The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  At the consistory to create cardinals he told them to renounce being princes of the Church, to shun a “worldly mentality” of “rivalry, jealousy, and factions,” as well as “intrigue, gossip, cliques, favoritism, and preferences.” A cardinal, he said, “enters the Church of Rome, not a royal court.” Jesus, he said, came not to teach good manners but “to show us the only way out of the quicksand of sin, and this way is mercy.” He said they should “oppose arrogance with meekness” and use “the language of the Gospel: yes when we mean yes; no when we mean no.”17

  Just after the consistory, the first major overhaul of the Curia was announced: a new Secretariat for the Economy, headed by the Australian cardinal, George Pell, in turn accountable to a new Council for the Economy made up of professional lay experts as well as bishops with financial experience. A few months later, in July 2014, Cardinal Pell announced a series of reforms to the so-called Vatican Bank, stripping out its investment portfolio and reducing it to a savings and loan for religious congregations. The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) had already shrunk its balance sheet, after closing roughly 3,000 accounts that did not fit its new profile. Cardinal Pell said the aim was to create a model for good practice and administration, and be “boringly successful”. Pell also announced an 11-member media commission headed by former BBC chairman Lord Patten to implement a plan to streamline the Vatican’s overlapping communications outlets.18

  The reforms had an underlying pattern: to inject lay technical expertise, to internationalize (or “de-Italianize”) the running of the Curia, and to focus its activities on its core purpose. These are some of the criteria behind the root-and-branch overhaul of the structure of the Curia being studied by the C8, who have made clear they are looking not just at updating or modifying Pastor Bonus, the 1988 constitution that gives the Curia its current form, but a complete rewriting of it, to be announced in late 2014 or early 2015.19

  Francis’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is a sixty-year-old Italian career diplomat who is the antithesis of his predecessors. Where Cardinals Sodano and Bertone were driven in limousines, Parolin prefers to walk alone, a humble and evangelically minded reformer in the mold of Francis. His austerity appears in even sharper contrast to his predecessors following revelations in May 2014 that Cardinal Bertone’s retirement quarters in a building next door to the Casa Santa Marta had merged two apartments and a terrace to yield a square footage several times that of Francis’s two-room apartment. The secretary of state has traditionally had a dual role: as both the Vatican’s chief diplomat, responsible for the Holy See’s foreign relations, and as chief of staff, managing the Curia. It is likely that in the future he will concentrate on the first, while a new post will be created for the second, a moderator curiae who will run the Vatican’s bureaucracy.20

  The C8’s overhaul will simplify and streamline the bloated, complex, and frequently overlapping jurisdictions of the Vatican’s nine congregations (which are powerful, legislative bodies), twelve pontifical councils and seven pontifical commissions (both largely advisory), and three tribunals. A new Congregation for the Laity is a virtual certainty, putting the body that represents God’s holy faithful people at the same level as those managing bishops and clergy. The Vatican’s councils and commissions are likely to be either merged or closed or put within a congregation. Cardinal Rodríguez, for example, has suggested that the Council for the Family could be headed by a married couple, and sit inside the future Congregation for the Laity.

  Other changes in the Vatican bureaucracy are underway, aimed at changing its culture. Most curial posts remain unconfirmed; Francis has scrapped bonuses and the title of monsignor for priests under sixty-five; and from February 2014, Vatican department heads were told to end new hires, wage increases, and overtime in an urgent effort to cut costs and offset budget shortfalls. At the same time, Francis has introduced compulsory retreats for all who work in the Curia, and is looking for other ways of nourishing and supporting the four thousand or so staff.

  Francis has become the most accessible of modern popes, almost always to be found at lunchtime in the Santa Marta restaurant, where he has his own table set aside, but stands in the queue with his tray like everyone else. Visitors report that he comes out of the Santa Marta to greet them personally, while hostel guests are often shocked to find that when elevator doors open the pope steps in (“I don’t bite,” he reassures them). There is no longer a bottleneck around the secretary of state, and the leaks have dried up.

  The changes have not always made him popular. Francis’s extraordinary popularity beyond the borders of the Church is in contrast to the view of him in the Vatican, where there is considerable grumbling. The old guard has lost control: once-powerful officials feel out of the loop. The founder of the Sant’Egidio community, Andrea Riccardi, says that “resistance is to continue business as usual.” Some are furious at Francis’s apparent contempt for decorum and tradition: they say his decision to wash the feet of women on Thursday of Easter week was in direct violation of the rubrics, and that as pope he is free to change them but not to disregard them. Others point to the harsh language he has used in regard to the Curia’s courtly ways, and feel he is not on their side; Francis’s “elder son” problem is an issue in the Vatican, too. Yet it would be wrong to see the tension as between the Curia and Francis’s advisers. “There are plenty of staff in the Curia who agree that it cannot stay as it is and are supporting us with their own proposals,” says Cardinal Rodríguez. “The Curia is by no means a monolithic bloc.”21

  It is a measure of the success of Francis’s campaign against spiritual worldliness—a theme he has returned to time and again in his preaching and addresses, sometimes in harsh language—that Vatican extravagance is now a news story. Pope Francis was furious, for example, at a VIP banquet for 150 businessmen and journalists on the veranda of the Vatican Prefecture for Economic Affairs during the April 27, 2014, ceremony to canonize John XXIII and John Paul II, which reportedly cost its sponsors—an insurance firm and an oil company—$25,000. The idea that Francis might disapprove has had its own chilling effect: observers report a sharp reduction in the number of limousines in the Vatican parking lots and a greater hesitancy to use extravagant clerical vestments. Only a month after Francis’s election, a veteran Italian cardinal with a weakness for crimson-trimmed garments and elaborate insignia of office entered his usual restaurant dressed in modest black clerical clothes. Quizzed about his new look, he said: “Under this pope, simple is the new chic.”22

  * * *

  DRENCHED from a tidal wave of unprecedented popularity, by the end of his first year Francis seemed to grace every magazine cover and to top every poll, hailed as a model leader who had reversed the fortunes of his ailing institution and made it again a force in the world. Vanity Fair sent the first bouquet in July 2013, declaring that “his first one hundred days have already placed him in the category of world leaders who make history.” At Christmas he was Person of the Year in Time magazine as well as the Times of London and the gay magazine the Advocate. He was the subject of long feature articles in Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, topped the list of Fortune magazine’s list of world’s greatest leaders, named “fourth most powerful person in the world” (after the presidents of the United States, Russia, and China) by Forbes and fifth among the world’s top thinkers by Prospect magazine, alongside economists and philosophers such as Amartya Sen. The Economist said that the Harvard Business School should study Francis alongside IBM’s Lou Gerstner and Apple’s Steve Jobs as an example of “turnaround CEOs” who breathe new life into dying organizations, describing him as “the man who has rebranded RC Global in barely a year.” The British Guardian decided Francis was now “the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo” and the Financial Times said that he was “the leading global symbol of compassion and humility.”23

  But not everyone was happy. A Pakistani souvenir seller near St. Peter’s lamented that Francis “is a
lways talking about the poor and so the poor come to the Vatican and they have no money to spend.”24

  Without altering a single core Church doctrine—which a pope is not at liberty to do—Francis had achieved what had seemed impossible only a year earlier: to speak to the heart of contemporary Western culture. Catholics no longer had to hunker down defensively; as one journalist put it, “the overall effect has been to restore the Church as an admirable and loveable presence on the world stage.”25 Explaining exactly what Francis had done, however, was more challenging. Time named Francis its Person of the Year for “pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets” and for “balancing judgment with mercy.” Yet its advance publicity—subsequently corrected—claimed that he had “won hearts and headlines with his common touch and rejection of church dogma and luxury.” Time’s canonization was an attempt, as one observer put it, to turn Francis into “a crusading humanist on the verge of making the Catholic Church socially acceptable at Manhattan dinner parties.” The article struggled to make sense of how a pope had changed everything when he had changed no doctrine, concluding eventually that he was a master PR operator. But this was unpersuasive. What drew people to Francis was that he was completely himself, acting in total freedom and honesty, indifferent to the headlines. As the Financial Times noted, Francis “has a sincerity and authenticity that no world leader can match.”26

  What had captivated the world—though few dared to put it as plainly as Cardinal Schönborn did at the inauguration Mass—was that Francis’s actions, words, and gestures had awoken in Western culture a dim, often unconscious, yet powerful memory of someone once loved but since lost.

  * * *

  “SOME say you are a revolutionary,” a journalist from the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia put to him in June 2014. Francis answered:

  To me, the greatest revolution is what goes to the roots, to recognize them and see what those roots have to say at this time. There is no contradiction between being a revolutionary and going to the roots. Indeed, I believe that [strengthening] identity is the way to bring about real change. You can never take a step [forward] in life unless you do it by going back, by knowing where I come from, what surname I have, what cultural or religious surname I have.27

  One who goes to the roots is a radical (from the Latin radicalis = “forming the root”). Francis’s radicalism is born of his extraordinary identification with Jesus after a lifetime of total immersion in the Gospel and mystical prayer. That identification leads him to want to simplify and focus, to increase the opportunities for God to act. It is a dynamic, disconcerting leadership, which while delighting most Catholics and attracting people beyond the boundaries of faith, has dismayed and disconcerted a number of “parties” within the Church. In this, Bergoglio and Francis have been consistent: a radical may be deeply appealing, but can never be universally liked.

  Francis’s proclamation of a kairos of mercy stems from his discernment that a world being transformed by technology and wealth is prone, above all, to the illusion that human beings, not God, are sovereign. Mercy is the great antidote to progressive optimism as well as conservative pessimism, for it grounds its hope in God’s forgiveness of our sins, rather than our belief in our own resources. That is why the poor are quicker to grasp Francis than the rich and the educated—and why the opposition to Francis has come from elite groups invested in particular narratives.

  One of those narratives, especially in Europe and the United States, was exposed in the 2012 synod: that the Church is in decline as result of a hostile culture to which the necessary response was a defensive stance that stresses purity and loyalty. In demonstrating that, unconsciously, Western culture is attracted to Christ, Francis has shown that an evangelizing, missionary Church is possible. The narrative of decline and defensiveness was “like a winter coat, protecting against the cold,” observes Michael Sean Winters. “Francis has taken the coat and encouraged everyone to recognize it is not that cold anymore. The effect is disorienting for those who suddenly find themselves coatless and, what is more, wondering why they had the coat on in the first place.”28

  Francis’s freewheeling communication and his proclamation in a missionary key—that is, putting love and mercy and healing first, before rules and doctrines—have particularly offended some on the front line of America’s culture wars. Some see Francis’s off-the-cuff remarks in his daily homilies and frequent interviews as creating ambiguities liable to be exploited and misunderstood by the Church’s enemies. What had given them “the confidence, the solid doctrinal ground they needed to fight the good fight,” in the words of one pro-life writer, was “a system in which every word spoken or written by a pope, or for that matter by any office of the Vatican, has been carefully examined and vetted.” Now, she added acidly, “there appears to be no one minding the store.”29

  An early example was in May 2013, when Francis in a morning homily said that Jesus Christ had redeemed everyone, “including atheists,” which seemed to imply that atheists could be saved without converting. These and other remarks led to criticism that he was “naïve” and “imprudent,” giving succor to those (liberals) attacking the Church. On the eve of Francis’s trip to Rio de Janeiro, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia warned that conservatives “have not been really happy” about Francis, and that “he’ll have to care for them, too.”30 Their unhappiness increased in the fall of 2013 with Francis’s blockbuster Jesuit interview, which produced what was to them nightmare headlines: POPE BLUNTLY FAULTS CHURCH’S FOCUS ON GAYS AND ABORTION (New York Times), POPE FRANCIS: CHURCH CAN’T “INTERFERE” WITH GAYS (CNN), and POPE FRANCIS: THE CHURCH NEEDS TO MELLOW OUT ON ABORTION (San Francisco Chronicle). They convinced many that Francis was selling out to secular modernity, a conviction reinforced by the encomia from liberal citadels such as Time and the Advocate.

  The Jesuit interview was followed just weeks later with another explosive one in La Repubblica, the result of Francis meeting its founder, a ninety-year-old Catholic turned atheist intellectual named Eugenio Scalfari.

  The Scalfari-Francis dialogue showed the pope’s great skill in engaging nonbelievers. It began over the summer of 2013 through the pages of La Repubblica and continued in the interview that Scalfari wrote up in the same paper in early October. When they met in the Santa Marta, Scalfari shared his journey to unbelief, a classic modern tale of a young adolescent believer who in high school meets Descartes and ends up believing that the individual, “the seat of free thought,” is the basis of all existence. Through gently probing questions, and disarming honesty about the Church’s failings, Francis caused Scalfari to look again at the Church he once loved, and to admit the painful insufficiency of his humanist philosophy, which was too ethereal to be capable of meeting the challenges of humanity. They parted not just friends but collaborators, agreeing that selfishness had increased at the expense of love, and this needed reversing by men and women of goodwill. The exchange was warm, respectful, and engaging, as well as clarifying of their differences, and left Scalfari smitten.

  Later he wrote up their exchange from memory. (Scalfari had offered to show it to Francis before publishing it, but Francis said that would be a waste of time, telling him: “I trust you.”) The interview was full of things Francis clearly said and believed, but included phrases that were very unlike his, as well as details that were obviously wrong—such as Scalfari’s claim that Francis had doubted before saying yes to his election, or that Francis no longer believed that sin existed because God’s mercy and forgiveness were “eternal.” After some weeks of questions and clarifications, the Vatican removed the article from its website, saying that it was unreliable in particulars although trustworthy overall. The whole episode left observers amazed. How could the pope agree to an interview that was not recorded or transcribed? Didn’t he know that he was the pope?

  The same happened after another Francis-Scalfari meeting (about sex abuse in the Church and the mafia) in July 2014. Scalfari’s write-up in
La Repubblica once again put in the pope’s mouth words that, as Father Lombardi later clarified, he never said. It was clear that to Francis the misuse or misunderstanding of what he might say weighed less than the relationship he had established with Scalfari, and the reaching-out beyond the Church’s borders that it enabled. This missionary, pastoral approach, whose object is to speak to the heart of the other, lies deep in Jorge Bergoglio’s Jesuit soul and clashes directly with a monarchic view of the papacy in which the task of papal communication is clarity, consistency, and dignity.31

  Father Lombardi has been urging journalists and commentators to accept the emergence of a whole new genre of papal speech: informal, spontaneous, and sometimes entrusted to others in terms of its final articulation, one that requires, he says, a “new hermeneutic” in which “the general meaning, rather than particular terms, should be interpreted.” Yet critics say most people are not capable of those distinctions; they care only that the pope said it. Accusing Francis of creating “confusion, consternation, and bewilderment among the faithful,” one conservative commentator worried that “such an informal and often ambiguous method of communication cannot help but erode the more solemn teaching authority of the papacy,” adding that “a pope, like a monarch, should realize that when it comes to public utterances, less is more.”32 Francis, however, does not see himself as a king, but a fisherman.

  A final straw for many came when at the end of April 2014, a woman in Argentina civilly married to a divorced man said she had received a call from Francis in which he told her to ignore her priest and go to another parish to receive Communion. Father Lombardi refused to comment, saying that the pope’s phone call did not form part of the magisterium, any more than were his daily homilies at the Santa Marta chapel. Whether or not Francis said what the woman claimed he said was unclear: Cardinal Bergoglio’s head of press, Federico Wals, says he frequently made such calls in Buenos Aires, but would never advise anyone to disobey Church teaching. But to many in the Curia and elsewhere it seemed irresponsible of the pope to be making any such call in the first place, not least because it could be used to bypass local priests and bishops.33