The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Francis hears these criticisms and has responded by tempering some of his habits, but the tension will not go away: he insists on the freedom to make direct personal contact with the world outside the Vatican. It is one of Bergoglio’s paradoxes: the pope of collegiality exercises his sovereign authority in ways that can seem high-handed. Above all, Francis understands people: his is a highly personalistic government, which bypasses systems, depends on close relationships, and keeps a tight control. He understands power, and how to use it. “The irony,” says a well-placed Jesuit at the Vatican, “is that this pope, great agent of decentralization in the Church, is personally the most centralized pope since Pius the Ninth. Everything has to cross his desk.”34

  If conservative Catholics are orphaned—Benedict XVI was a father figure to them—liberal or progressive Catholics feel they belong again. Father Thomas Reese, SJ, of the National Catholic Reporter, believes that “we’re going back to where we were after the Second Vatican Council, before things closed down,” adding that he hadn’t been “this hopeful about the Church in decades.… It’s fun to be Catholic again.” His longtime conservative sparring partner, George Weigel, wondered “what the heck he’s been looking at in the Catholic Church in the United States, such that he’s spent ‘decades’ being unhappy.” Reese was expressing a widespread feeling among progressive Catholics made to feel for decades that they were heretics or unwelcome. As William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, ruefully puts it: “The left smells a certain victory right now.”35

  Yet many liberal Catholics have misinterpreted Francis’s freedom and freewheeling communication in terms of greater doctrinal flexibility. Liberal reform lobbies in northern Europe have been perplexed by his insistence on the integrity of Catholic teaching, as well as his willingness to discipline clergy for failure to teach it. He has backed the Vatican’s reform of the main American umbrella organization of nuns to ensure its fidelity to Catholic teaching; approved the excommunication of a priest in Melbourne, Australia, who advocated women’s ordination; and criticized the attempt to pick and choose doctrine, saying that fidelity to its teaching is a fundamental part of belonging to the Church. He also made clear in a November 2013 letter to Archbishop Agostino Marchetto that he supports the more conservative understanding of the Second Vatican Council espoused by Benedict XVI. Francis may be a radical reformer, but he starts from the assumption that the task of the papacy is the preservation of the doctrine handed down by Jesus Christ, and that in order to preach the Gospel Catholics must be rooted in core shared understandings of that doctrine.36

  Shortly after the Jesuit interview in which he spoke of not needing to speak all the time of issues such as abortion, he gave a blistering address to Catholic doctors on the very subject, in which he linked abortion to the throwaway culture, saying that “each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ … who even before he was born, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world.” In Evangelii Gaudium he has shown how being pro-life needs to be part of a broader narrative linked to human rights. “Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems,” he says. “Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be.”37

  Francis has taken a similarly clear line in support of Paul VI’s 1968 ban on artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, a touchstone issue for many liberal Catholics and their publications and the reason for their discontent with the papacy. In his interview with Corriere della Sera a year after his election, Francis praised Paul VI’s prophetic genius in rejecting the recommendation of the body of experts he had appointed, saying “he had the courage to place himself against the majority in defense of moral discipline, acting as a brake on culture, opposing present and future neo-Malthusianism.” (The term neo-Malthusianism—a reference to population control ambitions of the eugenics movement—was how the 1968 CELAM document of Medellín described the values behind artificial contraception.) Although the synod might consider pastoral issues related to the living-out of the teaching, “there was no question of changing the doctrine,” Francis said.”38

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  FRANCIS’S radicalism is not to be confused with a progressive doctrine or ideology. It is radical because it is missionary, and mystical. Francis is instinctively and viscerally opposed to “parties” in the Church: he roots the papacy in the traditional Catholicism of God’s holy faithful people, above all the poor. He will not compromise on the hot-button issues that divide the Church from the secular West—a gap liberals would like to close by modernizing doctrine. Yet he is also, just as obviously, not a pope for the Catholic right: he will not use the papacy to fight political and cultural battles he believes should be fought at the diocesan level, but to attract and teach; nor does he feel the need endlessly to repeat what is already well known, but wants to stress what has been obscured—God’s loving-kindness and forgiving mercy. And where Catholic conservatives would like to speak more about morality than social issues, Francis is happy to do quite the opposite, to rescue Catholicism as a “seamless garment.”

  Francis is seeking to unite the universal Church, just as he did with the Jesuits in the 1970s, by anchoring it in the ordinary faithful and the poor while focusing the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on mission and evangelization. He is inviting the “parties” to renounce their faith in their own schemes and notions of Church. He offers the greatest chance in generations to heal the divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics: he is the first pope to be a product of, rather than part of, the Council; yet he spotted, early on, the temptation to take it down the wrong path, and resisted it boldly.

  The joint canonization in April 2014 of John XXIII and John Paul II, icons for each “side” in the division over the Second Vatican Council, was an important moment in this unifying task. In the United States the canonization inspired a prominent Republican and a prominent Democrat to make a joint statement calling on their fellow Catholics to leave their bunkers and to embrace a common platform that sees both abortion and immigration as pro-life issues, in which “defending the sanctity of life and fighting for social justice are not clashing political agendas, but part of the same moral framework for building a just society.”39

  For Francis, as for his generation, the “great light” was Paul VI, whom he has put on the road to sainthood.40 Another moment for helping Catholics to come to terms with the legacy of the Council will be the funeral, when it comes, of Benedict XVI—the first time a pope will have buried another. Benedict, a reassuring father figure to Catholic conservatives, is nonetheless the great enabler of the Francis papacy, the one who discerned the end of an era and nurtured a new one into being, encouraging the Latin-American Church to take its place as the source for the universal Church. Francis’s debt to Benedict was symbolized on Copacabana Beach in July 2013, when Francis told the pilgrims that Benedict was following it all on television and praying for everyone there. There were hesitant cries of Benedicto! from the youth, which Francis encouraged: “Si! Benedicto! Benedicto!” he cried.

  When the time comes, Francis has said that he, too, will decide whether to resign (“I will do what the Lord asks me to do,” he told La Vanguardia). Many believe that is unlikely, that Francis will wear himself out in the role before becoming frail. “Let’s be frank, at my age I don’t have much to lose,” he says when a reporter asks about his vulnerability in the Square each week. But if he did resign, many close to him in Buenos Aires believe that, improbable as it may seem, Francis would return to his beloved city. And if he did not, but took up residence in the Mater Ecclesiae, what would that be like for the new incumbent? It is one thing to have pope emeritus Benedict XVI up the hill, another altogether—as the Jesuits in Argentina could attest—having an emeritus Francis.

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  JORGE Bergo
glio’s radicalism comes from his willingness to go to the essentials, to pare back to the Gospel; despite his powerful intellect, his political mind, and his theological sophistication, his belief is primitive, undiluted: God is sovereign, the devil is active, we must discern and choose. After fifty years discerning spirits, Francis sees the devil not as a myth or theological proposition but a daily reality, the “prince of this world” who hates holiness and tempts through riches, power, and pride to persuade us to look to our own resources, not God’s. “The origin of the hatred is this: we are saved; and that prince of the world, who does not want us to be saved, hates us and gives rise to the persecution that from the earliest times of Jesus continues until today,” he said in a May 2013 homily, which warned that “with that prince you cannot dialogue.”41

  He sees the devil behind the intractable, violent conflicts of the world. When he brought together Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas at the Vatican to pray for peace on June 8, 2014, he told them: “More than once we have been on the verge of peace, but the evil one, employing a variety of means, has succeeded in blocking it. That is why we are here, because we know and we believe that we need the help of God.”

  Francis conversely believes in the power of prayer to perform a “diplomacy of the impossible.” Thus, on September 8, 2013, Francis knelt before an icon of Our Lady in St. Peter’s Square while leading a three-hour peace prayer vigil for Syria, accompanied by tens of thousands of people in the square and hundreds of thousands more around the world who begged God to bring to an end the barbaric, heartrending carnage in that country. “How I wish that all men and women of good will would look to the Cross, if only for a moment,” he said. “There, we can see God’s reply: violence is not answered with violence, death is not answered with the language of death. In the silence of the cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue, and peace is spoken.” Among the prayers that night were many to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The next day, Sunday, while strolling in the Vatican Gardens, a gardener handed Francis a white rose. The following day, the Russian president’s plan to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile forestalled a proposed U.S. bombing.42

  He believes, too, in the power of personal relationship to act as a vehicle of God’s grace, which is why he took with him to the Middle East his close Jewish and Muslim friends from Buenos Aires, Rabbi Abraham Skorka and Omar Abboud—the first time a pope’s official entourage had included leaders of other faiths. Seeing the three constantly together sent a powerful message in that divided region, and when the three hugged in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the tears flowed freely.

  Personal friendship has also brought about a breakthrough in Christian unity through his friend Bishop Tony Palmer, the evangelical Pentecostal who had come to know Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires. When Palmer met Francis in the Casa Santa Marta in January 2014, the pope recorded a message on Palmer’s iPhone for him to take the following week to a meeting in Texas of hundreds of mega-church pastors and evangelical leaders. In the grainy film, Francis, seated in a green felt chair with a poinsettia plant in the background, spoke of his yearning for the separation of Christians to end, and spoke of a “miracle of unity” that had begun. When the video went viral, Palmer was inundated with messages from evangelical leaders across the world asking how they could be part of it.

  On June 24, 2014, Palmer brought leaders of five evangelical organizations—which together represent perhaps eight hundred million people—to meet Francis at the Santa Marta. At the meeting the leaders said they wanted visible unity with the bishop of Rome, to start with a joint declaration of faith in unity for mission, in which Catholics and evangelicals renounce all rivalry or attempt to convert the other, and declare themselves united in announcing the same Gospel.

  A few days later, as he left London for two weeks in South Africa, Palmer described the meeting to me in a telephone call from the airport. He said Pope Francis had been “like a brother” to the guests: “open, down-to-earth, humble, authentic, spiritual but very friendly and warm.” He and the leaders had met for an hour, and then lunched with Francis until 3:00 p.m. Palmer said Francis had been “one of the boys. It was beautiful.”

  Palmer said he hoped that the extraordinary declaration discussed at that meeting would be signed in 2017 in Rome, at a special joint Catholic-Lutheran ceremony to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. He said Pope Francis had taken the draft away with him and was pondering it, and that Palmer expected to have news on his return to the UK.

  Shortly after he came back, just as this book was going to press, Palmer was killed in a motorcycle accident. His funeral in Bath, England, was a full Catholic Requiem Mass; afterward, he was buried in the local Catholic cemetery, united at last to the Church in which he felt so at home. In a message to his wife, Emiliana, which she read at the funeral, Francis said he and his close friend had “prayed often in the same Spirit”; that Palmer had given his life, out of love of Christ, to the unity of the Church; and that those who loved him would be inspired by his zeal to build on his precious legacy.”43

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  VATICAN journalists are busy now. Gone are the days when they could prepare a story using carefully crafted phrases from embargoed homilies and statements: every event is made tense by what Francis might do or say. Their editors want stories: Francis sells. The reporters often use the words unprecedented, unusual, and historic in their intros. The Vatican has become a whirlwind of news.

  Francis has given more interviews in eighteen months as pope than in twelve years as cardinal archbishop (“I could kill him,” laughs Federico Wals, his old press officer), along with airborne press conferences where no question is off the table. The effect has been each time to bring him closer. In one interview at the end of June 2014, with the Rome daily Il Messagero, the reporter felt comfortable enough to ask if she could make a criticism. “Of course,” said Francis. She took him to task for talking about women only as wives and mothers, rather than rulers of states or big businesses. He understood the point, and said they were working on a new theology of women. Later in the same interview, Francis said that he had more or less kept the same lifestyle as he had in Buenos Aires, with a few necessary modifications: “to change at my age would be a bit ridiculous,” he said. He tells friends there are things he misses: not being able to go out, take a bus. But they report him happy and relaxed, more demonstrative and joyful. He enjoys being pope.

  He left Buenos Aires, promising to return, but never did. In his native city he is a benign phantom now, smiling beatifically out from posters in the slums, an icon of joy, a national treasure, and the topic of a three-hour “papal tour” organized by the municipal government of Buenos Aires, which is promoting the city as a pilgrim destination. The bus takes you from a modern little house built over his parents’ casa chorizo in Flores, to the church where he was baptized, past the convent where he was taught, and the basilica in whose confession he first heard the call around which he has built his life. It carries on to the secondary school where he studied chemistry, the clergy retirement house on calle Condarco, the seminary where he had part of his lung removed, the parish where María Desatanudos continues unravelling the knots in peoples’ lives, and finally the curia and cathedral on the Plaza de Mayo, where you are shown the kiosk which delivered his newspaper and the barber who cut his hair. It is all far from him now, but it never leaves him.

  The frontier is new: the mission now is to the globe. As ancient Christian civilization is cruelly destroyed in Iraq, the Church is re-born in Asia. Yet some things stay the same. He rises at dawn each day to listen, then goes out to proclaim the kairos, entering the hearts of God’s holy faithful people. Each day brings novelty, and that’s how it should be when the Holy Spirit is given space to act.

  “Listen up,” Francis told thousands in St. Peter’s Square on Pentecost Sunday 2014. “If the Church is alive, it
must always surprise,” he said. Then came the mischievous grin. “A Church that doesn’t have the capacity to surprise is a weak, sickened, and dying Church. It should be taken to the recovery room at once.”

  NOTES

  Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  ONE FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO (1936–1957)

  1 The term bergoglismo was created by Bergoglio’s friend and former pupil, the journalist Jorge Milia, on the website Terre d’America. See, for example, “La Jerga de Francisco/8: ‘Misericordiando.’ Diálogo con el Papa sobre un Gerundio Curioso,” www.terredamerica.com (November 20, 2013).

  2 John Lynch, Massacre in the Pampas, 1872: Britain and Argentina in the Age of Migration (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p. 108. See also Austen Ivereigh, “The Shape of the State: Liberals and Catholics in the Dispute over Law 1420 of 1884 in Argentina,” in Austen Ivereigh (ed.), The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000).

  TWO THE MISSION (1958–1966)

  1 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959).

  2 The best overview of all things Jesuit is James Martin, SJ, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).