The clamor had, overwhelmingly, been for change. Here change was. A self-confessed “sinner” pope, lowering his head with humility and asking his people to pray for him. The silence in the square was spellbinding. Gone were the princely pontifical ways; and as Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga recalled from his position next to Francis on the balcony that night, “You can’t imagine the response from that huge crowd that was in St. Peter’s Square, because they expected a theological message and they found somebody that is warm, that is there, that is one of us.” It was a powerful statement to the world but also to the Vatican, and it illustrated that Francis intended to be true not only to his humble origins and principles but also to those of his namesake.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a pope of many firsts: the first Jesuit pope; the first pope from Latin America; the first non-European pope in over twelve hundred years; the first pope to have never studied or worked in Rome; and, significantly, the first pope to choose the name Francis. And the first pope for a long time to have a former pope still around. The choice of name was a daring move laden with symbolism, and depending on which side of the Vatican’s political divide one sat, it could be interpreted as hopeful or ominous for the future of the Catholic Church.
Saint Francis of Assisi was born into a wealthy family in the Umbrian town of Assisi in 1181 and enjoyed a carefree and lavish youth, never wanting for anything. But by twenty-five he had tired of parties and what he later described as living in sin, and when Assisi declared war on the neighboring town of Perugia, he seized the opportunity to prove himself as a noble young knight. He rode out of Assisi resplendent in a suit of armor decorated with gold. After a day on the road, however, God came to him in a dream and commanded him to return home. He did so and was mocked for his cowardice. Humiliated, Francis began to withdraw from his former life and to immerse himself in prayer. During a pilgrimage to Rome, he was so moved by the poverty he witnessed that he exchanged clothes with a beggar outside St. Peter’s Basilica and spent a day among the poor, begging for alms.
As he wandered the hills, searching for guidance from God, a vision came to him and told him three times, “Francis, go and repair My house, which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” Returning to Assisi in rags, Francis was disowned by his father and so renounced his former life to live as a beggar. Devoting himself to poverty and penitence, he spent two years helping to rebuild local churches before founding the Franciscan Order in 1208. It had only one rule: “to follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps.”
Followers continued to increase in number after his death in 1226, and he was canonized in 1228. Francis, “one of the most cherished saints in modern times,” remains revered for his “generosity, his simple and unaffected faith, his passionate devotion to God and man, his love of nature and his deep humility.”
When the new pope declared that he wished to be named Francis, those who knew him thought it a perfectly pitched choice for the cardinal who had already shunned the luxurious lifestyle of an archbishop. But for members of the curia who lived like kings within the Vatican walls, it was a concerning move that prompted more than a few quizzical sideways glances.
Fundamentally, the trappings of the papal office could not be more different from the life of poverty led by Saint Francis. It is pomp and ceremony; it is red leather shoes and fur-trimmed velvet; it is assassination attempts and armored cars; it is governance and power; it is management and administration; and, cripplingly, it is a gilded cage from which the dove of peace looks out over the world, unable to fly among the people. It is one thing for a pope to reject limousines in favor of the bus, but quite another for him to overturn the tradition and institution he had just been appointed to lead.
As a cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio had not been shy in expressing his opinions about such worldly excess:
The cardinalate is a service, it is not an award to be bragged about. Vanity, showing off, is an attitude that reduces spirituality to a worldly thing, which is the worst sin that could be committed in the Church.… An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth … Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.
These words, taken from an interview in February 2012, now seem prescient. They can easily be interpreted as characterizing the pope or the Vatican as the peacock behind which the murky scandals of sexual abuse and Vatileaks corruption lurked. When coupled with Saint Francis of Assisi’s determination to “go and repair [God’s] house, which, as you can see, is all in ruins,” they indicated that the church at last had an opportunity to effect great change. The only question now was how those within its walls would embrace it.
AND THE DUST FINALLY SETTLED
Tears and celebrations continued to flow throughout the night in Vatican City. When a somewhat bewildered Francis stepped down from the podium and was ushered to the official papal limousine that would take him to dinner, again he refused, saying he preferred to ride the bus with his brother cardinals: “We have come together, we go together.” Back at Casa Santa Marta, he could finally relax. Over the celebratory dinner, including ice cream and sparkling wine, he joked during his toast, “May God forgive you for what you’ve done.” Cardinal Dolan recalled that this “brought the house down.”
After the guests had retired to bed, Francis, unable to sleep, changed out of his papal robes and back into his plain black trousers and coat, and made his way downstairs. According to Paul Vallely’s biography, “Startled officials found themselves being asked if there was a car available. The new Pope wanted to go for a drive, he said. A driver was summoned and, in a small unmarked car, the man who hours earlier had pointedly styled himself only as Bishop of Rome, toured the streets of that city watching the celebrating crowds.”
Perhaps Francis felt this was his last opportunity to move unnoticed through life, absorbing the perspective afforded to him as a simple cardinal on the streets of Buenos Aires. Or perhaps he was curious to experience the natural outpouring of joy now that the cameras had stopped rolling. Whatever the reason, he drank in these last few hours of freedom like a man about to endure what his predecessor had described as a death sentence.
The following morning, Francis woke early. After prayers, he made a visit to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore to pay homage to the Virgin Mary. Crowds of people surged around him, but the new pope requested his security team not to prevent them from entering the chapel with him. On his way back to the Vatican, he requested another unscheduled stop, this time at the hostel he had stayed at during the two weeks prior to the conclave. Declining the offer of an assistant to pack his bags, Francis explained that he wished to gather his belongings himself and to thank the staff for all their help. More shocking still, he insisted on paying his bill, explaining that he, more than anyone, “had to set a good example.”
At 5 P.M. Francis returned to the Sistine Chapel to celebrate mass with the cardinal electors. He did not read from the prepared Latin homily offered to him, but spoke from the heart in Italian. Nor did he speak from the papal throne. Instead, he stood at the lectern just as a parish priest would when delivering a sermon to his congregation. In his speech he outlined three building blocks that would be at the heart of his pontificate:
1. Journeying
Our life is a journey, and when we stop moving, things go wrong.
2. Building
We speak of stones: stones are solid; but living stones, stones anointed by the Holy Spirit. Building the Church … on the cornerstone that is the Lord himself. There is another kind of movement in our lives: building.
3. Professing
We can walk as much as we want, we can build as many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church … When we are not walking, we stop moving.
When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to the children on the beach when they build sand castles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity.
Francis then summarized his message:
Journeying, building, professing. But things are not so straightforward, because in journeying, building, professing, there can sometimes be jolts, movements that are not properly part of the journey: movements that pull us back.… My wish is that all of us, after these days of grace, will have the courage, yes, the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Lord’s Cross; to build the Church on the Lord’s blood which was poured out on the Cross; and to profess the one glory: Christ crucified. And in this way, the Church will go forward.
The election of Pope Francis was itself an unmistakable signal that a large majority of cardinals wished for real reform within the church. Francis was acutely aware of this and, through the words of his first homily, was signaling to those who had voted for him that he had heard them loud and clear. No member of the curia or even from the old-guard Western nations could have dreamt of instigating any form of quantifiable shake-up. It had to come from the New World. Now, to many in that room, it had come. Francis was the man to bring change and hope.
THE FRANCIS EFFECT
The potential impact of a Latin American’s election as pope should not be underestimated. The symbolism of Francis’s choice of papal name and his dedication to fighting social injustice and human rights abuses set him worlds apart from the many popes before him. As a Jesuit, his freethinking and acute understanding of evangelism in developing societies opened up a world of new opportunities in the church’s fight against the global rise of secularism.
The United States, in particular, was continuing to reel from the impact of secularism. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014, nearly one-third of all American adults (31.7 percent) stated that they were raised Catholic, but of that figure, 41 percent—equating to 12.9 percent of the total population—no longer identified with the religion. This makes lapsed Catholics the fourth-largest “religious” group in America behind Protestants (46.5 percent), practicing Catholics (20.8 percent), and those who identified as “nothing in particular” (15.8 percent). In real terms, for every one person who joins the Catholic Church in America, a staggering six people leave it. In the years between 2007 and 2014, the number of people not affiliated with any religion rose by 6.7 percent of the total population—some fifty-six million people. They now outnumber both Catholics and Protestants, with only Evangelical Christians maintaining a higher share of the population.
In Britain, most people under the age of forty now say they have no religion. In fact, “No religion” is a more common response to polls than “Christian.” This loss of faith is a concern not only for Christians: secularism is also on the rise within Muslim-majority countries. As Ahmed Benchemsi reported in the New Statesman, a poll in 2012 found that 5 percent of Saudi citizens—more than a million people—self-identify as “convinced atheists,” the same percentage as in the United States. Nineteen percent of Saudis—almost six million people—think of themselves as “not a religious person.” (In Italy, the figure is 15 percent.) These numbers are even more striking considering that many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Yemen, uphold the sharia rule punishing apostasy with death.
This rise in disbelief in the developed world rocked the church to its foundations, yet a solution remained elusive. By electing a man so clearly cut from a different papal cloth, the sense of hope was palpable. Francis had seemingly done the impossible and managed largely to satisfy both traditional and progressive wings of the church. In his biography, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, Paul Vallely describes him as a man of many contradictions:
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a doctrinal traditionalist but an ecclesiastical reformer. He is a radical but not a liberal. He seeks to empower others and yet retains a streak of authoritarianism. He is a conservative yet was on the far left of his nation’s reactionary Bishops’ Conference. He combines religious simplicity with political guile. He is progressive and open, yet austere and severe.… He has opposed same-sex marriage and gay adoption but he has kissed the feet of homosexuals with AIDS. He is of the South, yet has deep roots in the North: a Latin American whose parentage is Italian and who has studied in Spain, Ireland and Germany. He is a diocesan priest and yet also a member of a religious order. He is a teacher of theology but a pastor with the common touch. In him humility and power come together.
It is quite possibly because of these contradictions that Francis seems to have benefited from a surge of confirmation bias among the cardinal electors during the 2013 conclave. Based on their own desires for the future of the church, they saw the side of Francis they wanted to see—something that was impossible when electing Pope Benedict, unquestionably an archconservative. Francis’s enigmatic and humble demeanor, combined with his virtual invisibility during the run-up to the election, allowed individual voters to assume what kind of pope he would be.
Once the furor of his election had died down, however, the reality of electing a man so paradoxical meant the church was at a loss to decipher exactly which Francis he would turn out to be. Cardinals and media alike were now forced to become detectives, and every movement he made or word he uttered was studied in microscopic detail for possible clues. There was one word in particular that stuck in the mind of many who sat within the Sistine Chapel, watching the master of ceremonies ask Francis if he would take up the papacy: sinner.
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THE SUPERSTAR POPE
It was perhaps a combination of the mystique of Francis’s arrival as virtually unknown cardinal from Latin America, his radical steps of humility, and his admissions of sin in his first year that set such a high benchmark of expectation from the public and ruffled the feathers of conservatives within the Catholic Church. How could he possibly sustain such a glittering start?
We have already seen that his decision to dispense with the luxuries of the papal apartments, limousines, and extravagant clothing as favored by his predecessors struck an immediate chord with many of his followers, but what really set him apart in his first year was his highly visible ease with people. In the first month alone, he preserved his “slum bishop” tradition of washing the feet of twelve marginalized people during Holy Week. This time, he went to a prison and included not just two women among the twelve but also two Muslims. The stiffness of Benedict’s relationship with the people was suddenly a distant memory, and the new pope was all smiles and natural warmth. Francis took advantage of the glaring spotlight he now found himself in and showed unrivaled determination to draw the world’s attention to issues he believed pressing. There was one in particular that weighed on him, and so on his first official visit outside the Holy City, in July 2013, Francis traveled to the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa. Located seventy miles off the coast of Tunisia, this small spit of rock, just four miles long, with its white-sand beaches and turquoise waters, had become a focal point of the ever-growing crisis in which hundreds of thousands of refugees were risking their lives on perilous sea voyages to reach the shores of Europe—a crossing many thousands would never survive.
In a poignant illustration of this unrelenting catastrophe, a ship carrying more than 160 Eritreans had docked into port shortly before the pope’s arrival, and the Italian coast guard had the previous day rescued a boat carrying 120 people, including four pregnant women, after its engines had failed just off the coast.
Francis traveled out on a rescue boat to lay a wreath of white and yellow flowers for those who had lost their lives at sea. Then he addressed the fifteen-thousand-strong crowd of locals and migrants with a moving and powerful homily:
I felt I had to come here today, to pray and to offer a sign of my closeness, but to also challenge our consciences lest this tragedy be repeated.…
Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Ha
s any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat?…
We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion—“suffering with” others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!
Francis repeated the charge of “globalized indifference” four times during his address, which he delivered wearing purple mourning dress and standing on a makeshift altar made from the driftwood of shipwrecked refugee boats. By any standards, it was a strikingly political display for a pope who, while expressing his affection for the Muslims present, who were about to begin fasting for Ramadan, also begged forgiveness “for those who by their decisions on the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies.” But this was no publicity stunt, and the refugee crisis has remained one of the pope’s causes célèbres throughout his time in office. Every year, he has made multiple calls to action and traveled to numerous locations at the center of the crisis to continue drawing world attention to the issue. He has also publicly criticized the exploitation of Africa and its natural resources by the global elite; and labeled President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents as “immoral” and “contrary to our Catholic values.” He expressed “deep concern” following the violent clashes that erupted after the United States relocated its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And he described the U.S. president as “not Christian” in his desire to build a wall at the Mexican border.
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