Ten years ago, Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood on the balcony of St Peter’s in Rome, and said simply to the waiting crowd, “Buono Sera”, and asked them to pray for him. It was the beginning of a pontificate very different from any other. The archbishop of Buonos Aires was to become the first pope to take the name of Francis, the saint of the poor and of nature, and the first pope from Latin America. But it was in style as well as substance that he seemed so different from other successors of Peter.
He began differently. Other popes, including his predecessor, Pope Benedict, had lived in the papal apartments which were grand, but where access to the pope could be physically controlled by whomever was in charge there. Francis undermined that system very simply, by evading the papal apartments altogether and living, as he does to this day, in the Casa Santa Marta, in company with other people. He declared he did so for the sake of his sanity; in practice, it meant he was less subject to control by the head of the papal household.
In the heady early days of his pontificate, all things seemed possible. He was more informal than monarchical. He told one papal dignitary, “the carnival is over”, which seemed to spell an end to the old regime of Vatican cliques and corrupt factions. He was not legalistic; when asked about homosexuality, he would say, “Who am I to judge?” which was both ambiguous about substance, and satisfactorily Christ-like. He established a rapport with the crowds. He seemed to be, and was, a different person from the cautious archbishop who had played a careful game, at least once at the expense of his own priests, during the military junta in Argentina.
He was spontaneous and open. He seemed in whatever he did to ignore the rule of the law in favour of the rule of love. He was imaginative in his gestures. When he visited the headquarters of the EU he did so in a battered old car, and visited the backstage kitchen workers as well as the grandees. He was the first pope to visit the Arab Peninsula, and shared a platform, and a message, with the Grand Mufti from Cairo, a highly significant symbolic gesture. He spoke of Muslims as brothers.
From the start he was vocal in his support for migrants, with hundreds of thousands of them arriving on the shores of Italy. Indeed he took some families in himself to live in the Vatican. His concern for the environment resulted in a memorable encyclical, Laudato Si, explicitly modelled on the words of St Francis, which engaged with one of the most important issues of our day with thoughtfulness and conviction. He has not altered the stance of the Church on women priests but he has promoted women to senior roles within the Vatican itself, from foreign affairs to finance, which has been a substantive change.
He has the gift of the arresting phrase. When a gay man challenged him during the filming of the BBC documentary on pilgrimage to address his situation, he replied that he was setting the qualifier over the substantive; for the most important thing was not that he was gay, but that he was a human being. He himself took a leading role in his own Netflix documentary on getting old, as one of a group of older people dealing with the challenges of age in their own way. He has been empathetic and open to groups of victims of clerical abuse, sometimes apologising to them himself.
All of this was attractive to those who found the Church restrictive and legalistic. Yet precisely the qualities which made him seem attractively informal and open to change could be problematic in practice. His attempts to be non-judgmental about divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, a matter which he subcontracted to the decision of the local priest or bishop, ran squarely counter both to tradition and to the words of Christ and encountered vigorous opposition from conservative African bishops. His vigorous condemnation of clerical abuse was not followed through as quickly as victims had hoped by systemic change. Indeed in the case of clerical abusers in Chile, he showed real errors of judgment.
There have been limits to the effect of his charisma. His brief visit to Ireland was far too brief for the needs of a nation which had to a remarkable extent turned against the Church after successive revelations about clerical abuse; many people, especially the young, simply stayed away and he himself seemed badly briefed. His spontaneity can degenerate into vulgarity; addressing Spanish seminarians recently, he used unequivocally bad language, which popes should not do.
But it is his Synodal Path which has been the defining element of his papacy and it sums up both his strengths and his weaknesses. It is a vast listening exercise, an opportunity for the people of God to have their say about the Church, as parishes, as regions, as continents. And to some extent it has been a useful exercise, where people have voiced their concerns and priorities.
The problem is, the Synodal process is not just an exercise in listening but in collation; that is to say, a disproportionate power lies with those who collate the responses of the people and give the findings expression. People in more than one diocese have noted a discrepancy between the initial response from parishes, and the documents which are issued in their name, which often place undue emphasis on issues relating to sex, sexuality and gender, and on women priests and married clergy. There is the danger of raising false expectations. Some radical critics seem to expect that if a majority of people criticise the stance of the Church on issues such as communion for the divorced and remarried, or women priests or the relaxation of rules of celibacy, then the Church must change its teaching. But the Church is not a democracy; it cannot put its traditions and teachings up for popular vote. And this mismatch between expectations about the Synodal process and the outcome could be dangerous.
For a Jesuit, the yearning to find a way for the Church to function in China is very real, yet there are real concerns about the deal that has been struck between the Vatican and China in allowing the Church to operate in very restrictive circumstances; in practice, this has meant betraying the interests of those who kept alive the underground church, and subjecting the official church to the priorities and practices of the Chinese Communist Party. Dialogue is an excellent thing, but the Vatican has received little in return for its own willingness to compromise.
And there is, finally, a worrying discrepancy between the language of Pope Francis about subsidiarity, about avoiding authoritarianism and his actual practice when it comes to the celebration of the extraordinary rite or Tridentine Mass. In a troubling move, the head of the dicastery on liturgy, Cardinal Arthur Roche, has removed the decision about whether and where to allow the celebration of the rite to Rome, from local bishops. It thus becomes much less likely that celebration of the rite will be permitted and the granting of permission, if any, will be delayed by the usual bureaucratic processes. It is a move which not only runs counter to the liberal inclusivity of Pope Benedict, who successfully brought an end to the liturgy wars, but to the style of Pope Francis himself.
The expansion of the College of Cardinals to include a far greater geographical span, including areas where the Church is struggling, means that the body who will elect his successor will be very different from the college that elected him. It is very possible, as he himself intimated, that if he finds he is unable to fulfil his duties properly, that he too will resign.
Francis’s ten years have seen many changes in style and substance. His pontificate has been in some ways exhilarating. Yet he has also raised hopes of change which can never be realised, and dealt with opposition in a manner which is more authoritarian than inclusive. There have been, in short, failures as well as successes. We should all pray for him. He needs our prayers. There has rarely been a more challenging time for the successor of St Peter. God help him.
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