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Read more: TIME Magazine -- U.S. Edition -- December 23,
2013 Vol. 182 No. 26 http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601131223,00.html#ixzz2ndpC56bT
Person of the Year
http://poy.time.com/2013/12/11/person-of-the-year-pope-francis-the-peoples-pope/
Pope Francis, The People’s Pope
He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a
church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to
transform a place that measures change by the century
To read about TIME’s choice in Spanish and Portuguese, click
below.
EL ELEGIDO: El Papa Francisco es la Persona del Año 2013 de
TIME
A Escolha: O Papa Francisco é a Personalidade do Ano eleita
pela Time em 2013
On the edge of Buenos Aires is a nothing little street
called Pasaje C, a shot of dried mud leading into a slum from what passes for a
main road, the garbage-strewn Mariano Acosta. There is a church, the Immaculate
Virgin, toward the end of the pasaje—Spanish for passage—where, on one
occasion, the local priest and a number of frightened residents took refuge
deep in the sanctuary when rival drug gangs opened fire. Beyond the church,
Pasaje C branches into the rest of the parish: more rutted mud and cracked
concrete form Pasajes A to K. Brick chips from the hasty construction of
squatter housing coagulate along what ought to be sidewalks. The word
asesino—murderer—is scrawled in spray-paint on the sooty wall of a burned-out
house, which was torched just days before in retaliation for yet another shooting.
Packs of dogs sprawl beneath wrecked cars. Children wander heedless of traffic,
because nothing can gather speed on these jagged roads. But even Pasaje C can
lead to Rome.
As Cardinal and Archbishop of Buenos Aires, a metropolis of
some 13.5 million souls, Jorge Mario Bergoglio made room in his schedule every
year for a pastoral visit to this place of squalor and sorrow. He would walk to
the subway station nearest to the Metropolitan Cathedral, whose pillars and
dome fit easily into the center of Argentine power. Traveling alone, he would
transfer onto a graffiti-blasted tram to Mariano Acosta, reaching where the
subways do not go. He finished the journey on foot, moving heavily in his bulky
black orthopedic shoes along Pasaje C. On other days, there were other journeys
to barrios throughout the city—so many in need of so much, but none too poor or
too filthy for a visit from this itinerant prince of the church. Reza por mí,
he asked almost everyone he met. Pray for me.
When, on March 13, Bergoglio inherited the throne of St.
Peter—keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven—he made the same request of
the world. Pray for me. His letter of retirement, a requirement of all bishops
75 and older, was already on file in a Vatican
office, awaiting approval. Friends in Argentina had perceived him to be
slowing down, like a spent force. In an instant, he was a new man, calling
himself Francis after the humble saint from Assisi. As Pope, he was suddenly the
sovereign of Vatican City and head of an institution so sprawling—with about
enough followers to populate China—so steeped in order, so snarled by
bureaucracy, so vast in its charity, so weighted by its scandals, so polarizing
to those who study its teachings, so mysterious to those who don’t, that the
gap between him and the daily miseries of the world’s poor might finally have
seemed unbridgeable. Until the 266th Supreme Pontiff walked off in those clunky
shoes to pay his hotel bill.
The papacy is mysterious and magical: it turns a
septuagenarian into a superstar while revealing almost nothing about the man
himself. And it raises hopes in every corner of the world—hopes that can never
be fulfilled, for they are irreconcilable. The elderly traditionalist who pines
for the old Latin Mass and the devout young woman who wishes she could be a
priest both have hopes. The ambitious monsignor in the Vatican Curia and the
evangelizing deacon in a remote Filipino village both have hopes. No Pope can
make them all happy at once.
But what makes this Pope so important is the speed with
which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping
for the church at all. People weary of the endless parsing of sexual ethics,
the buck-passing infighting over lines of authority when all the while (to
borrow from Milton),
“the hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed.” In a matter of months, Francis has
elevated the healing mission of the church—the church as servant and comforter
of hurting people in an often harsh world—above the doctrinal police work so
important to his recent predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were
professors of theology. Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer,
chemical technician and literature teacher.
And behind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny
operator. He makes masterly use of 21st century tools to perform his 1st
century office. He is photographed washing the feet of female convicts, posing
for selfies with young visitors to the Vatican, embracing a man with a
deformed face. He is quoted saying of women who consider abortion because of
poverty or rape, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” Of
gay people: “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am
no one to judge.” To divorced and remarried Catholics who are, by rule,
forbidden from taking Communion, he says that this crucial rite “is not a prize
for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
Through these conscious and skillful evocations of moments
in the ministry of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, this new Pope may have
found a way out of the 20th century culture wars, which have left the church
moribund in much of Western Europe and on the defensive from Dublin
to Los Angeles.
But the paradox of the papacy is that each new man’s success is burdened by the
astonishing successes of Popes past. The weight of history, of doctrines and
dogmas woven intricately century by century, genius by genius, is both the
source and the limitation of papal power. It radiates from every statue, crypt
and hand-painted vellum text in Rome—and
in churches, libraries, hospitals, universities and museums around the globe. A
Pope sets his own course only if he can conform it to paths already chosen.
And so Francis signals great change while giving the same
answers to the uncomfortable questions. On the question of female priests: “We
need to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman.” Which means:
no. No to abortion, because an individual life begins at conception. No to gay
marriage, because the male-female bond is established by God. “The teaching of
the church … is clear,” he has said, “and I am a son of the church, but”—and
here he adds his prayer for himself—“it is not necessary to talk about those
issues all the time.”
If that prayer should be answered, if somehow by his own
vivid example Francis could bring the church into a new relationship with its
critics and dissidents—agreeing to disagree about issues that divide them while
cooperating in the urgent mission of spreading mercy—he might unleash untold
good. “Argue less, accomplish more” could be a healing motto for our times. We
have a glut of problems to tackle. Francis says by example, Stop bickering and
roll up your sleeves. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good—an
important thing for the world to hear, especially from a man who holds an
office deemed infallible.
A Changing Papacy
This papacy begins with a name. Jorge Bergoglio is the first
Pope to choose as his namesake Francis of Assisi, the 13th century patron saint
of the poor. The choice, coming after 14 Clements, 16 Benedicts and 21 Johns,
is clearly and pointedly personal. The 13th century Francis turned to the
ministry when, as legend has it, he heard a voice calling to him from a
crucifix to repair God’s house. He left his prosperous silk-merchant family to
live with the poor. He was a peacemaker, the first Catholic leader to travel to
Egypt
to try to end the Crusades. He placed mercy at the core of his life.
From that name follows much of Francis’ agenda. While the
Catholic Church envisioned by Benedict XVI was one of tightly calibrated
spiritual prescriptions, Francis told Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of the
Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica, in an interview published at the end of
September, that he sees “the church as a field hospital after battle.” His
vision is of a pastoral—not a doctrinaire—church, and that will shift the Holy
See’s energies away from demanding long-distance homage and toward ministry to
and embrace of the poor, the spiritually broken and the lonely. He expanded on
this idea in a 288-section apostolic exhortation called “Evangelii Gaudium,” or
“The Joy of the Gospel.” “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty
because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy
from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” he wrote. He made
it clear that he does not just want talk—he wants actual transformation.
He has halted the habit of granting priests the honorific
title of monsignor as a way to stem careerism in the ranks and put the focus
instead on pastoring. He told a gathering of his diplomats that he wanted them
to identify candidates for bishop in their home countries who are, he said,
“gentle, patient and merciful, animated by inner poverty, the freedom of the
Lord and also by outward simplicity and austerity of life.” To Francis, poverty
isn’t simply about charity; it’s also about justice. The church, by extension,
should not reflect Rome;
it should mirror the poor.
Which helps explain why he has turned the once obscure
Vatican Almoner, an agency that has been around for about 800 years and is
often reserved for an aging Catholic diplomat, over to the dynamic 50-year-old
Polish Archbishop Konrad Krajewski and told him to make it the Holy See’s new
front porch. “You can sell your desk,” Francis told Krajewski. “You don’t need
it. You need to get out of the Vatican.
Don’t wait for people to come ringing. You need to go out and look for the
poor.” The Archbishop hands out small amounts to the needy, including a recent
gift of 1,600 phone cards to immigrant survivors of a capsized boat so they
could call family back in Eritrea.
Francis often gives Krajewski stacks of letters with his instructions to help
the people who have written to him and asked for aid. In what sounds like a
necessary precaution, the Vatican recently issued a denial after Krajewski
hinted that Francis himself sometimes slips out of the Vatican dressed as an
ordinary priest to hand out alms.
Francis also moved early to tame the mess that is the
Vatican Bank, an institution even U.S. Treasury officials privately say is
corrupted. Soon after he was elected, he named a special commission to
investigate the bank, which in turn handed the matter off to an independent
firm for an audit. Francis also issued initiatives to counter money laundering
and increase the monitoring of the Vatican’s finances. In October, the
bank disclosed an annual report for the first time in its 125-year history.
And if personnel is policy, Francis has been particularly
busy, shaking up the Curia with his preference for new faces over old ones. In
a move that signifies he means business, he tossed Benedict’s Secretary of
State, Tarcisio Bertone, and named ambassador to Venezuela Archbishop Pietro
Parolin, the youngest man to hold the post since Eugenio Pacelli, who went on
to become Pope Pius XII in 1939.
In April, Francis tapped a boarding party of eight
like-minded bishops from around the world to meet with him several times a year
to comb through difficult problems, a move that diffused some of the
traditional power of the Synod of Bishops. “I don’t want token consultations,”
he explained in an interview, “but real consultations.” That, at least so far,
appears to be what he is getting. The membership is telling: Cardinals from Chile, Congo
and Honduras as well as Munich, Australia
and Boston are
on the panel. In August, another member, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of India, issued
one of the most expansive comments about gays that the church has ever made,
stating that while the church does not allow gay marriage, homosexuality is not
a sin. “To say that those with other sexual orientations are sinners is wrong,”
he wrote to an LGBT group in Mumbai. “We must be sensitive in our homilies and
how we speak in public and I will so advise our priests.”
And on Dec. 5, in a long overdue move, the group of eight
named a new commission on sex abuse, the problem of priests preying on children
they had vowed to protect. It is the church’s darkest existential problem in an
era of existential problems; the commission aims to study better ways to
protect children, screen programs that involve children and suggest new ways to
create safe environments and choose the priests to lead them. At worst, the
Cardinals are laying out a new set of best practices for far-flung dioceses to
follow. At best, they are admitting that the Vatican had focused too much
attention on the legal challenges of the sex-abuse crisis rather than on the
behavioral problems at its core.
Francis has backed up his deeds with homilies and his first
apostolic exhortation. He can barely contain his outrage when he writes, “How
can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of
exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Elsewhere in
his exhortation, he goes directly after capitalism and globalization: “Some
people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic
growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about
greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion … has never been
confirmed by the facts.” He says the church must work “to eliminate the
structural causes of poverty” and adds that while “the Pope loves everyone,
rich and poor alike … he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that
the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”
The church has always made the poor a priority—a mission
that has been the biting paradox of the treasure-laden Vatican. But
Francis has made it clear that they are a priest’s first responsibility. “A
lack of vigilance, as we know, makes the Pastor tepid; it makes him
absentminded, forgetful and even impatient,” he preached in May. “It tantalizes
him with the prospect of a career, the enticement of money and with compromises
with a mundane spirit; it makes him lazy, turning him into an official, a state
functionary, concerned with himself, with organization and structures, rather
than with the true good of the People of God.” In case anyone missed the point,
he suspended a bishop in Limburg,
Germany, for
overseeing a $42.5 million renovation of the church residence that included a
$20,500 bathtub. Says Father Guillermo Marcó, who was Bergoglio’s spokesman
from 1998 to 2006: “It is the first time we have had a priest as Pope.”
An Argentine’s Way
On weekends in Buenos
Aires, you can take a 31⁄2-hour bus tour of the
neighborhoods where Jorge Mario Bergoglio grew up. “What’s coming up on this
street?” the tour guide Daniel Vega asks as the bus pulls up on Calle
Membrillar in the Flores district of Buenos
Aires. “The house where he was born,” comes the answer. There’s the chapel
where his father Mario, a native of the Piedmont region of Italy, and Regina,
an Argentine of Piedmontese descent, met in 1934. They married the next year
and had their firstborn, Jorge Mario, on Dec. 17, 1936.
The Bergoglios were very strict Catholics, the kind who
worry about meeting people who were not married in the church or who were
socialists or atheists. But the future Pope was never that doctrinaire: in the
four years between realizing he was called to the priesthood and actually
entering seminary, he said he had “political concerns, though I never went
beyond simple intellectualizing.” He admits to reading and liking publications
of the Communist Party but says he was never a member. Many Bergoglio watchers—a
minor industry in Argentina—believe that his concern for the destitute is
partly rooted in Argentina’s experience with Peronism, a strange
socialist-capitalist amalgam that evolved in the country in the 1940s and was
powered by a deep, working-class populism. That ideology suffused everything
Argentine then—and now.
Bergoglio is quite mystical about his career choice, which
hit him when he stopped off at church on his way to join friends to celebrate a
holiday. “It surprised me, caught me with my guard down,” he told Francesca
Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin, who interviewed him for their 2010 book, published
this year in the U.S. as Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio.
“That is the religious experience: the astonishment of meeting someone who has
been waiting for you all along.” He did not enter seminary until 1957, telling
the authors, “Let’s say God left the door open for me for a few years.”
He was briefly a nightclub bouncer and would as a
21-year-old seminarian lose most of his right lung to an infection, a condition
that may contribute to his back problems today. He chose to join the Jesuits
because the order—founded as the Catholic Church launched the
counterreformation—was at “the front lines of the Church, grounded in obedience
and discipline.” He claimed to not be disciplined himself and thus in need of
the structure. What he did have was a talent for empathy and for engaging
people in conversation. Even before he was ordained, he was a popular and
attractive figure to his students at Jesuit schools as well as to many
superiors. In 1973, at 36—just three years a priest—he was named the head of
the Society of Jesus in Argentina
and the boss of Jesuits many years his senior. The office came with prestige,
huge responsibilities and, as it turned out, the seeds of almost two decades of
turmoil for himself, which nearly derailed his career.
His crisis centered around two Jesuits, Father Orlando Yorio
and Father Francisco Jalics, who refused his orders over the period of about a
year beginning in 1975 to leave the slums as the country spiraled into
political chaos and the military, which considered slum priests to be likely
rebels, was clearly moving to take over Argentina. As terrorists on the
right and left tore the nation apart, many Argentines—including some bishops
and priests—longed for a strong hand to reassert control over the country, and
many welcomed the military coup of March 24, 1976.
In May the two Jesuits were arrested and subjected to
torture. Bitterness has lingered among some Jesuits and the relatives of Yorio
(who died in 2000), who to this day accuse Bergoglio of virtually giving up the
priests to the junta, citing a flurry of bureaucratic paperwork that ultimately
failed to provide cover for the clerics to stay on in the slums. Bergoglio said
he immediately tried to win their freedom (as he would do for many others), and
Yorio and Jalics were released after five months. Very few of the
“disappeared”—as abducted Argentines were called—reappeared alive.
Even after Bergoglio served out his term as Jesuit
provincial in 1979, he remained a divisive figure. In 1988, when he was serving
as a theology lecturer at a school in Buenos Aires, he came into conflict with
the provincial at the time, Father Victor Zorzín, who reassigned Bergoglio to
Córdoba, more than 400 miles (640 km) northwest of Buenos Aires. From June 1990
to May 1992, according to journalist Elisabetta Piqué, author of the biography
Francis: Life and Revolution, he could make no phone calls without permission,
and his correspondence was “controlled.” Zorzín says “it cost [Bergoglio] a lot
to accept the change. But pain can ripen into something else.”
In what would prove to be a providential turn, a Cardinal
who admired Bergoglio’s work as provincial—including his ability to assess the
talents of others and organize productive meetings—came seeking him and,
rescuing him from Córdoba exile, turbocharged his ascent in the church
hierarchy. And as he rose from bishop to Archbishop to Cardinal, Bergoglio
began ministering to the slums—the same kind of districts that Yorio and Jalics
refused to leave at his orders. Jalics, who now lives in Bavaria, kept silent
about the case for nearly four decades but released a statement after Bergoglio
became Francis, declaring that “Orlando Yorio and I were never given up by
Jorge Bergoglio … I used to think we had been victims of an accusation. But by
the late 90s, after many conversations, it was clear to me that I was wrong.”
After becoming Archbishop in 1998, Bergoglio was known for
his frugality, for taking the bus and the subway and for living in a simple
apartment on the same block as the cathedral, not at the opulent archdiocesan
residence. That kind of humility increased his appeal not only with ordinary
Argentines but also among his fellow Archbishops in Latin
America. His meteoric postexile rise seemed to climax in April
2005, when the death of John Paul II brought Bergoglio to Rome and to the ranks
of what Vaticanologists call I papabili—the Cardinals who might become Pope.
The Wednesday after Germany’s
Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Bergoglio had lunch with his
press secretary Marcó and, according to Marcó, never let on that the Latin
American Cardinals had gathered enough support to make him the runner-up in the
conclave. Some accounts have Bergoglio signaling to his supporters to shift
their votes to Ratzinger so as not to prolong the process and give an
impression of a divided College of Cardinals.
He returned to Buenos
Aires and looked to retirement. He had already picked
out the residence where he would live out the rest of his life—an old-age home
for priests in Flores, where he was born—and
handed his letter of resignation to the Pope when he turned 75 in 2011. “I’m
starting to consider the fact that I have to leave everything behind,” he said
in 2010. “It makes me want to be fair with everyone always, to sign the final
flourish … But death is in my thoughts every day.” He insisted he was not sad, and
he went on posing for pictures with the faithful. But his face gave him away,
and one parishioner called him on it: “Padre Jorge, if you’re going to put on
that face, you’re going to ruin the photo.”
Then without warning on Feb. 11, Benedict XVI announced that
he was abdicating the papacy, the first time a Pope had resigned in 600 years.
The Archbishop of Buenos Aires once again flew to Rome, though he was no longer on the hot list
of I papabili. But on the night of March 13, to the world’s surprise, Bergoglio
emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as Francis.
Argentines saw on his face what millions of others could not
have divined: the sad, haggard look was gone. Joy cometh in the evening.
The Limits Of Reform
The five words that have come to define both the promise and
the limits of Francis’ papacy came in the form of a question: “Who am I to
judge?” That was his answer when asked about homosexuality by a reporter in
July. Many assumed Francis, with those words, was changing church doctrine.
Instead, he was merely changing its tone, searching for a pragmatic path to
reach the faithful who had been repelled by their church or its emphasis on
strict dos and don’ts. Years of working closely with parish priests have taught
him that the church seemed more comfortable with narrow issues than human
complexity, and it lost congregants and credibility in the bargain. He is
urging his army to think more broadly. As he told Spadaro, “What is the
confessor to do? We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay
marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. That is not possible. I have not
spoken much about these things and I was reprimanded for that. But when we
speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context.”
In short, ease up on the hot-button issues. That might not
seem like significant progress in the U.S. and other developed nations.
But the Pope’s sensitivity to sexual orientation has a different impact in many
developing countries, where homophobia is institutionalized, widespread and
sanctioned. Similarly, Francis is aware of the liberal clamor in the affluent
West for the ordination of women. He also recognizes that Catholic doctrine, as
it is currently formulated, cannot be made to justify women as priests. “The
feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions,” he has said.
But that does not involve ordination as priests. Instead, in his recent
exhortation, he says he wants to diminish the primacy of the all-male
priesthood, arguing that just because they monopolize the sacraments does not
mean their gender should be the only one empowered in the church.
That won’t make the grade for women who expect equal
protection and rights under secular law. But the real significance of these new
horizons will likely come in countries where the stakes for women are far
higher than just the question of ordination. In the places where the Catholic
Church is growing fastest, Francis’ words may portend significant advances in
culture wars where women and other disadvantaged groups have always been on the
losing side. When Catholic Archbishop Berhaneyesus Souraphiel of Addis Ababa talks of
women in the church, he thinks of the crisis in sub-Saharan African regions
where female genital mutilation is common. He is trying to rally Catholics to
raise money to build a university where women can have greater access to
education. Souraphiel sees great progress in Francis’ statements about women.
“It could help a lot,” he says, “because he is saying women have a great role
in the church and in society.”
But if there appears to be some wiggle room on homosexuality
and the role of women, there is none for abortion. “This is not something
subject to alleged reforms or ‘modernizations,’” Francis says. “It is not
‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.” Even so,
Francis’ tonal shifts on doctrine have unsettled some church conservatives,
particularly in the U.S.,
where some bishops in the past have declined to offer Communion to elected
officials who favor abortion. The exact size of this group is unknown, but no
one denies it exists. “Already there has been a lot of backlash from
traditionalist groups, conservative groups, people who feel he is moving too
quickly away from the traditional style of Benedict on liturgy, on clerical
appointments,” says Brian Daley, a professor of theology at the University of
Notre Dame. “But that’s probably a relatively small group of people.”
Those who have inveighed against abortion and homosexuality
for decades may fear that the ground is shifting underneath their feet. Some of
the harshest criticisms of Francis have come from traditionalists alarmed at
his emphasizing the Pope’s role as just another bishop—albeit of Rome—rather
than Supreme Pontiff. They argue that this path would lead to the end of the
papacy as the world has known it for centuries. In early October, Mario
Palmaro, a conservative bioethicist who worked for Radio Maria, went so far as
to co-author an essay titled “We Do Not Like This Pope” that hinted that
Francis was the Antichrist because of his all-too-knowing use of the media to
propagate heterodox ideas. Palmaro was particularly appalled by the interview
Francis granted the atheist editor of the Italian daily La Repubblica, in which
the Pope was quoted as saying, “I believe in God, not a Catholic God.” The
station fired Palmaro for criticizing the boss. But in November, after Palmaro
came down with a debilitating disease, Francis telephoned to console him. “I
was so moved by the phone call that I was not able to conduct much
conversation,” Palmaro told reporters. “He just wanted to tell me that he is
praying for me.” Palmaro says he has not changed his opinion of Francis’
policy.
Part of the conservative critique is that Francis’ words and
gestures cannot be fully reconciled with the legacy of previous Popes.
Apparently aware of that potential for controversy, Francis has been skillfully
citing the writings of former Pontiffs, stressing continuity. As the first
Pontiff to be ordained a priest after Vatican II, he has been generous to the
opinions of John XXIII, who convened that reformist council. But it is a
delicate task given that Francis has one thing no Pope has had since the 15th
century: a living predecessor. While Benedict resides in quiet retirement in
the Vatican Gardens, he remains a potential rallying
point for those who fear that Francis may hold the doctrinal reins too loosely.
So far, Francis and Benedict appear to get on well: both men flatter each
other, and Francis was especially generous with quotations from Benedict in his
recent exhortation. In any case, Francis needs to keep his predecessor on his
side, for it was Benedict who codified the conservative views of John Paul II,
the hero of many Catholics, particularly those on the right of the spectrum.
Francis will continue the policy of both John Paul II and
Benedict on détente and fraternal relations with Judaism. (Francis plans to
visit Israel
in May.) But with his experience working with the Muslim immigrant population
of Argentina,
Francis will extend a warmer hand toward Islam than Benedict, who famously
infuriated that religion’s clerics with a scholarly aside in an otherwise
innocuous speech. And he has proved himself amenable to Protestant, evangelical
piety, scandalizing conservative Catholics in Argentina
by kneeling and being blessed by Pentecostal preachers in a Buenos Aires auditorium.
While still in his home country, the future Pope also said
that priestly celibacy is a recent development (it dates to about the year
1000) and has seemed open to change. Again, in Argentina, he startled
conservatives by attending the funeral of a rebel bishop who left the church to
marry, comforting the deceased prelate’s widow, who used to concelebrate Mass
with her husband. Francis is sympathetic to people whose marriages have fallen
apart: his only surviving sibling, María Elena Bergoglio, is divorced. In Argentina, he
worked very closely with Catholics who were divorced and remarried, some of
whom continue to take Communion. The Pope has called an Extraordinary Synod of
Bishops—only the third such gathering in almost 50 years—in October 2014 to
discuss pastoral challenges that face modern families, including sexual ethics,
divorce, cohabitation and reproduction.
A place that measures change in terms of centuries doesn’t
do relaunches often. It is important to remember that Francis has been Pope for
less than a year, and a papacy can change character in midstream. In 1846, Pope
Pius IX came to the throne as the great hope to liberalize Catholicism but by
the end of his pontificate had become the great champion of conservatism—the
font of infallibility and angry confrontation with secular powers like the
newborn Italian state. The entrenched dynamics of the church can transform the
would-be transformer.
A Day In The Life
Francis begins, ends and dots his day with prayer. He rises
at 5 a.m. and prays until 7 before celebrating morning Mass at the Casa Santa
Marta chapel. He prays after Mass and again before breakfast. Then at 8 a.m.,
the day begins. He works through papers until 10, then meets with secretaries,
Cardinals, bishops, priests and laypeople until noon, followed by lunch and a
half-hour siesta. Six hours of work follow, then dinner and more prayer in
front of the Blessed Sacrament. He admits he sometimes nods off at this point,
but says, “It is good to fall asleep in God’s presence.” He is usually in bed
by 10.
On Wednesdays, he has a general audience around lunchtime in
St. Peter’s Square, which brings in the multitudes. On a bright December day,
the festive crowd numbers about 30,000. It’s the season of light, and Francis
is talking about the Resurrection. He appears to have a cold; he needs the
handkerchief tucked in his robes. But his voice is strong, though higher than
you’d expect, and more musical, like that of a storyteller with a full range of
context and characters to bring to his mission of making you listen. He has a
script in hand because once he finishes the lesson, it will be repeated by
priests reading in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Arabic.
But every so often, he can’t help himself. The script falls
to his lap and he leans forward, looks out over the crowd and just starts
talking, his hands in the air, his voice stronger now, doing his own call and
response. Jesus is risen, and so shall we be one day, he tells them. And as
though they might not quite grasp the implication, he pushes them: “But this is
not a lie! This is true!” he says. “Do you believe that Jesus is alive? Voi
credete?” “Yes!” the crowd calls back, and he asks again, “Don’t you believe?”
“Yes,” they cry. And now he has them. They have become part of the message. He
talks about Christ’s love like a man who has found something wondrous and wants
nothing more than to share it. “He is waiting for us,” Francis says. And when
he comes to the end of his homily, the script drops once more. “This thought
gives us hope! We are on the way to the Resurrection. And this is our joy: one day
find Jesus, meet Jesus and all together, all together—not here in the square,
the other way—but joyful with Jesus. This is our destiny.”
Once the service ends, he greets the Cardinals in attendance
on the dais, then walks over to meet first with the sick, then with special
guests. Many have brought him gifts, mementos: a small statue of a merry Jesus
on a yellow silk altar, a painting of Christ, a coffee-table book of photos
from Austria.
One man poses with him for a selfie; others do not want to let go of his hand.
The ushers and security guards try to keep him moving, but he has more words to
speak, pilgrims to meet and missions to launch before the day is over.
It’s hard to imagine a setting farther from Pasaje C. But if
Francis can order his steps, it’s not so far at all.
—With reporting by Hilary Burke and Uki Goñi/Buenos Aires
and Stephan Faris and Alessandro Speciale/Rome