It is alleged that after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the
King of France, Louis XVI, remarked to an aide that this was a revolt,
only to be corrected: “No, Sire, it is a revolution.”
Apocryphal or
otherwise, the aide’s laconic response identified for the still
uncomprehending monarch the truth of the attack: A momentum had been
unleashed that would have irreversible consequences.
Not least, for the
Bourbons.
The cardinal-electors who chose Jorge Mario Bergoglio last March to
succeed the retired Benedict XVI might well have indulged in the notion
that their decision was a revolt against expectations, a sundering of
the plans of the pundits, but they would not have thought of it as
revolutionary.
But that is precisely what the election of Francis,
the pope from the Americas, has proven to be.
And Francis himself is
the revolution.
Not the scheming Jesuit of popular imagination nor a
fifth columnist for liberation theology, Francis’s revolution is of a
different kind: He has remade the face of the papacy; he has humanized
the Office of Peter.
He hasn’t done this by issuing a series of
authoritative declarations; and he hasn’t ushered in, at least not yet, a
wholesale replacement of the current officialdom with the Vatican
equivalent of Young Turks. He has simply and eloquently transferred his
pastoral style from the River Plate to the River Tiber. That’s the
revolution.
By choosing to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae
rather than the Apostolic Palace, by choosing to depart from the
constrictions of protocol and papal script, by simplifying the rubrics
of decorum and by opting for spontaneity and extempore asides and
gestures over prescribed rituals, he demonstrates again and again that
he learned to be a bishop in Argentina and that he sees no reason to
accommodate his style to what is expected at the seat of Catholic power.
He will be Peter on his own terms.
And these terms are
revolutionary: simplicity of living; acute sensitivity to the poor;
accessibility; an attitude of welcome as opposed to a posture of
censure; a receptivity to alternate points of view as opposed to a
summary dismissal of contesting opinion.
In short, Francis has, by
rewriting the script, demystified the papacy. His style is his
substance.
When he cautions prelates and diplomats that they are
to be pastors and not princes, when he jettisons the papal throne and
sits in a circle with his guests, when he dines with the staff in shared
digs rather than in the rarefied setting of the papal apartments, when
he casts aside prepared remarks and engages in an animated conversation
with thousands of youth, and when he washes the feet of a Muslim girl he
affirms publicly his private conviction that a priest, a bishop, and,
yes, the Bishop of Rome, must have about him “the smell of the sheep.”
The
media, the non-Catholic world, and a sizable percentage of the Catholic
population as well, are fascinated by the exotica of papal governance,
vesture, manners and conventions. There is a mystique about the papacy
that is alluring, its pageantry theatre with few parallels, its music
and art an aperture to divinity. As the 19th century political economist
Walter Bagehot famously warned: Allowing daylight to shine upon the
magic of the monarchy diminishes its mystique.
But the papacy,
appearances to the contrary, is not a monarchy; it is a ministry.
Centuries of historical encrustations have hampered the effective
exercise of this ministry and Francis is determined that Peter is no
longer hostage to an anachronistic mode of leadership. That is why he
jokes, as he did in a recent audience, that Mr. Pope is no more nor less
important than everyone else.
He will be Christ’s Poor Servant, not
Christ’s Regent.
We are now more than his first 100 days into the Franciscan revolution.