Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka make history in the Vatican

Never before in the history of Christian-Jewish relations have a Pope and a Rabbi celebrated their friendship by living in the Vatican together for several days, sharing all meals, including on two Jewish festivals and the Sabbath at which the Rabbi said prayers in Hebrew, and discussing what more  they can do together to promote dialogue and peace in the world.
 
That is what actually happened over the past four days at the Vatican guesthouse (Santa Marta) where Pope Francis lives and where his friend from Buenos Aires, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, has been his guest from September 25 to this day.   
 
“I eat with him at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.  He cares for me, and controls everything regarding my food to makes sure it is all kosher, and according to my religious tradition.  These are festive days, and I have to say certain prayers at meals and, I expand the last prayer and translate it. He accompanies me together with the others at table -his secretaries and a bishop, and they all say ‘Amen’ at the end”, the Rabbi said.
 
By acting in this way, the Pope and Rabbi are sending an extraordinary message of friendship, dialogue and peace not only to their respective religious communities but also to the whole world.  And they plan to do even more together, Rabbi Skorka revealed when we talked together at Santa Marta, on September 27.
 
He and the Pope are planning to travel together to the Holy Land next year. The Israeli and Palestinian authorities have invited Pope Francis, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew1, wants him to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the historic meeting of his predecessor, Athenagoras, with Paul VI in the Holy City.
 
“We are dreaming of traveling together to Israel soon, and the Pope is working on this subject”, the Rabbi said. “I dream of embracing him at the Kotel, or Wailing Wall, and I will accompany him to Bethlehem, in the Palestinian territories.  His presence can help a lot at this moment when the peace talks are starting again”, he added.
 
Skorka sees a deep spiritual significance for both of them in being together at the sites that are sacred to their respective religions. “I do not cease to be a Jew for him, and he goes on keeping his own faith. But the two spiritualities have to have a point of encounter.  We cannot live in a world where we reject each other, we must build bridges.”
 
He believes his friend “has become a spiritual reference point for the whole world, not just for the Catholic Church” as was evidenced recently when he called for a day of prayer and fast for peace in Syria
 
“Ours is a spiritual journey”, he said of their friendship which dates back to 1997 when Bergoglio became coadjutor bishop of Buenos Aires archdiocese. “Like him I don’t much like the protocol, and like him I too go for the essentials”, he added. Since then, they have done many things together, including producing an interview book – Sobre el cielo y la tierra (‘On heaven and earth’) that has been translated into several languages and will soon be in Hebrew too.
 
“We hold to different traditions, but we are creating a dialogue that has not existed for centuries. Both of us believe that God has something to do with our friendship and with what we are doing.  There are too many coincidences for it all to be mere chance”, said Skorka, 63, who is Rector of the Latin American Rabbinic Seminary.   
 
“We come together without burying our identities.  I spoke to him about evangelization, and he stated emphatically that the Catholic Church cannot engage in proselytism”, he said.
 
“We are not looking for a photo opportunity, but we want what we are doing to trigger a re-thinking about things. Ours is not a relation of ‘tea and sympathy’; that is not my way, and it is not Bergoglio’s way. We want to move ahead by actions, we must advance by building bridges, through a living dialogue; not a dialogue of words, but a dialogue of actions that reflect our commitment”, he stated.
 
Rabbi Skorka believes that “many Christians and Jews in Europe and the United States do not understand our friendship, for them it comes as a shock,”, but he is convinced that “history is made more by action than by political reasoning”.
 
Last June the Rabbi met his friend, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in the Vatican for the first time after his election, when Skorka came at the invitation of the Focolare movement. He returned this time at the invitation of the Sant Egidio community which is holding its annual international inter-religious meeting in Rome in these days.  

It was his second meeting with Pope Francis, and he found him “full of energy and very much focused on his work” He believes the honeymoon period is over and the Pope is now “in the phase of hard work”. He was particularly struck by the fact that his relation with the Pope “is the same as before, and even deeper”, and he concluded that even though his friend has moved to a higher status in the world’s scale, “his humility has increased even more!” 

Rylko and Turkson keep posts in Pontifical Councils for Laity and Justice and Peace

Pope Francis has taken further decisions regarding the Roman Curia. 

He confirmed last Tuesday that Cardinal Stanisław Ryłko will remain President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Titular Bishop of Segerme, Mgr. Josef Clemens will continue as Secretary, until the end of their five year stint. 

He has also confirmed that the members and consultors of the Pontifical Council will remain in their positions until 31 December 2013.

Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson will also be keeping his position as President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace until the end of his five year appointment, as will the Titular Bishop of Bisarcio, Mgr. Mario Toso, who will continue in his role as Secretary. 

Francis also confirmed the Council’s members and consultors for the same period.

Hebron: More bloodshed at Abraham’s burial site

Any time anyone talks about peace among the three main monotheistic religions, they are always referred to as the “children of Abraham”. 

And yet the tomb of the Patriarch that is common to Jews, Christians and Muslims continues to be the catalyst of hatred and conflict between these religions. 

Tensions are running high again in Hebron, the Holy Land city which is home the Tomb of Patriarchs. The Tomb – which is believed to be Abraham’s burial place – has been a place of worship for some millennia.

What sparked the tensions was the murder of Sergent Gal Kobi, an Israeli soldier who was shot by a sniper, near the site which is known to the Jews as the me'arat ha-Machpela (The Cave of Machpelah) and to the Muslims as the al-masjid al-Ibrāhīmī (the Sanctuary of Abraham). 

The murder took place just as Israel celebrates the Feast of Tabernacles or Sukkot. 

The soldier was escorting some Jews who had gone to pray at the site which is situated inside Palestinian territory.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli army responded with a series of stops and searches in an attempt to find the sniper who fired the shot. 

But the toughest reaction came from the political sphere: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has authorised the entry of Jews to Machpelah House, which is located near the contested holy site. 

Last year, a Jewish organisation purchased Machpelah House through some intermediaries. Before this, they had been forbidden from moving into the building in order to prevent further tensions in a city that is home to 200 thousand Palestinians. 7 thousand Israelis live in a high security part of Hebron’s Old City. 

The Tomb of Patriarchs has been divided by a pane of bulletproof glass to allow each religious community to pray at the tomb of Abraham separately.

Hebron’s history is a perfect illustration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Tomb of Patriarchs occupies a hugely important place in Jewish history. As the Book of Genesis says, the Cave of Machpelah was purchased by Abraham to use a burial plot for his wife Sarah (before his own death). 

For this reason it is considered the earliest evidence of the Promised Land. A small community of Jews continued to lived here, alongside Muslims, even during the diaspora. This was until the 1929 pogrom, when 67 Jews from Hebron were brutally killed in the early clashes between Arab nationalists and Zionists. 

Britain responded with a drastic and perhaps even more traumatic decision: they moved all Jews out of Abraham’s city for security reasons. Then, in 1967, after the Six-Day War, a group of Jews decided to settle in Hebron again. 

But this time they had the army on their side. This marked the start of new clashes which culminated in the bloodbath of 26 February 1994, when Baruch Goldstein, a Jew, opened fire on a group of Muslims who were on their way to the Tomb of Patriarchs to pray. About 60 people died on that occasion, including the 29 people Goldstein killed and other victims of the violence which followed.

The Hebron massacre of 1994 marked the first serious stop to the peace process launched a month before with the Oslo Accords signed by Rabin and Arafat. 

The fear therefore, is that tensions surrounding Abraham’s Tomb will yet again blow out the feeble flame of negotiations which resumed between Israelis and Palestinians just a few weeks ago.

Mgr. Coutts: “Pakistani government needs to address sectarian violence issue”

“The government has to seriously address the growing religious and sectarian violence that has reached alarming proportions, as evidenced by the incident in the Church of Peshawar," the Archbishop of Karachi and President of the Episcopal Conference of Pakistan, Mgr. Joseph Coutts, told Fides news agency in a statement. 

"Killing innocent people in a moment of prayer is a shameful act of cowardice. We ask the government to take immediate steps to arrest those responsible for this attack and to protect places of worship of all religious minorities in the country," the archbishop said in the note sent to Fides. 

“With regards to the possible dialogue with the Taliban, the Archbishop says: "On this point, as a good citizen, we will stick to what the government decides, with the aim of maintaining peace in the country.”
 
“In Karachi, a city in the province of Sindh (Southern Pakistan), there is a very tense social situation,” Fides reports. “In past days, after widespread protests on behalf of Christians, riots broke out in front of a mosque and a Muslim man was killed. In a joint meeting held yesterday at the Trinity Church in Karachi, Mgr. Joseph Coutts, and the Anglican Bishop Sadiq Daniel, express their saddness "for one of the most serious and fatal attacks in the history of the Pakistani church", they invited the faithful "to keep calm and not to give in to the temptation of violent reactions".”
 
"The Christian community in Pakistan - remarked Bishop Sadiq Daniel - is a peaceful community that offers an excellent contribution in the field of education and health, for the development of Pakistan". 

The Bishop, recalling that the Taliban are a threat to the entire nation, not only for Christians, expressed his gratitude for the solidarity on behalf of religious leaders of other communities, such as Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, as well as the leaders of political parties: "Jamat Islami", "Pakistan Peoples Party" and "Muthaida Quami Movement".

“Bergoglio’s List”:How Francis saved dissidents from Argentina’s military dictatorship

Many of Bergoglio’s friends couldn’t make any sense out of it: “Why doesn’t he respond? Why doesn’t he tell everyone the truth so all these lies can stop?” Fr. José Maria “Pepe” di Paola kept on asking.  

Fr. Pepe coordinates priests in the villas miserias, Buenos Aires’ slums. 

The priest was referring to the slanderous comments a left-wing journalist had been making against Bergoglio for years, to the immense joy of ultra-right wing movements. 

The journalist accused him of collaborating with the military dictatorship and facilitating the arrest of two fellow Jesuits Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio, who were in turn accused of being subversive “communists”.

No sooner had Bergoglio been elected Pope on 13 March than blogs and newspapers started firing accusations at him, in a hungry attempt to find embarrassing material on Peter’s successor. 

On the very evening of Francis’ election, Nello Scavo, a journalist for Italian Catholic daily Avvenire started looking into the stories circulating on the web about the Pope having allegedly complicit with the Argentinian dictatorship. Scavo had no premeditated theories to prove and no hagiographical intentions. 

As a journalist whop focused on legal  and judicial issues, he knew that if he could prove the accusations against the newly elected Pope were true, he would be in for a huge scoop. He also knew that an honest reconstruction of the facts leaves no room for censorship and prejudices.
 
It was on that special evening that Scavo began the long investigation described in his book “La Lista di Bergoglio salvati da Francesco durante la dittatura”(“Bergoglio's List: Those Saved by Pope Francis; Stories Never Told”), published in Italian only by missionary publishing house Emi. The book which has been written in the style of an interview is out in bookstores tomorrow. 

The fast-paced text includes an appendix with a transcript of the 2010 testimony Bergoglio gave during a nearly four-hour court interrogation on the crimes committed in the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) the Navy School of Mechanics that operated during Argentina’s military dictatorship.

The suspicions and lies surrounding Bergoglio’s actions that were circulating in those first few days of his pontificate, in a blind and universal copy-pasting frenzy, turned out to hold no water. The only living Jesuit of the two who had been presented as Bergoglio’s victims denied everything. 

The journalist who had made the accusations admitted that Jalics’ words had let Bergoglio off the hook once and for all. 

But Nello Scavo’s investigation had already started by this point. Following the false clue offered by the manipulated dossiers that were built up against Bergoglio Scavo didn’t just get a scoop, he got much more than he bargained for. 

He found dozens of converging testimonies about the plans Bergoglio had hatched to protect and save many potential desaparecidos, men and women who ended up in the crosshairs of the repressive regime.  At least a hundred of them, according to Scavo.
 
The starting line for most of the events the book describes was the Colegio Maximo in San Miguel - in the same area of Buenos Aires Bergoglio used to live – and the nearby Universidad del Salvador, which also had Jesuit ties. This is where Jorge Mario Bergoglio who had not yet turned 40, hosted dissidents who were being hunted down by the military and their thugs, either individuals or groups, passing them off as students  who were attending spiritual exercises. Many of these men’s lives were in danger so Bergoglio’s rescue strategy involved them being expatriated. From the reconstruction these events it is quite clear that Bergoglio was part of a larger support network of Jesuits across the Latin American Continent who helped distribute expatriation documents to those who needed to get out of the country.

The book’s 192 pages are full of the names, faces and stories of many individuals who were rescued thanks to the future Pope’s actions. The reader can almost feel the desperation of that period f Argentinian history on their own skin. 

Scavo paints an eloquent and detailed picture of the consolation and reassurance Bergoglio gave to so many during that dark period. Uruguayan militant Gonzalo Mosca, whom Bergoglio helped flee to Brazil, after giving him some works by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and “a radio so I could stay up to date.”
 
The book also mentions three seminarists entrusted to Bergoglio by the Bishop of La Rioja, Enrique Angelelli. Shortly after this, the bishop was killed by the military in a bogus road accident. Then there are Ana and Sergio Gobelin, two Christians who were involved in the pastoral and social mobilisation work in the Buenos Aires’ Bajo Flores slum. 

Bergoglio went to visit them in the slum and celebrated their wedding but then Sergio was arrested by a dissident hunting squad. Bergoglio managed to get him released with the help of Italian consul Enrico Calamai and felpe the couple free to Friuli, in north-eastern Italy. He convinced them by assuring them that if they died “he and his wife would not be able to continued their mission".

The Jesuit Juan Manuel Scannone, a representative of the Liberation Theology movement who was accused of backing the subversive communists, states: “he covered my back, he saved me. And he did so on many occasions”. Given the mood at the time, Bergoglio kept a low profile and chose to show he was not affected by the anxiety that gripped the country. 

He always suggested little tricks to prevent people from getting caught out by the regime’s hitmen. “Now is not the time to play superheroes,” Bergoglio had said. When he drove others to places, he advised them to avoid looking out of the window. When they spoke on the phone they were encouraged not to say anything that could compromise their safety and not to write such things in letters. They were to speak in code. All these little details were also important from a psychological point of view. First live, then philosophise was Bergoglio’s motto. This is what drove him to meet with general Videla and Admiral Massera, two of the dictatorship’s big fish, to try to obtain Yorio and Jalics’ release.

Scavo’s book also reveals the source of Bergoglio’s discretion regarding these facts. This silence was also required of those mentioned in Bergoglio’s List who benefited from his help. 

More than modesty and discretion, Bergoglio’s decision to stay silent reveals an intimate aspect of the current Bishop of Rome’s spiritual profile. 

His actions speak for him and this is as true today as it was back then. You do not respond to offensive comments and accusations made by spiteful people and when you do a good deed you must not boast about it but forget about it. 

“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,  so that your giving may be in secret” (Matthew 6:3-4).

French imams back pope after Vatican audience

A group of French imams attended a general audience with Pope Francis on Wednesday, saying they saw the Catholic leader as a figure of reconciliation.
"We feel something strong with this pope. We the minorities need him," Hassen Chalghoumi, a Tunisian imam in Drancy, a suburb of Paris, told AFP.
"Moderates should be supported. We should not be grouped with extremists who burn churches," he said.
The visit was organised by Marek Halter, a French writer of Polish Jewish origin, who briefly met with the pope during the audience in St Peter's Square.
There were a total of eight imams -- seven from Paris and suburbs and one from Marseille. Chalghoumi said they were all "sufis" -- a moderate current in Islam.
Tunisian cinema and television tycoon Tarak Ben Ammar brought the imams on his private plane and said the visit would boost inter-religious dialogue.
"We have a problem to resolve ourselves. Christians had this in the Middle Ages. Political Islam is winning the upper hand," Ben Ammar said.
Halter said that Francis "can do what Benedict XVI never managed to do: reconcile Christianity and Islam".
John Paul II and Benedict XVI both made overtures to the Muslim world but Benedict was widely criticised for appearing to link Islam and violence in a speech in Germany shortly after being elected in 2006.

Glasnost at the Vatican? (Opinion)

A “small chapel” is how Pope Francis describes what the Roman Catholic Church might wind up becoming if it keeps playing the role of morally superior know-it-all. 

An exclusive fraternity, as opposed to being a truly catholic (in the sense of “universal”) body, seems to have been the obsession of the Roman Curia, a group of grumpy old men who berate the rest of us for being mere mortals. 

No matter that church doctrine hasn’t been affected (not yet, anyway) by the pope’s more relaxed outlook, this is a welcome change in tone from that of the former pope, Benedict, who lives in retirement, not far from where Francis lives. 

One of my first thoughts on hearing of this pope’s desire to shift the conversation away from the Don’ts to the Do’s was that this was clearly an implied rebuke of the doctrinaire Benedict, nicknamed the rottweiler for his emphasis, equally true of John Paul, on dogma, on making sure that the musty air at the Vatican would continue to remain musty. 

Though he hasn’t commented on his successor’s views, Benedict must surely be having second thoughts about letting go of the papal reins. 

Sorry, Benedict, but to paraphrase that memorable graffito in a public restroom that I once saw, his karma ran over your dogma.

Not that dogma is dead, by any means. It still barks, bares its fangs, but perhaps not as loudly or as often as before. Francis is still doctrinally a conservative, and he made that point quite clearly when he recently spoke to an audience of Catholic gynecologists and reiterated the 

Church’s stance against abortion, decrying what he termed today’s “throwaway culture.” He did so after an interview with him, by a fellow Jesuit and journalist, was published in various Jesuit publications. Pope Francis (the former Jorge Cardinal Mario Bergoglio from Buenos Aires) offered up a critique that must have shocked the Catolicos Cerrados—a peculiar specimen of which the Philippines has more, much more, than its fair share. I could hear their jaws dropping. For this alone I applaud him. 

He noted how the institution had become obsessed with sexual matters such as gay marriage, contraception, and abortion. He pointed out that “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” He also stated that he might have been too hasty in his judgments when he was younger. 

Is the Curia listening? 

While this body has no choice but to listen, the bigger question is, how will the members of this powerful body respond? Right now Dan Brown must already be contemplating yet another page-turner, where the shadowy figures behind the papal throne conspire to dispose of him.  

This is a folksy pope who enjoys meeting people, someone who calls individuals popes never call—that’s folks like you and me—who drives around in a secondhand car, and who disdains living in the Apostolic Palace. 

He seems bent on undermining the autocratic Curia, or at the very least bringing a measure of transparency to its proceedings. It was precisely to shake the Curia up that he got the nod to be the CEO of a two-thousand-year-old institution. 

How is our version of the Curia, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP)—another bunch of grumpy men—reacting? 

For Francis’s desire to open up the doors as a gesture of a more inclusive church must make them hot under the collar, particularly in their wrongheaded opposition to, and mischaracterization of, the reproductive health bill, to the point of portraying it as Satanic.

Francis is New Testament, while the CBCP, as with the Curia, is so Old Testament, their deity that of fire and brimstone, God with the face of an avenger. 

This pope seems to favor the way that Jesus walked among the people, who talked to and hobnobbed with whores and thieves and fishermen and farmers, a Jesus who disdained the Pharisees and their fancy ways. 

He listened, and he understood. 

And in expressing views more in keeping with the times, Francis shows he is listening, and trying to stay away from the cold imperious judgment so favored by the conventional church hierarchy. 

Interestingly, in an Associated Press dispatch, in interviews with Catholic laymen in places such as Havana, Boston, New York, and Manila, interviewees were overwhelmingly in favor of the pope’s approach. 

The one exception was—you guessed it—a Filipina, who insisted that the Church keep railing against abortion and homosexuality, yet at the same time she appreciated the pope’s outspokenness, a polite but dismissive gesture.

Still, the role of women in the RCC remains restricted, on weak theological grounds, as I have pointed out in earlier columns. If the church is to be truly inclusive, then its outdated views towards the half that holds up the sky must change. 

Pope Francis could be the agent of such change. His candid remarks have certainly encouraged Sister Carol Zinn, the head of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a nationwide organization of American nuns that had been severely criticized by Benedict for focusing on issues such as social justice. 

She lauded Francis’s gentler tone, and is optimistic that “we are going to see changes, because discernment brings changes.” 

Glasnost at the Vatican? 

One fervently hopes so.

Dominican Republic-Vatican pedophile scandal roils Poland

The case of a catholic priest and a bishop, both Polish nationals charged with child molestation, has roiled Poland, whose media have sent journalists to cover the scandal that has rocked the Vatican and the Dominican Republic.
 
A former Dominican Today intern from Poland on Tuesday said Newsweek Pl. and one of the polish TV stations are covering the case extensively, and DT has already received the former’s investigative report published on Monday, by a journalist who with the help by DT staff also interviewed TV producer Nuria Piera, who first broke the case.

“Polish media published the article about this investigation in Dominican Republic and we have a little storm. They also covered the case of Juncalito. Something is really going on. Today this is already topic which we deal with every day,” the former intern said in reference to the town of Juncalito, where Polish priest Wojciech Gil (Padre Alberto) allegedly abused as many as one dozen minors.

Also accused in the scandal is Polish bishop and fired Vatican envoy to Dominican Republic Jozef Wesolowski, who allegedly paid young boys for sexual favors.

Jesus was the world's first tweeter: Vatican

Jesus Christ was the world's first tweeter because his pronouncements were "brief and full of meaning", Vatican cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi said Wednesday.
 
Christ "used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like 'Love one another'", said Ravasi, the Vatican's equivalent of a culture minister.

"A bit like in television today, he delivered a message through a story or a symbol," Ravasi said at a conference with Italy's leading newspaper editors.

The cardinal emphasised the importance of clergy making full use of modern-day computer technology.

"If a cleric, a pastor is not interested in communication, they are defying their duty," he said.

The Vatican has stepped up its presence on the Internet in recent years, initially under Benedict XVI and now under Pope Francis, who has more than three million followers on Twitter in English alone.

Francis has also resorted to more traditional media, cold-calling ordinary faithful who have written to him and writing lengthy letters on religious issues that have appeared in the Italian press.

Reform groups write to Pope

An international group of Catholic reformers has written to the Pope pressing for a decision-making voice for laity in the Church.
In their open letter the group, which represents 100 church organisations, backed by over four million Catholics worldwide, seek an audience with the Pope to discuss church governance. 

Supporters of the letter include several British groups including Catholics for a Changing Church, Catholic Women's Ordination, We Are Church UK and Quest.
In it they ask that the Pope and his cardinals give priests, religious and laity a major role in areas including the selection of their bishops. 

They also call for dialogue and respect for conscience to replace authoritarian rule, that social justice is promoted inside and outside the church and that church officials who have facilitated or ignored the scandal of clerical sex abuse be removed from office.

Archbishop backs free school meals

The Archbishop of Westminster has called for free school meals to be provided to all primary school children.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols made the comments during a breakfast with more than 80 school children from St Mary's and St Michael's school in Tower Hamlets, London last week.

"I would love to see every school without a hungry child in sight," he told The Times. "If that's what it takes, then yes, let's do that."

The breakfast was provided by the charity Magic Breakfast and the Catholic social action agency, Caritas Westminster, as part of a collaborative initiative to provide free, healthy breakfasts to primary school children. 

Five Catholic schools in Westminster Diocese, including St Mary's and St Michael's, are taking part in the scheme.

Free school meals are currently provided to children whose parents receive benefits or earn less than £16,190 per year, but last week the Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg announced a £600 million plan to expand this to all children in their first three years at school.

The Pontiff of No Return

“I am a really, really undisciplined person:” This confession, coming from the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics in a much-discussed, lengthy, and gripping interview last week, was not especially surprising to those who have followed the young papacy of Francis closely. 

From the moment of his election, stories have bubbled up about the unscripted papacy—about phone calls out of the blue to ordinary Catholics, about a mass being moved at the last minute to a juvenile detention center, about a member of the Swiss Guard being ordered to have a seat while protecting the new pontiff. 

In early statements, he rather mockingly disparaged both Catholic traditionalists (“restorationist”) and Catholic radicals (“pantheist”) and made a remark about salvation and atheists that Vatican spokesmen, like characters in a palace comedy, later had to clarify with a “what the Czar meant to say” sort of statement. 

“It’s just Francis being Francis,” I found myself starting to think, with a mixture of delight and suspense for what his papacy might entail.

From the beginning, the contrast with his predecessor could not have been more stark: Benedict was meticulous in his public statements, austere in demeanor, and took a rococo approach to vestments. 

Francis is improvisational, intimate, and dons more basic wear. He has famously eschewed the papal apartment for a room in the Vatican guest house. He drives an old Renault.

It’s true that these early departures were—as many progressives who were reluctant to place their faith in the new pontiff pointed out—mostly matters of style. 

But with the papacy as with few other offices, style truly is substance. 

The pope plays a uniquely visible function: representing Christ (and the church) to the world. 

And it was clear early on that the Christ represented by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires would cut a different figure than the Christ represented by the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger.

It was less obvious where the new pope stood on doctrinal issues. Until this week it was still possible to imagine Francis wrapping conventional theological views in a charmingly chaotic pastoral style. 

But the 12,000-word interview, conducted over three sessions and approved in its Italian text by the Vatican, closes that possibility definitively. 

It is a document that may fairly be called unprecedented. In discussing topics that range from doctrine and spirituality to art and music, Francis gives clear and fulsome voice to the long-muted tradition of theologically progressive Catholicism. 

On homosexuality, the role of women, and the collegial relationship between the pope and other bishops, Francis spoke carefully but encouragingly for the possibility of development. Doubt and the openness of faith are celebrated; the pope, himself a Jesuit, says that a Jesuit “must be a person whose thought is incomplete.” 

That there are turns ahead in Catholic faith and life, turns ardently hoped and worked for by some and resisted by others, is a possibility Francis leaves pointedly open.

But more striking than anything he has said about hot-button issues was the way in which he depicted the development of teaching and thought within the church. In facing the world, the church can’t let itself retreat into a “small chapel” for “a small group of selected people”—a clear rebuke to the many advocates for a “smaller, purer church.” 

“We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.” 

In an interview full of startling moments, this one stands out for what will likely become a rhetorical trademark of the Francis papacy: he identifies the impulse to separate from and reject the secularized society not with an admirable if misguided holiness, but with mediocrity. 

This mediocrity seeks only to discipline and correct a “barbarian” world, and to put the church into a posture of defense. But this, Francis insists, is exactly wrong. “There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning.” 

There is a difference between the genius of Thomas Aquinas and the “bankrupt” commentators who imitated him. 

“Even the forms for expressing truth can be multiform,” Francis says, citing the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Caravaggio, Chagall, and Dali, “and this is indeed necessary for the transmission of the Gospel in its timeless meaning.” 

“In thinking of the human being, therefore, the church should strive for genius and not for decadence.”

The interview met with a thunderous cheer from many quarters, believing, unbelieving, differently-believing, and estranged, and took a variety of forms. 

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross singled out a comment about Wagner’s Parsifal. A friend of mine who hasn’t been to mass in years confessed a desire to go “old-school Irish Catholic and hang a picture of the Pope in my living room.” 

It is easy to exaggerate the radicalism of his statements; the very next day he condemned abortion as an extension of the “indifference and solitude” to which we condemn the world’s poor. 

The ideas expressed in the interview are not new or unorthodox. They are thrilling to theological progressives and discouraging to church traditionalists less on their own account than because of the person giving them voice.

Francis inspires admiration or anger because he is supposed to inspire awe. The pope who began his papacy threatening to become a cassocked version of Warren Beatty’s Senator Bulworth has emerged quickly as a more classical, solid figure of reversal. 

A pope is not expected to wash the feet of female Muslim prisoners, to drive a beater, to live in a guest house, or to compare the church’s doctrine of humanity to the movement from classical sculpture to Dali. 

The irony of Francis’ young tenure in the chair of Peter is that he has become a hero (or a villain) by subverting the expectations of the very role that makes his utterances significant.

This subversion is unrepeatable. 

“I feel sorry for whoever has to be pope after Francis,” a theologian friend remarked to me. 

Having shown that a pope can perfectly well break down the hallowed distance between himself and the people, speak candidly and publicly about his own failings, and fearlessly push his church toward embracing “the freshness and fragrance of the gospel” over a “disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently,” Francis will leave his successor accountable either to continue doing so or to revert to a fustian papal model that will appear not so much grand and ancient as nostalgic and, to borrow Francis’ word, mediocre. 

If the next pope drives an old Renault, no one will care; and if he brings back all the medieval trappings he’ll look foolish.

In that sense, Francis has already made himself a pivotal figure. 

In answering his predecessor’s departing challenge to lead the church into a complex modern world, Francis has changed his office and his church. 

What remains to be seen is whether this modestly-styled, thrilling, frustrating papacy will retain enough awe to effect the renovation it promises.

Pope Francis divides atheists (Opinion)

Nobody can accuse the Catholic Church of being democratic, but as an atheist I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill’s remark about democracy: Pope Francis is the worst pope we ever had, except for all the others.

I’m no papal historian, but I’m pressed to think of a less bad pope. 

True, I have nothing bad to say about Pope John Paul I, perhaps because he was pope for only 33 days.

Although Pope Benedict XVI unified atheists whenever he made pronouncements on atheists, gays, pedophilia, and all matters sexual, his successor, Pope Francis, is a divider rather than a uniter within the atheist community. 

Some atheists see this pope glass as 1/10 full, while others see it as 9/10 empty.

For instance, what are we to make of this statement from Pope Francis? 

“God’s mercy does not have limits and therefore it reaches nonbelievers, too, for whom sin would not be the lack of faith in God, but rather, failure to obey one’s conscience.” 

Pope Francis added that God forgives those who do not believe and do not seek faith, as long as they follow their own conscience.

I like the pope’s emphasis on conscience, though I neither want nor need forgiveness for not believing in a nonexistent deity. 

I doubt that the pope would appreciate someone telling him, “Zeus will forgive you for not believing in him as long as you follow your conscience.” 

Following one’s conscience instead of a religious “authority” is exactly what atheists and humanists do. 

We are also guided by reason, empathy, and a growing knowledge of the world to help live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good. No need for gods and other supernatural forces.

Promoting conscience must make a lot of conservative Christians squirm. 

Is the pope saying it doesn’t matter what you believe about Jesus as long as you are a good person? 

Not quite, but he comes closer to that position than any pope in my memory. 

I’d say the difference between conservative and liberal Christians is that conservatives place belief above behavior and view this life as preparation for an afterlife, while liberals place behavior above belief and focus on improving the human condition.

The issue for me is not just how much of Catholic theology this or that pope believes, but which parts he emphasizes and which parts he mostly ignores. 

Pope Francis is concentrating more on peace, poverty and social justice than on abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He even gave a limited shout-out to gays, asking “Who am I to judge a gay person of goodwill who seeks the Lord?” 

But he conditions his benevolence on a search for the Lord.

I think Pope Francis is a liberal Christian trapped in a conservative Christian body (the Catholic Church). 

There are many cafeteria Catholics who ignore doctrines that make no sense to them. 

That’s why 82 percent of Catholics say birth control is morally acceptable. 

I don’t know what the pope believes about birth control, but as leader of the church he can’t seem to find an entrance to the cafeteria.

Whether you call it tradition or baggage, popes take great care to live mostly in the past. 

They may be in the forefront of 21^st century technology by tweeting, but they are stuck with papal dogma and doctrine from centuries past. 

I see three kinds of baggage that go from bad to worse to worst:

1. Church doctrine that mostly doesn’t affect behavior. Examples include “infallible” papal declarations that require faithful Catholics to believe things like the Immaculate Conception of Anne (Virgin Mary’s mom) so that Mary could somehow be free from the stain of “original sin,” and also Mary’s Assumption into heaven, body and soul.

2. Church doctrine applicable only to church clergy and nuns. For instance, lives of celibacy. Benedict supported celibate heterosexual priests, but not celibate homosexual priests. In his Orwellian world, all ways of not having sex are equal, but some ways are more equal than others. Pope Francis seems more welcoming of gay priests.

3. Church doctrine that affects non-Catholics. A prime example is Catholic political influence on prohibiting contraception in an overpopulated world with undereducated, vulnerable women— a policy that furthers the spread of sexual diseases when contraception is denied.

I suspect that Pope Francis would like to be even more human-centered, while at the same time not alienating a doctrine-centered Catholic hierarchy. 

But he took a job that comes with lots of baggage and he either can’t or won’t act as Thomas Jefferson did. 

Reflecting the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, Jefferson rewrote the Christian Bible by cutting out the superstitions and miracle stories in it, calling what remained “Diamonds in a Dunghill.”

Bottom line: Pope Francis may be as good as it gets, but the Catholic Church just doesn’t allow popes to get that good.

Pope Francis the troublemaker (Contribution)

Pope Francis’s blunt, conversational, subversive, disarming, humane, self-critical interview in the Jesuit publication America amounted to a sort of extemporaneous encyclical. 

He is clearly concerned that the message of Christianity has become obscured by ecclesiastical moralism. 

“The proclamation of the saving love of God,” he explained, “comes before moral and religious imperatives.”

Just as clearly, this pope intends to be a disruptive force; the Vicar of Christ as troublemaker. 

Rather than leaving his critique in the realm of vague admonition, Francis waded into controversy. 

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he said. These should be raised “in a context” and not “all the time.”

Gerson writes about politics, religion, foreign policy and global health and development in a twice-a-week column and on the PostPartisan blog.

While the pope’s views on these topics are orthodox, his critique of legalism is radical and unsparing. The church must be more than the sum of “small-minded rules.” “We have to find a new balance,” he said, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards.” 

Many casual observers of Christianity, particularly in the media, have found this surprising. 

They tend to view religion as identical to ethics. Remove the moral nagging and what remains?

This betrays a very casual acquaintance with Christianity, which was founded by a subversive, troublemaking critic of ecclesiastical moralism. 

During three years wandering around the southern Galilee and Jerusalem, Jesus managed to offend just about every cleric he encountered, whom he variously called “blind guides,” “whitewashed tombs” and a “brood of vipers.” 

True religion, he said, is not found in obedience to the letter of the law; it is an affair of the heart. And this friendship with God often comes easier to the simple, powerless and outcast — children, sinners, women, gentiles and the poor. 

It was a message calculated to offend legalists in every generation: Ethical religion without love is arid and misleading. 

Relationships — with God and your neighbor — come first. Ethics arise from a grateful and transformed heart. 

Over the millennia, this strain of impatience with legalism has provided Christianity with an advantage. When the church becomes ossified, legalistic and hypocritical — as all institutions periodically do — it is the radical reformers who carry on its most authentic tradition. 

This was true of the original Francis, the one from Assisi, who knew the power of a dramatic gesture (he once stripped naked in the public square to shame his materialistic father and begin a life of poverty). 

During his recent interview, Pope Francis was more modest but no less ambitious. Every time he speaks, you wonder what uncomfortable truth is about to be exposed.

Those who hope that the pope’s reform agenda is identical to liberal Protestantism are likely to be disappointed. 

Many mainline churches have distanced themselves from legalism by throwing traditional moral views overboard and embracing progressive causes. 

In some cases, this has been a panting, unsuccessful search for relevance.

Francis is taking a different direction. 

Rather than surrendering the moral distinctiveness of the Catholic Church, he is prioritizing its mission. 

In the America interview, he vividly compared the church to “a field hospital after battle.” 

When someone injured arrives, you don’t treat his high cholesterol. 

“You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.” 

The outreach of the church, in other words, does not start with ethical or political lectures. 

“The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.”

There is a good Catholic theological term for this: the “hierarchy of truths.” 

Not every true thing has equal weight or urgency.

But this does not adequately capture Francis’s deeper insight: the priority of the person. 

This personalism is among the most radical implications of Christian faith. In every way that matters to God, human beings are completely equal and completely loved. 

They can’t be reduced to ethical object lessons. Their dignity runs deeper than their failures. They matter more than any cause; they are the cause.

So Francis observed: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We must always consider the person.” 

This teaching — to always consider the person — was disorienting from the beginning. 

The outsiders get invited to the party. 

The prodigal is given the place of honor. 

The pious complain about their shocking treatment. 

The gatekeepers find the gate shut to them. 

It is subversive to all respectable religious order, which is precisely the point. 

With Francis, the argument gains a new hearing.