ON HIS debut abroad the first Latin American pope put a spring in the
church’s step in the world’s largest Roman Catholic country. He
also—with a long, informal press conference—underlined the new style
that his papacy has brought, heralding a softer tone on sexual issues,
and a tougher line on Vatican cliques.Humble and plain-speaking, Francis drew huge crowds despite the wet and cold of the southern winter. His energy and urgency was a marked break with the sense of drift that has afflicted the Latin American church. And it contrasted with two lacklustre visits by his cerebral predecessor, Benedict.
A final mass on Rio’s Copacabana beach drew 1m people: a record rivalled only by John Paul II’s trips to Poland. He told them: “Do not be afraid to go and to bring Christ into every area of life, to the margins of society, even to those who seem farthest away, most indifferent.”
At a meeting of bishops, he called for a new “missionary spirit” and decried “obsolete structures”. He led by example, visiting a favela (slum) and meeting the sick, young offenders and former drug addicts.
In word and deed, that was a rebuke to the church for its retreat from the poor urban peripheries, where Pentecostalist competitors have flourished. He also, by implication, challenged the Pentecostalists’ theology, often a gung-ho message of prosperity through piety, with a forthright attack on capitalism’s “disposable” culture.
With that, he offered an olive branch to the remnants of the politically radical liberation-theology movement, long at odds with Rome. As Argentina’s senior cleric, Francis had disagreed firmly with the movement’s Marxist message, infuriating its leftist fans. But he applauds its emphasis on the poor.
Brazilians’ verdict on their own country’s performance in Rio during the papal visit was immediate and negative: a worry with the World Cup final looming in 2014 and the summer Olympics in 2016.
The faithful stoically endured many inconveniences (including a breakdown for several hours of the metro). Secular sports fans will be fewer—but may also be less patient.
Whether their appreciation of the pope’s new style will halt the church’s decline will not be clear for years.
Even when parts of the Latin American Catholic church opted for the poor, the poor have often opted for Pentecostalism, notes Andrew Chesnut, of Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The message of social justice often appeals more to liberal secularists than its intended audience,” he says. The charismatic John Paul II also drew vast crowds in Latin America—but in the very years when the Protestant churches were making some of their biggest gains there.
The trip underlined Francis’s image of a “barefoot pope” who lives in a hostel, not the papal apartments, cares for the poor and is endowed with a human warmth that Benedict seemed at times to lack. His likeability ensures respectful attention (even from those who disagree with him).
For the leader of an organisation in which the core beliefs are not open to negotiations, style matters a lot. People sense hypocrisy and pomposity; they also sense the opposite.
In the plane on his return home Francis seemed buoyed by his visit. Other popes have also spoken to the travelling press corps. But this first press conference was long, at 82 minutes, and relaxed: quite unlike the stilted affairs of past years.
What particularly caught the headlines was a notably non-judgmental remark about homosexuality.
Francis also said gays should be “integrated” not marginalised. Though the generous tone (as with his remarks about women’s service to the church) was new, he stressed that church teaching is unaltered.
Yet this is more subtle than outsiders sometimes appreciate. The catechism deplores homosexual acts, terming them “objectively disordered”, but it also forthrightly condemns all signs of discrimination against homosexuals, saying they “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity”.
The intriguing aspect of his remark, however, was the question that prompted it: about Monsignor Battista Ricca, appointed by Francis in June to perhaps the most sensitive job in the Vatican, the Prelate of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), popularly known as the Vatican bank.
He will be the pope’s eyes and ears in an outfit that has besmirched the image of the papacy, and which Francis seems set on overhauling. He has since named one commission to scrutinise the IOR and another to look at the overall management of the Vatican’s finances.
Now many wonder if Francis was set up—perhaps deliberately misinformed about his choice.
Shortly before he left Rome L’Espresso, a newsweekly, reported that Monsignor Ricca’s time as a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay had been beset by scandal. It said he had arrived with a gay lover whom he had housed and employed; that he had been beaten up in a gay bar, and caught in the middle of the night with a young male prostitute. Though strongly denied, the claims would, if true, deal a blow to Francis’s plans for reform of the curial administration.
In February La Repubblica, (a daily sister publication) reported that Vatican investigators had identified a network of gay prelates, some of whom were being blackmailed.
Details of this “gay lobby” are supposedly in a dossier on the “Vatileaks” affair, prepared by three cardinals on Benedict’s orders.
Vatileaks involved the leaking by the papal butler of secret correspondence purportedly revealing scandalous maladministration.
All this adds significance to Francis’s remarks: “We must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby.” Lobbies were bad, he said. “But if a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge that person?”
One worldly interpretation of Francis’s remarks on the plane is that he is trying to diminish the impact of any further revelations in the Vatileaks affair.
A more dramatic version is that, as he seems to have already hinted, he is preparing to strike against a homosexual network in the Vatican and wants his motives to be clear: that it is not the sexual orientation, or even behaviour, of its members that he condemns, but the formation of interest groups in an organisation that is meant to have only one interest, and one earthly boss.