Ten months into the pontificate of Pope Francis,
a revealing metropolitan myth has taken hold in Rome.
Namely that once a
week the pope removes his white robes, puts on parish-priest black and
slips out of the Vatican
late at night, incognito, to do the rounds of the city’s many down and
outs, distributing money, cups of coffee and his blessing.
It
required only an ambiguous answer in a recent interview from the
official papal almsgiver, Archbishop Konrad Krajewsky, for this myth to
take hold.
Describing his unusual, centuries-old job, the archbishop
seemed to suggest that sometimes when he and a couple of Swiss Guards
leave the Vatican late at night to make the rounds of the poor and
homeless, Pope Francis likes to come along too.
Even
though Krajewsky has since clarified his remarks, and even though the
Vatican press office has issued umpteen denials of the story, the myth
has taken hold. After all, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was Archbishop of
Buenos Aires, did he not go out late at night to offer food and comfort
to the homeless?
Not only the faithful but also intrigued
nonbelievers are ready to see this pope in the role of modern day Good
Samaritan in disguise. In a few busy months, Pope Francis has appeared
to turn one the conservative and hidebound Holy See on its head.
Is
this not the man who has chosen to live in a Vatican B&B rather
than in the Apostolic Palace? Is he not the pope who drives around in a
Ford Focus, who eschews Vatican gala concerts, who asks if St Peter had a
bank account, who washes the feet of Muslims during Easter week and who
says “Who am I to judge” homosexuals?
Above all,
is he not the pope who rails against a culture of “globalised
indifference” and who wants a church “of the poor and for the poor”?
He is.
Nine
months into his pontificate, both Rome and the church globally have
been imbued with what the worldwide head of one religious order calls a
“massive feel-good feeling”.
That feeling is tangible twice weekly in
the Vatican at the pope’s Sunday Angelus and his Wednesday public
audiences, where his normality, warmth and ability to relate to people
guarantee not only 75,000-strong crowds but also an endless succession
of splendid photo-ops.
Nor is the “feel-good”
factor restricted to just the faithful. The Vatican’s senior
communications adviser, Greg Burke, says Pope Francis continues to
engender a “tidal wave” of worldwide, secular media interest.
From
the moment of his election, in March, there has been the sensation that
something remarkable has finally happened. A pope with a mandate for
change, and one who came “from far away”, had seen off ultraconservative
Curia forces in a relatively quick election – Cardinal Bergoglio was
elected in just two days.
Promising signs
But has Pope Francis changed anything?
Ten months is a short time to
effect meaningful and radical change.
However, there have been plenty of
promising signs, many of them outlined in the pope’s recent
exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, a document that reads like a
blueprint for this pontificate – the “joy” of the gospel; the church’s
option for the poor and suffering; inequality; ecumenism; dialogue with
Islam; reform of the papacy itself; decentralisation of the church and
much else besides all feature.
In what one cardinal calls Pope Francis’s “Utopian” vision, Evangelii Gaudium
also reinforces his criticism of deregulated capitalism with comments
such as “we also have to say ‘Thou Shalt Not’ to an economy of exclusion
and inequality”. Such criticism prompted Tea Party advocate Rush
Limbaugh to call the document “pure Marxism”.
The biggest question in relation to Evangelii Gaudium,
and indeed to this pontificate, now concerns not these signs and
indicators but rather the extent to which these good intentions can be
implemented. “There will be serious question marks if we are still in
the same place in 12 months’ time,” says the same worldwide head of one
religious order.
Minority elements in the Roman Curia, not to
mention the universal church, have already given clear signals that they
are less than enthusiastic about the Pope Francis roadmap.
In July, the Italian weekly L’Espresso
reported that 57-year-old Monsignor Battista Ricca, freshly appointed
to a senior post at the Vatican bank, IOR (Institute for Religious
Works), was an active homosexual with a colourful and well-documented
gay past.
Vatican observers speculated that this report might have been
intended as a Curia shot across the bows of the reform-minded pope.
The
message was: this is what happens if you continue to plough your own
furrow, ignoring Curia advice. For the record, Ricca is still at his IOR
post.
More recently, the prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the German archbishop
Gerhard Ludwig Muller, in an October interview with the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano,
forcibly underlined current church teaching regarding the ban on those
who are remarried after divorce receiving the Eucharist.
The archbishop’s hard line seemed to
contradict remarks made by Pope Francis on the flight back to Rome from
the World Youth Day celebrations, in Brazil, in July, when he had said,
“This is the moment for mercy,” in response to a question about the
remarried.
Furthermore, in Evangelii Gaudium, the pope says the Eucharist is “not a prize for the perfect but rather a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak”.
The long-time Vatican critic and dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung
wrote in a recent article: “The credibility of Pope Francis will be
immensely damaged if Vatican reactionaries stop him from soon
translating his words into actions . . . The huge capital of trust that
[Pope] Francis has built up in these opening months of the pontificate
must not be squandered by the Curia.”
The pope,
however, is no babe in the Vatican woods. He is ready for the Curia
having had problems in his days as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, when
elements in the Curia tried to block the path of his trusted adviser
Victor Manuel Fernandez, the current rector of Argentina’s Pontifical
Catholic University.
One of the pope’s earliest appointments was of
Fernandez to the titular post of Archbishop of Tiburnia, and this summer
Fernandez visited the pope in Rome to help with the writing of Evangelii Gaudium.
In Italy, as they say, revenge is a plate best eaten cold.
In
this “Vatican Spring” climate, however, there is a real risk that Pope
Francis may have prompted unrealistic expectations, especially with
regard to doctrinal change. He seems much more open to women, writing in
Evangelii Gaudium that he wants them to have a bigger role in
“decision making in different aspects of the Church’s life”.
But this
does not mean he favours their ordination: “The reservation of the
priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in
the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion.”
Likewise,
he suggests the church has “done little” to accompany women in “very
difficult situations where abortion appears as a quick solution to their
profound anguish”.
However, that sympathy is juxtaposed with a total
rejection of abortion.
Cultural shift
So, where is the Vatican Spring? One Holy See insider says it is only realistic to conclude that while the church’s teaching will not change, the application of that teaching will.
It is what others call “a
cultural shift”, an attempt to apply what Pope Francis, in a September
address to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, called the
“ancient pilgrimage rule of St Ignatius”.
“In one
of his rules, St Ignatius says that whosoever accompanies a pilgrim . .
. should go at the pilgrim’s pace, neither too far in front nor too far
behind,” he said.
A more profound understanding
of that “pilgrim’s pace” may emerge from the Synod on the Family in
autumn 2014, where the bishops may be required to consider a far wider
range of lay views than would normally cross their Synod desks.
Last month, the Holy See confirmed that an
unprecedented 39-point questionnaire has been sent to the bishops
conferences worldwide, calling on them to distribute the questions “as
widely as possible . . . so that input from local sources” can be
considered regarding issues as controversial as same-sex marriage,
divorce, contraception and gay adoption.
This
questionnaire, called the preparatory document, is not in itself new but
its (online) extension to the laity is a clear sign of the Pope Francis
times, an expression of his desire for a collegiate church of
consultation and dialogue.
Even though change is a
slow process, in one area of Vatican life the pace of Pope
Francis-driven change is already obvious – the controversial Vatican
bank.
A cardinal recently went into the bank to lodge a modest amount of
money into his account.
To his surprise, he was kept waiting for some
time before the transaction was completed: “What is the matter? You do realise that I am a cardinal, don’t you?”
To
which the IOR bank teller replied: “Oh yes, that is the point, you are
in what we call a ‘socially unstable’ category and therefore we have to
be extra careful.”
Under the German lawyer Ernst
Von Freyburg, who was appointed president of the bank in February, it
has been on a radical overhaul course, much sustained by Pope Francis.
The Von Freyburg mantra requires the bank to be more open and
transparent, while a team of experts from the global consulting firm
Promontory has been going through every account with a view to
identifying suspicious transactions and eliminating cases of money
laundering or tax fraud.
Even a cardinal, it seems, is not above
suspicion.
The alleged mismanagement of the
Vatican bank was one of the most hotly debated items at the Udienze
Generali, or cardinals’ meetings, which preceded the conclave in March.
The pope has instituted two special financial commissions, one to
oversee the bank and the other to take an overall view of financial
organisation at the Holy See.
In June, a reminder
of the bank’s troubles came when Vatican employee Monsignor Nunzio
Scarano was arrested on charges that, along with a former secret
services agent and a shady financial dealer, he had attempted to
illegally “import” €20 million into Italy, using his Vatican bank
accounts.
Unlike in the past, when, for example,
the Vatican claimed diplomatic immunity for Archbishop Paul Marcinkus in
the infamous Banco Ambrosiano investigation, in the early 1980s, this
time the Vatican collaborated with Italian investigators, resulting in
Scarano’s arrest. He was recently released from prison, but, as of the
time of writing, he remains under house arrest.
The
road ahead of Pope Francis is rising with him. Yet as “a non-Italian
Italian”, as one Curia figure dubs him, he is probably better equipped
than most to deal with it.
On top of that, he has long since begun to
put together his own team, often diplomats with extensive experience in
Latin American nunciatures.
Furthermore, although
he is a good listener, the pope heeds his own counsel and makes his own
decisions.
In that sense, key figures in his entourage, such as his
Italian secretary of state Pietro Parolin and his Maltese private
secretary Alfred Xuereb, are just that – secretaries rather than policy
makers. Pointedly, Parolin recently went out of his way to say publicly,
“I am no sort of vice-pope.”
As for the papal
almsgiver, the pope made his point by making him a bishop in August and
increasing his budget.
Even if the pope cannot go out on the beat with
him, he sends a Vatican gendarme across to his office every morning with
a list of people to visit, coffee to distribute, money and appeals for
help answered.
In that sense, the metropolitan myth is alive and well,
as indeed is the pontificate of Pope Francis.