Rome
— The swift election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, S.J., as bishop
of Rome is replete with good news — and not a little irony. To reverse
the postmodern batting order, let’s begin with the good news.
A true man of God. The wheelchair-bound beggar at the corner
of Via della Conciliazione and Via dell’Erba this morning had a keen
insight into his new bishop: “Sono molto contento; e un profeta” (“I’m
very happy; he’s a prophet”). That was certainly the overwhelming
impression I took away from the hour I spent with the archbishop of
Buenos Aires and future pope last May — here was a genuine man of God,
who lives “out” from the richness and depth of his interior life; a
bishop who approaches his responsibilities as a churchman and his
decisions as the leader of a complex organization from a Gospel-centered
perspective, in a spirit of discernment and prayer. The intensity with
which Cardinal Bergoglio asked me to pray for him, at the end of an hour
of conversation about a broad range of local and global Catholic
issues, was mirrored last night in his unprecedented request to the vast
crowd spilling out of St. Peter’s Square and down toward the Tiber to
pray for him before he blessed them. Gregory the Great, in the sixth
century, was the first bishop of Rome to adopt the title Servus servorum Dei
(Servant of the servants of God). That ancient description of the
supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church will be embodied in a
particularly winsome way in Pope Francis, who named himself for the Poverello of Assisi, the most popular saint in history.
A pope for the New Evangelization. The election of Pope Francis
completes the Church’s turn from the Counter-Reformation Catholicism
that brought the Gospel to America — and eventually produced
Catholicism’s first American pope — to the Evangelical Catholicism that
must replant the Gospel in those parts of the world that have grown
spiritually bored, while planting it afresh in new fields of mission
around the globe. In our May 2012 conversation, the man who would become
pope discussed at some length the importance of the Latin American
bishops’ 2007 “Aparecida Document,” the fruit of the Fifth General
Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. The
essential message of that revolutionary statement (in which there was
not the least bit of whining about Protestant “sheep-stealing” but
rather a clear acknowledgment of Catholicism’s own evangelical
deficiencies in Latin America) can be gleaned from this brief passage,
which I adopted as one of the epigraphs for my book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church:
The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . .
A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that “being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
Here, in a statement that then-cardinal Bergoglio had a significant
hand in drafting, is what John Paul II and Benedict XVI have called the
“New Evangelization” in synthetic microcosm:
The
Church of the 21st century cannot rely on the ambient public culture,
or on folk memories of traditional Catholic culture, to transmit the
Gospel in a way that transforms individual lives, cultures, and
societies. Something more, something deeper, is needed.That
“something” is radical personal conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ and
an embrace of the friendship he offers every human being: a friendship
in which we both see the face of the Father of Mercies (who calls us out
of our prodigality into the full dignity of our humanity) and learn the
deep truth about our humanity (that it is in making our lives into a
gift for others, as life itself is to each of us, that we come into
human fulfillment).
* This conversion of minds and hearts builds a community that is unlike
any other: a “communion” of disciples in mission, who understand that
faith is increased as it is offered and given away to others.
That
communion-community best embodies the truth of the human condition if
each individual member of it, and the Church itself, fully embraces the
entire symphony of Catholic truth, and in doing so, lives the moral life
as a life of growth in beatitude, in compassion for others, and in
evangelical charity.Finally,
this communion-community lives “ahead of time,” because it knows,
through the Easter faith the Church will celebrate in a few weeks, the
truth about how the human adventure will end: God’s purposes in creation
and redemption will be vindicated, as history and the cosmos are
fulfilled in the New Jerusalem, in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, where
death will be no more and every tear will be wiped away (Rev. 21:2–4).
That is the message that Pope Francis will take to the world:
Gospel-centered Catholicism, which challenges the post-mod cynics, the
metaphysically bored, and the spiritually dry to discover (or
rediscover) the tremendous human adventure of living “inside” the
Biblical narrative of history.
A reforming pope. One of the principal dynamics of Conclave
2013 was a settled determination among a clear majority of the cardinal
electors to see that the next pontificate addresses, in a
root-and-branch way, the incompetence and corruption that has made too
much of the Roman Curia an impediment to the New Evangelization, rather
than an instrument of it — and in doing so, to empower the good people
of the Curia to give the world Church the benefit of their remarkable
talents. Pope Francis is not going to have a happy time reading the
300-page report on Vatileaks and related Roman messes that is waiting
for him in the papal apartment. But he will read it with a reformer’s
eye, with the aid of some very shrewd and reform-minded veterans of the
Curia, and with a clear understanding from his own experience (as
related to me last May) of what went wrong in the management of the
Church’s central administrative machinery under the leadership of
Benedict XVI’s cardinal secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B. It
may be reasonably expected that real reform, in both curial culture and
curial personnel, will follow in due course. The sooner the better, many
would say.
A pope in defense of human rights and democracy. Pope Francis has left behind
an Argentina in which he was a stern critic of the Cristina Kirchner
government’s deepening of that beautiful country’s democracy deficit,
and of Madam President’s commitment to a public policy of bread and
circuses wedded to legally enforced lifestyle libertinism — what
Benedict XVI aptly called the “dictatorship of relativism.” At a moment
when the momentum of the democratic project in Latin America is flagging
(while new opportunities are opening up in places like post-Chávez
Venezuela and the inevitable post-Castro-brothers Cuba), the new pope
should be able to rally Catholic forces in defense of religious freedom
and other civil liberties in a continent where they are now under
assault. And if he can do that at home, he can do it throughout the
world.
Pope Francis is also deeply committed to the Church’s service to and
empowerment of the poor, as he made unmistakably clear in his ministry
in Buenos Aires. But those Gospel-based commitments should not lead
anyone to think that he will be Paul Krugman in a white cassock. That
seems very unlikely.
And now for the ironies.
The 2005 runner-up takes the checkered flag in 2013? Well,
not really. Cardinal Bergoglio was used in 2005; he knows precisely who
used him and why; and while he is a man of the Gospel who is not
looking to settle scores, he is also a man of prudence who knows who his
friends, and who his enemies, are. Here’s the story:
In April 2005, the progressive party (which was a real party then)
came to Rome after the death of John Paul II thinking it had the wind at
its back and clear sailing ahead — only to find that the
Ratzinger-for-pope party was well-organized; that Ratzinger had made a
very positive impression by the way he had run the General Congregations
of cardinals after John Paul II’s death; that he had deep support from
throughout the Third World because of the courtesy with which he had
treated visiting Third World bishops on their quinquennial visits to
Rome over the past 20 years; and that, after his brilliant homily at
John Paul’s funeral Mass, he was indisputably the frontrunner for the
papacy.
Confronted with this reality, the progressives panicked. Their first
blocking move against Ratzinger was to try to run the aged Carlo Maria
Cardinal Martini, S.J., emeritus archbishop of Milan, who was already
ill with Parkinson’s disease and had retired to the Pontifical Biblical
Institute in Jerusalem. The idea was not to elect Martini pope; it was
to stop the Ratzinger surge. Then, when Ratzinger blew past Martini with
almost 50 percent of the vote on what was assumed to be the “courtesy”
first ballot (where some votes are cast as gestures of friendship,
esteem, etc.), and subsequently went over 50 percent the following
morning, the panic intensified. Martini was summarily abandoned (or may
have told his supporters to forget it). The progressives then tried to
advance Cardinal Bergoglio — who was very much part of the pro-Ratzinger
coalition; who embodied “dynamic orthodoxy,” just like John Paul II and
Joseph Ratzinger; who had been persecuted by his more theologically and
politically left-leaning Jesuit brethren after his term as Jesuit
provincial in Argentina (they exiled him to northern Argentina, where he
taught high-school chemistry until rescued by John Paul II and
eventually made archbishop of Buenos Aires); and who was doubtless
appalled by the whole exercise on his putative behalf.
It was a last-ditch blocking move, perhaps constructed around the
idea that a Third World candidate like Bergoglio would peel off votes
from Ratzinger. In any event, it was a complete misreading of the 2005
conclave’s dynamics and a cynical use of Bergoglio, who would almost
certainly have been abandoned had the stratagem worked — and it failed
miserably.
Thus it may be safely assumed that the coalition that quickly
solidified and swiftly elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in 2013 had
little or nothing to do with the eminent cabal that tried to use him in
2005. Pope Francis was elected for who he is, not for taking the silver
medal eight years ago.
The first Jesuit pope? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.
Bergoglio is an old-school Jesuit, formed by classic Ignatian
spirituality and deeply committed to an intelligent, sophisticated
appropriation and proclamation of the full symphony of Catholic truth —
qualities not notable for their prevalence among members of the Society
of Jesus in the early 21st century. I suspect there were not all that
many champagne corks flying last night in those Jesuit residences
throughout the world where the Catholic Revolution That Never Was is
still regarded as the ecclesiastical holy grail. For the shrewder of the
new pope’s Jesuit brothers know full well that that dream was just
dealt another severe blow. And they perhaps fear that this pope, knowing
the Society of Jesus and its contemporary confusions and corruptions as
he does, just might take in hand the reform of the Jesuits that was one
of the signal failures of the pontificate of John Paul II.
There will be endless readings of the tea leaves in the days ahead as
the new pope, by word and gesture, offers certain signals as to his
intentions and his program. But the essentials are already known. This
is a keenly intelligent, deeply holy, humble, and shrewd man of the
Gospel. He knows that he has been elected as a reformer, and the reforms
he will implement are the reforms that will advance the New
Evangelization. The rest is detail: important detail, to be sure, but
still detail. The course is set, and the Church’s drive into the
Evangelical Catholicism of the future has been accelerated by the pope
who introduced himself to his diocese, and to the world, by bowing
deeply as he asked for our prayers.
