WHAT WILL HIS LEGACY BE?
Tweeting, kissing the feet of prisoners and living outside the Papal palace – Pope Francis has had a very modern reign. But his failure to deal with abuse scandals could yet derail the goodwill
IT’S five years since Pope Francis took on his monumental role as head of the Catholic Church. And while the reputation of the Church has been in something of a decline in the last few decades, it’s widely thought that Pope Francis had been one of the more popular choices for the role.
On his inauguration in 2013, it was mooted that the Jesuit would reform power structure, overhaul finances and give Vatican pomp a long overdue reality check. Sure enough, Francis abolished the bonuses paid to Vatican employees upon the election of a new Pope, amounting to several million Euros, opting instead to donate the money to charity. He also abolished the €25,000 annual bonus paid to the cardinals serving on the Board of Supervisors for the Vatican Bank.
Now that the man born Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been Pope for over five years, the question looms large: did his ascension usher in radical reform?
In some ways, his very appointment was a breath of fresh air. The first ever Jesuit Pope, not to mention the first Pope from the Americas, was a surprise for everyone, given the strained relations between the Society of Jesus and the Holy See. Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict, had carried on the stuffy traditions of his forebears. At 86, Benedict resigned from the papacy in 2013, the first Pope to do so since Gregory XII in 1415. The reason that was given at the time was his deteriorating strength and his advanced age.
Perhaps not surprisingly, speculation grew that he had been forced to step down from the role for other, perhaps less edifying reasons. But on the eve of the first anniversary of his resignation he wrote to La Stampa to deny as much.
‘There isn’t the slightest doubt about the validity of my resignation from the Petrine ministry,’ he wrote in a letter to the newspaper. ‘The only condition for the validity is the full freedom of the decision. Speculation about its invalidity is simply absurd.’
On March 13, 2013, Francis was elected on the fifth ballot of the conclave — the meeting of Catholic cardinals to elect a pope — and in a much quicker time than many anticipated. As would befit tradition, the white smoke rose from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel, indicating that the 266th Pope had been chosen.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn later said that Bergoglio was elected following two supernatural signs, one in the conclave and hence confidential, and a Latin-American couple of friends of Schönborn who whispered Bergoglio’s name in Schönborn’s ear. Schönborn commented: ‘If these people say Bergoglio, that’s an indication of the Holy Spirit.’
Whatever about the somewhat supernatural element of his appointment, the changes the new Pope made were rooted in the real world. His first word to the assembled crowds in St Peter’s Square was the casual ‘buonasera’ (good evening). He had dispensed with the formalities and the Italian public loved it.
On the night he was elected, Francis famously took a bus back to the hotel with the cardinals, rather than be driven in the Papal car. Far from resting up on his laurels after the appointment, he visited Cardinal Jorge Maria Mejia in hospital the very next day. In his first media audience, he set out his stall even more clearly: ‘How I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.’
Where most popes before him lived in the sumptuous surrounds of the Apostolic Palace, the official Papal residence, Francis instead moved into a suite in the Vatican guesthouse. He’s the first Pope since Pius, who died in 1914, to live outside the Papal apartments, though he still appears at the window of the Apostolic Palace for the Sunday Angelus.
On the first Holy Thursday following his election, Francis washed and kissed the feet of ten male and two female juvenile offenders, imprisoned at Rome’s Casal del Marmo detention facility. It was the first time that a Pope had included women in this ritual, although he had already done so when he was archbishop.
His mantle as the first ‘Twitter Pope’ has also seen him lauded — by some, anyway — as a refreshing change from the usual conservative Papal fare. Yet with change comes resistance, and many traditionalists have slated his approach, calling him a danger to Catholic traditions. Some have even asserted that he has widened the gulf between Church traditionalists and progressives.
One of the first things Pope Francis did in attempting to reform the Institute for the Works of Religion was to set up a new Council for the Economy, made up of cardinals and lay financial experts, to establish policy.
With that, he quickly developed a reputation as down-to-earth, good natured and, well, human.
Survey findings published earlier this year by the respected Pew Research Center in Washington found that 84 per cent of American Catholics retain a favourable view of Pope Francis, ‘virtually identical to the share who expressed a positive view of the Pope after the first year of his pontificate. Roughly nine-in-ten US Catholics describe Pope Francis as “compassionate” and “humble”.’
And in a world that seems to be shifting inexorably to the right, Francis’ often left leanings don’t go unnoticed.
His style has resulted in a growing number of seminarians and followers in the Americas and in Africa, though Mass attendance in Ireland is noticeably still declining.
In the last five years, there have been many other notable moments in Francis’ papacy, with his influence often impacting world affairs. Late last year, he made an official visit to Myanmar, where he finally expressed sympathy with the Rohinga people.
In the final years of the Obama presidency, the Pope was credited with greatly strengthening the links between the US and Cuba after decades of political tension.
During the US presidential campaign in 2016, the Pope implicitly took a potshot at incoming President Trump, noting publicly that the building of walls was ‘unchristian’.
Another one-liner proved to be seismic — this time, delivered on a flight to Brazil in July 2013. Talking to reporters mid-flight, Pope Francis made an off-the-cuff remark that attracted widespread media attention: ‘If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?’
CNN noted it as ‘five little words that (could) change the course of the Catholic Church’. While the Pope has never advocated for doctrinal change, or a change in the church’s formal antipathy toward LGBTQ sexuality, his focus has been on welcoming allcomers to the Church, or at the very least opening up the conversation about Catholic attitudes towards the LGBT community.
In 2016 he clarified his stance: ‘I
‘How I would like a poor Church, and for the poor’ He implicitly took a potshot at President Trump
Abuse scandals have dogged the Church for years
prefer that homosexuals come to confession, that they stay close to the Lord, and that we pray all together,’ he said.
There have been other moves towards reform within the Church. One of Pope Francis’s major innovations was his selection of a Council of Cardinals to advise him on reforms in the Curia, which runs the church from the Vatican. He has merged a number of Vatican offices into the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, headed by Dublinborn Cardinal Kevin Farrell, as well as offices for Promoting Integral Human Development, and for Communications.
Francis has been appointing cardinals in places that rarely had one before. This is considered one of the most revolutionary things he has done. The maximum number of cardinals who may take part in a Papal election is 120, who must be under 80 — a move, it’s been noted, that has cemented the legacy of his papacy.
His criticism of global capitalism is a lynchpin of his papacy. He has labelled labour unions as ‘prophets’ and called unbridled capitalism the ‘dung of the devil’.
This ruffled feathers, so much so that in 2014, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan felt the need to write a piece in the Wall Street Journal reassuring Catholics that the Pope wasn’t actually a socialist.
His remarks on divorce and remarriage have also flown in the face of tradition. In a footnote in chapter eight of his 2016 encyclical, Francis suggested that the church should grant Communion to divorced-and-remarried couples, despite the fact that the Catholic Church believes in the indissolubility of marriage.
This came three years after 21 British Catholic peers and MPs asked Francis — in vain, ultimately — to allow married men in Britain to be ordained as priests, keeping celibacy as the rule for bishops, much like their Anglican counterparts.
‘It is possible that in an objective situation of sin... a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end,’ wrote Francis, implying that, for example, a divorced-andremarried couple might be welcomed into the Church despite the fact that they’re believed to be, as remarried Catholics, in a ‘situation of sin’.
Yet while he has been less than ambivalent in his stance on these social issues, his take on others has been tangled. He has been opposed to abortion, reaching out via public message to the Irish people earlier this year, asking them to protect the unborn and the vulnerable, as they went to the polls to vote on repealing the 8th Amendment. And while speaking out on the importance of women in the Church, he has ruled out the possibility of women being ordained as priests in the Church.
His record on child protection ‘has been a dismal failure’ and ‘he needs to come [to Ireland] with a mindset that it’s not good enough to simply apologise for what has happened’, the former chief executive of the Irish Catholic Church’s National Board for Safeguarding Children, Ian Elliott, has said.
‘Looking at the evidence across the world, the problem is not being managed effectively anywhere by the Church,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that bishops, the clerical hierarchies, are capable of exercising the sort of judgment that is needed in order to have confidence that the vulnerable will be protected.’
Adding insult to injury, a report emerged earlier this week that 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania have been named in a grand jury report that accuses church leaders of covering up child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church over 70 years.
Pope Francis’s refusal to contend with the aftermath of this year’s Catholic sex abuse scandal in Chile drew widespread criticism, and it’s this one point that has proved the most contentious of his papacy.
During a trip to Chile in January, Francis took a defensive posture when asked about Bishop Juan Barros, who has been accused of covering up cases: ‘The day they bring me proof against the bishop, then I will speak,’ he said. ‘There is not a single proof against him. This is calumny! Is that clear?’
Sex abuse scandals have dogged the church for years, and it hasn’t been the first time, nor the last, that Francis has been described as failing to address the public’s demands for accountability.
The other big central cause in his papacy has been environmental issues.
He has asked for the use of renewable instead of conventional fuels, although also lays partial blame at the door of rampant consumerism. ‘The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth,’ he said in a 2015 encyclical.
Putting his proverbial money where his mouth is, the Popemobile reportedly got a carbonneutral makeover under Francis’s tenure.
Pope Francis may be credited with dragging the Church into the 21st century, but his time on the Papal throne has been as complex as it has been imperfect. Will his everlasting legacy be his readiness to bat on behalf of the world’s poor and marginalised, or his failure to deal fully with the brevity of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals?
Only time will tell.