Getting to know the Pope
After four years in the job, Pope Francis leads an increasingly divided church. Journalist Andrea Tornielli reveals the real man – and why he isn’t scared to stick out his neck and defy expectations
THE bells of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, along with those of churches the world over, have been ringing through the night. It’s Easter Sunday, the most important day of the year for the world’s 1,3 billion Catholics, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At midday, the pope, who’s just entered the fifth year of his papacy, will appear on the central balcony at St Peter’s to deliver his traditional Urbi et Orbi (“to the city and to the world”) blessing, given at Easter and Christmas. His message will be beamed beyond a packed St Peter’s Square to every continent.
But if you’ve had the chance to come close to Pope Francis (80), as I have often, both as the author of a book about him and as the Vatican correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, you’ll know he doesn’t think of himself as a sovereign surrounded by a sacred aura. He disregards protocol; he stops to shake hands with the Swiss Guards who keep watch at the entrance to the Vatican Apostolic Palace.
When he was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, he’d ask everyone to call him “Father”. Since becoming Pope Francis, he’s remained as approachable as ever, always ready to put others at ease with a joke.
The first time I interviewed him as pope it was over an empty dinner table. Francis usually has lunch and dinner in the common dining room of Casa Santa Marta, the residence next to St Peter’s that he made his home after being elected pope. He lives there instead of in the traditional papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace.
If he has guests he needs to speak to privately, lunch is served in a small room connected to the kitchen. We sat down at the table and started speaking. After 15 minutes, a clearly hungry pope stopped and said, “Did you tell them not to bring us any food? I feel like I have invited you to a non-lunch!”
In fact, the person who was tasked with serving the food was waiting behind the door, anxious not to disturb us. I’d dined several times with Cardinal Bergoglio before his election, always in the
evenings and always at friends’ homes. His dinner in Buenos Aires was always light and frugal, but on those occasions he tried to honour the cook by trying everything and finishing every dish.
But when I had lunch with him in Santa Marta he surprised me by eating little and drinking lots of water. He doesn’t have a sweet tooth, but does like the Latin American pudding dulce de leche.
HIS small apartment is made up of three rooms, a living/ reception room, a small study and the bedroom. In his study there’s a desk where he works and has a landline. He says he can’t read all the correspondence he receives – thousands of letters a week – but he does read a few of them.
Often he’s moved by the stories told by children, their suffering and their requests. He keeps a few letters on his desk and prays about them. Sometimes he decides not only to answer them but also to personally phone the people who sent them, to encourage them as a priest would for a person who’s struggling in his parish.
Next to the desk there’s a small table where he keeps the statues of saints. Francis is especially devoted to one of them – a figure of St Joseph, the husband of Jesus’ mother, Mary, depicted while he sleeps.
“St Joseph, while he sleeps, guards the Church,” the pope tells me, adding that he writes notes with requests for miracles or prayers to put under the statue so the saint may look after them.
I’ve experienced his thoughtfulness first hand. A few days before he was elected pope in 2013, I talked to him for some time at a dinner at a friend’s home, telling him that my mother was quite ill and there was no hope of recovery. Hugging me, he reassured me of his prayers and told me, “The loss of our mother is the first great pain – we live without her consolation.”
When I interviewed him a few years later for my book The Name Of God Is Mercy, it was a hot July day. Before I sat down he suggested I take off my jacket – a small gesture but not one that all dignitaries would think to make.
I sat opposite him and laid three recording devices on the table: a smartphone, a digital recorder and a traditional cassette recorder – not one, but two safety nets. I’d just begun asking the first question, when he stood up, saying, “But you have no paper to take notes! Let me go and get you some paper . . .” I stopped him, explaining it wasn’t necessary, but that’s what he’s like.
There was a moment that moved me deeply during our conversation that day. The pope told me of an incident that happened to him decades ago when he was a parish priest in Argentina.
“I remember a mother with young children whose husband had left her,” he said. “She didn’t have a steady job and only managed to find temporary work a couple of months out of the year. When there was no work, she had to prostitute herself to provide her children with food. She was humble. She came to the parish church and we tried to help her with our charity, Caritas.
“I remember one day she came with her children and asked for me. I went to greet her. She’d come to thank me. I thought it was for the package of food we’d sent to her. ‘Did you receive it?’ I asked. ‘ Yes, yes, thank you for that too. But I came here today to thank you because you never stopped calling me Señora.’
“Experiences like this teach you how important it is to welcome people delicately and not wound their dignity. For her the fact that the parish priest continued to call her Señora was as – or perhaps even more – important than the help we gave her.”
He keeps a few of the letters people send to him on his desk and prays about them
This anecdote reveals a lot about Francis. It explains why mercy, acceptance, tenderness and closeness to others are so important in his teachings. His attitude of condemning sin but welcoming the sinner, despite being at the heart of Jesus’ teaching, isn’t always understood or popular within the Catholic Church; his critics talk of Francis’ “do-goodism” and “too much mercy”.
THE election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a surprise for everyone. He’s the first pope from South America, the first pope in history to belong to the religious order of the Jesuits, and the first pope to take the name of Francis, the saint from Assisi who reformed the church through humility and poverty.
Since the evening of 13 March 2013, when the conclave elected a pope who came “from the end of the earth”, as Francis himself described his origins in his first public remarks as pontiff, he’s continued to move countless people with his gestures, his words and his way of life.
“When Christians forget about hope and tenderness, they become a cold church that loses its sense of direction and is held back by ideologies and worldly attitudes,” he told me. “Whereas God’s simplicity tells you: go forward, I’m a Father who caresses you. I become fearful when Christians lose hope and the ability to embrace and extend a loving caress to others.”
How has this message been received in the four years since his election? There’s no doubt that the media “honeymoon” of the first months is over. These days, there’s an organised resistance to everything the pope says, proposes and does. The stark criticism has been circulated by blogs and social media.
Many were shocked by the news of the anonymous posters, put up secretly in the centre of Rome and written in the Roman dialect, that accused the pope of not being “merciful” towards the Knights of Malta, the ancient Catholic chivalric order in whose internal controversies the Holy See intervened last year following a row over condoms.
The Vatican effectively took control of the Knights of Malta in January after the British head of the ancient chivalric order, Grand Master Matthew Festing, resigned over the condom row. Festing had dismissed the order’s foreign minister, German aristocrat Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, for apparently allowing the distribution of condoms in Myanmar, in contravention of Catholic teaching.
Von Boeselager insisted he’d stopped the handouts of prophylactics as soon as he found out about them, and protested his dismissal. Pope Francis ordered an inquiry, but Festing resisted, saying his order was under no obligation to listen to the pope.
Francis has also been criticised for his ideas about marriage. In one chapter of his 2016 book, Amoris Laetitia, he leaves the option open for some remarried divorcees, after long discussions with their priest, to receive communion again. This hasn’t gone down well with the traditional wing of the church.
It’s not just on core church teachings that the pope hasn’t been afraid to court controversy: he’s criticised the “economy that kills”, called for social justice and focused on migrants and refugees in what he considers Europe’s “greatest crisis since World War 2”.
One of the issues is that the pope’s words are often read and interpreted through the political definitions “liberal” and “progressive”. On this basis, Francis has definitely disappointed the conservatives, but has also let down some progressives. The former see the pope as too open – they don’t accept any possibility of sacraments for remarried divorcees and dream of a church that’s more confrontational towards Islam and stricter in its teachings. The progressives see the pope as too conservative because he hasn’t pushed reforms all the way through. But it’s the conservative critics who shout loudest.
Whenever I’ve had the chance to ask Pope Francis about how he’s seen by these two groups, I’ve been amazed by the calmness of his answers. He reiterates that he sleeps “like a baby” and says that criticism, if given with honesty and without malice, is good for him. He also claims to be deeply against the “idealisation” of himself as a person. This means he doesn’t suffer sycophants gladly.
This year has also been difficult as far as the fight against paedophilia within the Catholic Church is concerned, due to the resignation of Marie Collins from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
The Irishwoman, a former abuse victim, claimed there were a lot of positive changes in the Roman Curia but that resistance persists. There are strict laws to combat the problem but there’s still a lot of work to be done to change the mindset within the church.
In an unprecedented gesture, Francis wrote the introduction to the story of a man who, as a boy, was raped for four years by a priest. In his preface to the book I Forgive You, Father, by Daniel Pittet, the pope writes, “How can a priest at the service of Christ and his Church
cause so much harm? How can someone who devoted their life to lead children to God, end up instead to devour them in what I called ‘a diabolical sacrifice’ that destroys both the victim and the life of the Church? Some of the victims have been driven to suicide. These deaths weigh on my heart, on my conscience and that of the whole Church. To their families, I offer my feelings of love and pain and humbly, I ask forgiveness.”
By writing this and meeting the abuse victims both in the Vatican and during his trips, and following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Francis shows how the pope himself can ask for forgiveness.
One of the most interesting things about him is that he defies expectation, point-blank refusing to be put in a box. The more the media portray the figure of the pope as a superstar, the more he tries to prove himself the opposite.
Pope Francis is always humble. Recently during a visit to the Italian city of Milan he met three families in an innercity council estate who live in social hardship or in pain because of illness. He entered the small flat of a woman who for years has been looking after her husband who’s bedridden and artificially fed.
Then he visited an elderly couple. The wife had been hospitalised a few days earlier and couldn’t be there. So Francis took her husband’s cellphone and they called her together.
Then Francis went to the home of a Muslim family, who welcomed him with open arms, offering him milk and almonds. Mihoual Abdel Karim, originally from Morocco, said that seeing the pope come into his home was incredibly powerful: “Today the pope changed our lives; we are very happy. “I thought I was dreaming.”
FROM the beginning of his pontificate, the pope confessed that he can’t do miracles but is instead a poor man; “a sinner to whom Christ has looked”. At best, he’s the finger pointing at the moon. He states that he’s a limited man, someone who refused to live in the Apostolic Palace for “psychological reasons”. Someone who didn’t want to be pope, because “a person who wants to be pope doesn’t love himself and isn’t blessed by God”.
It may sound strange to hear the pope talk about himself as a “sinner”, but this isn’t new for him. I was there when he met with prisoners in Bolivia during a trip to Latin America in 2015. He told them, “Standing before you is a man who’s been forgiven for his many sins.”
Coming from a pope, these words are extraordinary. He talked about this again during our interview: “The pope is a man who needs the mercy of God. I have a special relationship with people in prisons, deprived of their freedom.
“I have always been attached to them, precisely because of my awareness of being a sinner. Every time I go through the gates into a prison for a visit, I always think, ‘Why them and not me?’”
Francis tries to help build bridges and tear down walls through “gospel diplomacy”. This entails meeting with world leaders and pushing for peace, whether in Syria or Israel, between Cuba and America, or by taking a long and dangerous journey to the Central African Republic.
Francis sees himself as a “parish pope” to engender and favour peace.
His next crucial relationship will be with US president Donald Trump. But those who try to represent the pope as anti-Trump, picturing an open and permanent clash, are wrong. A few months ago the pope said of the new president, “We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. But being afraid or rejoicing beforehand because of something that might happen is, in my view, quite unwise. I prefer to wait and see.”
He’s been less circumspect in his criticisms of the populist wind sweeping through Europe and his concerns about Brexit (Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union). “I believe that unity is better than conflict. Brotherhood is better than hostility. Bridges are better than walls. This moment should make us reflect. Europe needs to find the strength of its roots again.”
From the first surprise visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa in July 2013 to his most recent to the Greek island of Lesbos a year ago, the pope has shown his concern about the migrant crisis.
When I asked what the most important challenge of 2017 would be, he said, “The first challenge I see before us concerns each and every one of us. It’s the challenge to win over the globalisation of indifference. The destructive illness that turns our hearts to stone and makes us self-absorbed and only able to care for ourselves and our interests; it’s the illness that renders us incapable of weeping, of feeling compassion, of letting us be hurt by others’ suffering. Life is a gift for us and we’re invited to share it in this communal home, caring for one another.”
The pope’s biggest sadness in his role is the lack of freedom “of having a pizza with my friends”.
He misses visiting parishes and stopping to hear people’s confessions, and perhaps also going to the stadium to watch a soccer game or two. He’s always been a dedicated fan.
“Some of the best times in my life were when I went to the stadium with my dad; my mom would also come to watch the game sometimes,” he says.
It’s a humble thought from a powerful man.
The pope misses being able to have a pizza with friends and go to soccer matches