Pope Francis faces new challenges in new year

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis faces a tough 2016, Vatican insiders say, with no let-up in his physically demanding schedule or the political battles over his efforts to modernize the Church.

The 79-year-old Pontiff, who eschews holidays and has appeared worn out at times during the last year, has already scheduled major trips to Mexico (February) and Poland (July).

Visits to Kosovo and Armenia (to mark the 100th anniversary of the World War I mass killings) are expected to be added to his diary, while France and his native Argentina are also seen as possible destinations in the next 12 months.

Laid low by the flu over Christmas, Francis nevertheless had the energy to insist that his wave-making shake-up of Vatican governance would be pursued in the New Year.

“The reform of the Curia (the Vatican bureacracy) will progress with determination, clarity and resolve,” he said in his end-of-year message to the faithful.

Top of the agenda for 2016 is the creation of two new ministries within the Vatican, one responsible for Laity, Family and Life, the other for Justice, Peace and Migration.

The Vatican’s media operations are also earmarked for reform alongside a continuing clean-up of the Holy See’s finances.

The reform process has encountered resistance among sections of the cosseted Vatican hierarchy.

Although there have been no redundancies, many clerics have been sent back to their dioceses and the wings of those who have stayed in Rome have been clipped by spending cutbacks.

Francis’ regular public attacks on extravagance and greed in the upper echelons of the Church, his gift for cutting sound bites and his quick-toanger temperament have not endeared him to many within the Vatican machine.

This has helped to create a paradoxical situation where Francis’s popularity with both believers and nonbelievers around the world is mirrored by an unusually high level of grumbling about him within the Vatican.

The scale of the internal opposition was underlined in October when an apparently erroneous Italian media report that the Pontiff had been treated for a benign brain tumor was immediately attributed to hostile elements seeking to undermine the Argentinian Pope.