September 27, 2013 6:52 pm
The new Pope is bringing glasnost to the Vatican
No one knows how his ideas will fare – but everybody senses they challenge conservative power
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, almost unknown to the world before his ascent this spring to the chair of Saint Peter after the sudden abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, is creating a real stir in the Roman Catholic Church. After long decades of papal intolerance that tried to silence debate and snuff out the flames of dissent, Pope Francis has just called for a “new balance” to prevent the two millennia-old Church collapsing “like a house of cards”. A discourse unheard inside the Roman hierarchy since the Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 is being revived by this Argentine Jesuit.
The impassioned debates that fizzed and then fizzled through the 1960s and 70s – on everything from clerical celibacy to liberation theology – were shut up in the deep freeze of dogma by Popes John Paul II and Benedict. Francis has now opened the freezer. Nobody knows how these ideas will fare once they thaw. But everybody senses they challenge conservative power – from the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy, to the reactionary Opus Dei order favoured by John Paul and Benedict – in ways that could change the face of the Church.
Quite how this has happened is a mystery. John Paul and Benedict, absolutists on questions of doctrine and papal prerogative, had more than 30 years to pack the conclave of cardinals, which chooses the pope, with prelates like them. Mystery still surrounds the (almost) unheard-of resignation of Benedict “on health grounds”. And Pope Francis himself, long reputed a conservative, looks an unlikely harbinger of perestroika and glasnost. But the signs of change keep accumulating.
He broadcasts his austere style, and that the Church of Jesus Christ is the Church of the poor. Whetherdenouncing the “idolatry” of money before jobless Sardinian miners, or telling his bishops to be shepherds who “smell more like the sheep”, Francis is sincere in casting his lot with society’s have-nots, something he dramatised by not moving in to the Vatican’s well-appointed papal apartments but instead to a priestly commune.
But the Catholic Church is about conserving an immutable core of orthodox belief, century after century, and while tone may vary, substance cannot. Can it be looked at in a different way? In recent weeks Pope Francis has fired off headline-grabbing statements on controversial themes, fromhomosexuality (“If someone is gay and is looking for the Lord, who am I to judge him?”) to atheism (“God’s mercy has no limits,” he said, “the issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience”). The contrast with Benedict, a subtle and retiring theologian with no pastoral background but a long history as John Paul’s doctrinal enforcer, could hardly be greater. Note, though, that the Church has, so far, changed no doctrine whatsoever.
But then came the Pope’s private meeting this month with Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who in a 1971 book popularised the ideas of the theology of liberation. These ideas, declaring structures of injustice that enshrined poverty as incompatible with the Gospel, became a call to moral arms for priests and lay activists across the developing world. The Jesuit Pope’s meeting prompted some Catholics to remember that it was the former Jesuit superior general, the Basque Pedro Arrupe, who in a letter to his Latin American priests in May 1968 first used the term the “preferential option for the poor” – which became the foundation of liberation theology.
John Paul used papal power to try to extirpate this current, which he equated with Marxism, as well as to roll back the modernising ideas of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict, was his principal instrument, in a battle that in some respects resembled the cold war. Hélder Câmara, the late archbishop of Recife in Brazil, a big influence behind the scenes at the Second Vatican Council, summed up the predicament: “When I give food to the poor, I am considered a saint. But when I ask why they are poor, I am called a communist.”
Pope Francis is no liberation theologian. But his ostensible relaxation of old anathemas has clearly worried organisations such as Opus Dei. The Pope’s long interview this week with Jesuit magazines – arresting in its clarity – will not have reassured them.
A pope enumerating his faults, for instance, can hardly hold up the banner of papal infallibility. “I have never been a rightwinger,” said Francis. “It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.” He compared the Church to a “field hospital after a battle” where the doctors were obsessing about cholesterol levels. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he said.
The Pope is taking action too. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Holy See who said the media was responsible for the impression that the Church was obsessed with sex and private morality, is out. Pietro Parolin, a skilled diplomat who will have to tackle everything from reform of the Vatican Bank to restructuring the Curia, is in. His observation that celibate priests are a clerical tradition, not a doctrine, did not go unnoticed. There appears to be a purge of individuals associated with the child sex abuse scandals that have so devastated the Church; this is not transparent.
There are demands for the reinstatement of sanctioned theologians, such as Hans Küng and Leonardo Boff. John Paul and Benedict manufactured hundreds of like-minded saints on assembly lines that devalued their sanctity. This pope may expedite the canonisation of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a modern Thomas Becket shot down by death squads while celebrating mass in San Salvador in 1980.
Francis’s first encyclical, moreover, will get straight to his point. It is said the title will be Beatis Pauperes – Blessed are the Poor. Anyone who wants to be more papist than this pope better get the message.
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