GOBSMACKED!

Summary: the Vatican has gobsmacked us again.  New Pope Francis I is an Argentine Jesuit.  First of that name, first from the Western Hemisphere, first Jesuit.  We don’t know at this point whether Francis intends to honor Francis of Assisi, the apostle of poverty, or Francis Xavier, the great early Jesuit.  If the new pontiff cleaves to the conservative line of his two last predecessors, he will do real damage to the church in the global North, while not necessarily contributing to the church in the global South which is now the home of most of the faithful.  As other commentators have noted, we should perhaps hope and pray for a pontiff who will be more like a John XXIV than a John Paul III or a Benedict XVII.  The Roman church needs a new aggiornamento, while we who are not Roman continue to watch cautiously inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church tends to set the tone for the Christian community’s dialogue with the larger world.

By: Paul S. Marchand
Once again the Vatican demonstrates its capacity to gobsmack the world at will.  The conclave has concluded its work and given the Roman church a new Bishop of Rome.

Francis I is the first pontiff to carry that name.

Francis I is also the first Pope from the Western Hemisphere, specifically, from Argentina.

Francis I is also the first Pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus.

Let’s run that by one more time: first Francis, first Western Hemisphere Pontiff, first Jesuit Pope.

Life seems to be imitating art of late at the Vatican.  When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI resigned, life seemed to be imitating the plot line of a Morris West novel, whether it be The Shoes of the Fisherman or The Clowns of God.  Now, life seems to be imitating Walter F. Murphy’s novel The Vicar Of Christ.

Murphy’s 1981 novel now seems eerily prescient, postulating as it does a fictional Pope Francis I from the Western Hemisphere.  Though Murphy’s Francis is an American, we should perhaps not be so gobsmacked at the idea of an Argentine Pope.  The majority of the world’s Roman Catholics now reside, like the majority of the world’s Anglicans, in what is often referred to as the global South.  Still, the new pontiff’s choice of the name Francis seems a departure that no one had expected.

Already, a bit of controversy has begun to arise over whether the quondam cardinal-Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name Francis to honor St. Francis of Assisi, or whether he chose it to honor Ignatius Loyola’s able and dedicated assistant St. Francis Xavier.  The Assisi reference makes sense if the new pontiff intends to pursue an agenda of the Roman church not only being poor, but of being seen to be poor.  After all, St. Francis of Assisi has gone down in the history of the church as a staunch advocate of holy poverty.

On the other hand, invoking St. Francis Xavier makes some sense for a pontiff who, for the first time in history, comes out of the Society of Jesus.  Xavier, after all, is one of the great and notable Jesuit saints.

No matter which Francis Papa Francesco had in mind, the task awaiting him would be enough to try the resolve of either Francis of Assisi or Francis Xavier.

To certain extent, we who are not of the Roman obedience have a luxury of being able to view the challenges confronting our Roman brethren and sistren from a somewhat broader perspective than that of those Roman Catholic brethren and sistren.  Not being in the metaphorical forest, we can see both the forest and the trees.

Francis I will need reserves of patience and openness of mind which seem to have evaded John Paul II in his later years and for which Benedict XVI (having been in charge of the Holy Office) is not viewed as having possessed.  The new Pope is widely regarded as being from the so-called conservative wing of the church.  If he opts to continue the kind of conservative agenda set under John Paul II and carried forward under Benedict, he will spend his pontificate desperately attempting to stem the tide of crisis by papering over the cracks in the edifice of the institutional church.

On the other hand, if Francis I opts to attempt to reclaim the momentum of Vatican II that Paul VI frittered improvidently away, he may find himself facing an angry backlash from ultramontane curialists and conservative bishops in the global North who have come to see themselves as water carriers for conservative political movements in their own countries.  At all events, the new pontiff will have to address sympathetically the significant social changes in the global North that have cost the Roman Catholic Church dearly in terms of declining numbers of faithful laity and committed clergy.

The last thing our Roman brethren and sistren need is a pontiff to thunder against the principled decisions they make with respect to the most profound and intimate issues of their own lives.  A Pope who seeks to reinforce and militantly reaffirm every jot and tittle of Paul VI’s breathtakingly ill considered encyclical Humanae Vitae, or to impose hyper-conservative doctrinal and/or dogmatic litmus tests on his faithful may well find himself stuck administering a church of the global South from a beleaguered outpost in a global North that has left him behind.

While the coming of any new pontiff (and this is my fifth) causes me to entertain a certain degree of skepticism, I am prepared for the very short time being to give Pope Francis I the benefit of some small fraction of doubt.  It may be that the perspective of a pontiff from both the Western Hemisphere and the global South, who comes out of the Jesuit experience (and who is thus emphatically not Opus Dei) may awaken him to the critical need for a new aggiornamento.  It is half a century since good Pope John XXIII dared to fling open the windows and bring both light and air into a church that had stultified under his predecessor Pius XII.

As an Anglican, I would like to be cautiously optimistic about such a development.  Those of us outside the Roman observance owe ourselves and our fellow non-Roman Catholics a duty to the truth to acknowledge that the Roman Catholic Church is very much the elephant in the Christian room, and that what Rome does still has an outsized impact on the way the rest of the world views the Christian community.  Thus, we should neither deny nor pooh-pooh what has happened in the Vatican today.  Instead, we should hope --- even pray --- that Francis I will have the grace to lead his church out of the doctrinaire traps into which his predecessors allowed it to fall.

If Jorge Mario Bergoglio truly wishes to embody the visions of Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier, he should, as more than one commentator has noted, be more John XXIV than John Paul III or Benedict XVII.  Vatican III, anybody?


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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California.  As an Anglican, he understands, pace Donald Rumsfeld, that you don’t deal with the ecclesial bodies you want, but with the ecclesial bodies you’ve got.  Though he is Anglican, he has a pragmatic understanding of the influence any Roman Pontiff can bring to bear.  The views contained herein are not intended as legal advice, and should not be so taken.  By the same token, those views are also not intended, and should not be taken as, catechesis or instruction in the Faith.  At all events, the views contained herein are his own.