#386: "Habemus Papam": Back to a Relevant Church?

White Smoke = "Habemus Papam"-- But Who?

 As the media continues to analyze the election of Pope Francis I, I am offering some historical perspective:

It took less than 10 minutes for Pope Francis to win over the hearts of millions watching his first appearance on the balconies Saint Peter’s Basilica.  He greeted the crowd with “Buona sera,” invited them to join him in prayer for Benedict XVI, joked about arriving as pope from “the end of the world,” and asked the crowd the favor of praying for him in silence before he blessed them.

Pope Francis I Bows after asking the people to bless him.

 He left smiling, only to come back, and grabbed the microphone again to thank the crowd for coming, and bid them to go home and get some rest, promising he would see them again soon.

We realize how difficult the current moment is for the Catholic Church when we see the way such simple gestures triggered wild and enthusiastic optimism that Francis would bring genuine reform to Catholicism and new hope to the world.

The Argentines unfurled their flag and led the cheers

 Given the crises and divisions within the Catholic world, and the deeper challenges this pope faces (see CrossCurrents #385, The New Pope’s Challenges) it is remarkable yet perhaps also understandable how little it takes to create a sense that this is a turning point.  That is probably because, in matters of faith, style can be just as important as substance.  And this pope has already demonstrated a different style of papacy from his immediate predecessors.

Yes, this pope is a conservative (like virtually all the other cardinals in the conclave.)  But that simply means he is not interested in rewriting or revising church doctrines.  It does not mean that nothing will change.

After all, Blessed Pope John XXIII, perhaps the most beloved pope of the last 100 years, was also doctrinal conservative.  And the council he called, Vatican II, did not even have doctrine on its agenda.  It was a resolutely “pastoral council,” meaning it was more concerned with the way the Church operated in the world, and how it expressed its message, then in any corrections or developments of the message itself.

John was beloved not because he changed church teachings but because he combined a vision for how the Catholic Church could thrive in the modern world with a personal style that made his vision credible, persuasive, attractive, and thus relevant to millions of people around the world.

It is no accident, I think, that three commentators on the PBS coverage following the election of Pope Francis, when asked to compare him to another pope, immediately chose, not Benedict, not John-Paul II, not Paul VI, but John XXIII.

Like John, Francis has been elected at an advanced age, and presumably will serve as a “transition pope” who offers not a long papacy but rather the possibility of a significant shift.  Like John, his bearing is strikingly different from his predecessors, and he already shows an uncanny gift for establishing rapport with ordinary people.

Immediately after his first appearance, media reports had him declining the private car back to his hotel to join the other cardinals on the shuttle bus, and packing his bags and paying his bills by himself “to set a good example.”

My betting is there are many more good examples to come.  And they will not go unnoticed, especially by young people.

Even this early, it does not appear that the shift in style is unintentional.  As many commentators have noted, by choosing to be the first pope called “Francis” this man aligns himself with the popular “grassroots” saints of the Church’s history rather than with its towering hierarchical powers.  Everything we know about his lifestyle and his work with the poor suggests that the conclave chose this Jesuit as pope knowing full well that this would shift the focus of Catholic life almost overnight.

My daughter once told me “Dad, when you say ‘Catholic’ you mean social justice; that’s not what ‘Catholic’ means to most people.” I suspect my two sons would agree with her, and they would all be right on both counts.  I do mean social justice when I say “Catholic,” and I have found, in more than 40 years of parish work, that social justice still remains on the margins of most people’s Catholic identity.  For most, it has yet to become a core element in their faith.

But my three kids are all graduates of Jesuit institutions, and from the beginning to the end of their days in those schools they repeatedly heard the phrase “educating men and women for others,” and they also heard about the “preferential option for the poor.” They knew that, in theory at least, the Jesuits and the institutions they ran stood for a tradition of public and social service designed to build the solidarity of the human family and even peace in the world.

None of this represents anything new in Catholic doctrine.  But with this Jesuit pope it could represent something new in the way the Catholic Church styles itself before the rest of the world.

CrossCurrents readers are familiar with two themes in my recent work.  First: the papacy itself has been in transition ever since the election of John XXIII.  Second: too often in recent years the hierarchy has created the public impression of being obsessed with matters sexual.

Pope Francis can act on both these fronts to dramatic effect.  His personal behavior, manner, and style can further transform the papacy from the stern imperial monarchy of the early 20^th century to the new mold of the public servant of all peoples everywhere—a people’s papacy. 

And his actions and teachings can shift our focus away from a preoccupation with sex to a focus on the true joys and sorrows of a world struggling to overcome injustice and groping blindly for peace.

Liberal Catholics remember with great fondness the euphoria about Catholic renewal that followed Vatican II in 1965, but they often forget that this had nothing to do with dramatic changes in official teachings.  It had to do with (1) the retrieval of many ancient values and concepts that had been lost along the way, and with (2) the suddenly extroverted style of a papacy and a Church that for too long had been closeted behind the Vatican walls.  These two shifts--a mining of ancient resources and an opening of church windows to modern life--enabled the Church to begin a new kind of dialogue with contemporary life and build bridges to people well beyond the boundaries of the Catholic population.

That began again last night when the pope stressed that his blessing was not just for the people in Saint Peter’s Square and not even only for the planet’s 1.2 billion Catholics; instead he offered his blessing to “All people of goodwill everywhere.”

It may be too early to predict, yet it is high time for the hope, that this pope will complete the transformations begun by John XXIII, put a renewed partnership of Church and world back on the map of Catholic action, and show the way for our Church to reach out to all people of goodwill and once again make the Catholic Church what its mission calls it to be: a global force for good in the world.

If that happens, Pope Francis may take us back to the future that we believed in, once upon a time, a time when the Church was still relevant.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013