The Pontiff Who Led by Example

There must be an element of grace involved when waving at the crowd from St Peter’s on Easter Sunday is the last public act of a pope. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the name Francis—after St Francis of Assisi and without papal precedent—in ascending the throne of Peter, died on Monday, April 21, at 88, having lived a labyrinthine and storied life worthy of the imagination of his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, let’s begin by asking who Francis was. The first non-European pope since the 8^th century and the first from the Americas as well as the Southern Hemisphere, he was also the first to bury his predecessor when Benedict XVI died in 2022, who in turn was the first pope to voluntarily retire in more than six centuries.

As pontiff, Francis was many things to many of the 1.2 billion Catholics of the world, but what he was not was a man who stood on ceremony. Or much of it. His coffin will be a simple wooden affair and he has done away with the papal catafalque—visitors can pay their respects as he lies in the coffin with the lid removed. He didn’t live in the Apostolic Palace, having chosen the modern guest house built by Pope John Paul II next door. He also took the bus home like the other cardinals and not the papal limousine. His attire was decidedly utilitarian for a pope—simple white like the robes he first appeared in on the Vatican balcony after being elected in 2013.

Next is the issue of doctrine and denomination, or order. Francis was the first Jesuit pope. Once the papal enforcers whose fanaticism made matters worse—infamously during the Thirty Years War (1618-48)—Jesuits, always educationists, reinvented themselves after centuries of distrust, discrimination and persecution in Europe. Jorge Bergoglio chose to become a Jesuit and taught psychology and literature. By the time he was appointed the archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and then made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001, Jesuits, especially in Latin America, had long embraced Liberation Theology which combined traditional doctrine with Marxist sociology. That was Bergoglio’s point of divergence when he almost fell out with his fellow Jesuits, insisting on a simpler approach.

None of that, however, shielded him from allegations that he was personally responsible for the kidnapping of two priests—later found alive—by the military during Argentina’s Dirty War (1974-83). But Bergoglio had many run-ins with the junta and was a close associate of Paraguayan activist Esther Ballestrino who was disappeared by Argentina’s military dictatorship, her body never found.

Running from dictators was perhaps in Bergoglio’s DNA. His parents had escaped to Argentina from the Italian fascists. But the young Jorge was sickly, the consequences of an early bout of severe pneumonia having taken away a part of his lung and leaving him susceptible to infections through his life, culminating in the complications from the double pneumonia before his death. A long time ago, he had been a nightclub bouncer who loved the tango.

Pope Francis was a reformer and a liberal in the opinion of many. Yet he was not the reformer or as liberal as many would have liked him to be. Doctrinally, he was a traditionalist who refused to have women ordained, sticking to the line drawn by John Paul II. He wasn’t in favour of contraception either although he allowed all Catholics, even those divorced and remarried, to receive communion. His positions on abortion—he had sent a strong message to Ireland on the eve of its referendum—euthanasia, the death penalty and priestly celibacy were uncompromising too. But he broke visibly with the Curia—the Vatican bureaucracy—in allowing same-sex unions short of acceding to gay marriage. And he made a difference by leading by example during the Covid pandemic—stopping public appearances to prevent crowds and urging people to take the vaccine.

But it was in holy diplomacy that Francis perhaps matched the agency of John Paul II, if not overtake it given the latter’s role in ending the Cold War and communism in Europe. From terror attacks to the Middle East and the Ukraine war, Pope Francis met every leader—even cajoling Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas to sit with him in prayer—and even got engaged in the US’ rapprochement with Cuba.

“Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” Francis had said in his early days as pontiff. The main thrust of his reforms, therefore, was directed inwards but it also remained the most incomplete of his projects. When the shadow of child abuse seemed to overwhelm his papacy, he had declared that he would rather have a wounded Church that tended to the sick than a sick Church “wrapped up in its own world”. He was good at reaching out to the world, as in attempting to bridge the Great Schism of 1054 with the Eastern Orthodox church and having the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople attend his inauguration. But at home, the allegations of not doing enough on child abuse aggravated the war within, with conservative cardinals and bishops vehemently turning against him. The Theodore McCarrick affair at one point threatened to undo Francis’ papacy and consume the Roman Church in its entirety till the former archbishop of Newark was found guilty of sexual misconduct and defrocked in 2019 after a canonical trial. Incidentally, McCarrick died on April 3, a couple of weeks before Pope Francis.

Pope Francis leaves behind a ‘globalised’ church, having appointed almost 150 non-European cardinals. To date, only 49 of the 266 legitimate popes have been non-Italian. After the white smoke goes up from the papal conclave days, weeks or even months from now, who will be revealed to the people on Piazza San Pietro?

ChristiansdeathIn MemoriamJesuit PopeJorge Mario BergoglioPope FrancisRoman Catholics