The People’s Pope

The pope’s tempo­ral power and his spiritual role were a contradiction and conflict built into the papacy. Even today, his temporal role is not insignificant, borne out by Pope John Paul II’s part in the communist endgame. History denied Pope Francis, who died on Monday, April 21, at 88, a role as big as John Paul II’s but he leaves behind a Church changed in many of its fundamentals. And yet, liberals say he was a tradition­alist who didn’t do enough. Traditionalists complain he weakened the Church. No­body would deny the element of grace in a pope blessing the crowd on Piazza San Pietro on Easter Sunday, a day before his death. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the unprecedented papal name of Francis after St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor, will not be a footnote in the annals of the Holy See.

Bergoglio was the first non-European pope since the 8^th century and the first from the Americas as well as the Southern Hemisphere. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, whom Francis buried in 2022, was the first pope to abdicate in more than 600 years. Francis was also the first Jesuit pope, an order once seen as papal enforcers, as during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), who were always educationists but reinvented themselves after centuries of distrust, discrimination and persecution. Francis himself had taught psychology and literature. But he had no time for Liberation Theology, the Jesuit combination of traditional doctrine with Marxist sociology in Latin America, insisting instead on a simpler pastoral approach where the poor became the Church’s focus. “Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” Francis had said in his early days as pontiff.

Doctrinally, he was a traditionalist who refused to have women ordained. He wasn’t in favour of contracep­tion but allowed all Catholics, including those divorced and remarried, to receive communion. His position on abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty and celibacy were uncompromising as well. But he broke with the Curia in allowing same-sex unions short of gay marriage, something traditionalists never reconciled themselves to. Then when the Covid pan­demic came, Francis led by example, stopping his public appearance and urging people to get vaccinated.

He came closest to John Paul II’s agency in diplomacy. From terror attacks in Europe to the Ukraine and Gaza wars, he met every leader—even cajoling Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas to sit with him in prayer—and got personally involved in Wash­ington’s attempted rapproche­ment with Cuba. He was not apolitical, supporting his native Argentina’s position on the Falkland Islands. He didn’t visit India but Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met him at the Vatican in 2021.

Born in Buenos Aires to parents who had fled fascism in Italy, Francis had an early bout of pneumonia which left him susceptible to infection all his life, culminating in the complications of the double pneumonia in his last days. His mark on the papacy is his simplicity: Francis had asked that his coffin be a simple wooden affair and for the catafalque to be done away with; he had first appeared as pope in plain white robes and stuck to them; and he didn’t live in the Apostolic Palace. Nor will he be buried in the Vatican. Two shadows dogged him: a personal one about al­legations that he let two priests be kidnapped by Argentina’s military junta during the Dirty War (1974-83) although he was a close associate of Paraguayan activist Esther Ballestrino who was disappeared by Argen­tina’s military dictatorship. The second threatened to consume his papacy: the child abuse scandal, especially the Theodore McCarrick affair. Francis, who was not seen by conservatives to have done enough, 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”.

The Church Pope Francis leaves behind is more global than ever. He appointed almost 150 non-European cardinals. But it remains to be seen if his successor will be an African or an Asian, notwithstanding the irony that the African cardinals are the mainstay of Catholic conservatism today.

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