“This economy kills,” Pope Francis told the crowds in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic capital, on 9 July. He warned them against idolising capital, and denounced the rule of the “unfettered pursuit of money”.He called on the whole world to help end the “subtle dictatorship” of global capitalism, which “stinks of the devil’s excrement” (1). “We need change; we want change,” he said. Three days later, in Paraguay, he urged young people to “make a mess”. In Brazil, in 2013, he had asked them to become “revolutionaries”, and “go against the current”.
The Pope talks in increasingly strong terms about the state of the world, environmental degradation and social decay, the harmful impact of neoliberalism and technocentrism, cultural standardisation and the “globalisation of indifference”. In June, he published an encyclical on ecology that appealed for “a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet” (2). It calls on believers and non-believers alike to change their behaviour and denounces “a system of commercial relations and ownership which is structurally perverse”. The New York Review of Books said: “It’s both caustic and tender, and it should unsettle every non-poor reader” (3). In France, 100,000 copies sold in six weeks.
Francis tells us that another world is possible, not after Judgment Day, but here and now. As a superstar pope, in the media-friendly tradition of John-Paul II (1978-2005), he has divided opinion. He is praised by ecologists and alterglobalists such as Naomi Klein, Nicolas Hulot and Edgar Morin for giving his blessing to ecology in an “intellectual desert”, and demonised by ultraliberals and climate sceptics. A pundit on Fox News has called him “the most dangerous person on the planet”.
Back in the international game
The Christian right are worried by a pope who uses leftwing language and says so little about abortion. The newspapers of the secular left are astonished at the revolutionary fervour of this first non-European pope since Syrian-born Gregory III (731-41), who denounces the trafficking of migrants, calls for support for Greece and the rejection of austerity measures, is not afraid to call the genocide of the Armenians a genocide, signs a treaty with the state of Palestine, prays and presses his forehead against both the Western Wall and Israel’s separation barrier, and is close to President Putin on Syria.
“He has got the Church back into the international game,” says Pierre de Charentenay, international relations expert on the Jesuit periodical LaCiviltà Cattolica. “He has also changed its face. He is the champion of alterglobalism. He makes Benedict XVI look like a nice boy.” Benedict, a theological introvert, quick to condemn, was a killjoy next to the merciful Francis, always ready to forgive. But, says de Charentenay, “Francis’s greatest strength is that he challenges the system as a whole.”
The first Jesuit and Latin American pope says that humanity is responsible for the degradation of the planet and is allowing neoliberal capitalism to destroy “our common home” by increasing inequality. We must abandon an economy from which, writes Jesuit economist Gaël Giraud, “ethical considerations have been excluded since Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by the fiction of the invisible hand” supposed to regulate the markets (4). Humanity needs “a global authority”, rigorously upheldstandards and intelligence. The economy urgently needs to be made to serve ordinary people again: the (political) solution is in their hands, not those of elites misled by the “short-sighted logic of power”.
For Francis, the environmental crisis is firstly a moral one, the result of an economy disconnected from humanity, in which debts are piling up — between rich and poor, North and South, young and old — and where everything is linked: poverty and exclusion, the culture of waste, the tyranny of the short term, consumer alienation, global warming and the coldness of hearts. So “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach.” Humanity must pull itself together and adopt a “new ethics of international relations” and “universal solidarity”. The pope will plead for these at the UN General Assembly on 25 September, when the Post-2015 Development Agenda is to be launched.
All this is not new. Michel Roy, secretary general of humanitarian aid network Caritas Internationalis, says: “Francis follows quite neatly in the line of Vatican II” (the ecumenical council, 1962-5, aimed at opening up the Church to the modern world). He refers to the gospels, revisits the social doctrine that the Church developed during the industrial era, and ties his convictions to those of Paul VI (1963-78), whom de Charentenay considers to be Francis’s intellectual and spiritual mentor.
Paul VI, who succeeded the reformist John XXIII (1958-63), was the first pope of the era of globalisation and great journeys. He was responsible for getting the papacy out of Italy, internationalising the College of Cardinals and increasing the number of diplomatic missions to and of the Holy See (5). He also took the Church beyond its limited remit as the guardian of religious freedoms and made it “share in theanguish and suffering of all humanity” (6). To Paul VI, development was a new name for peace, which he saw as a dynamic process leading to the creation of a more humane society where wealth would be shared.
Although there is continuity in Francis’s message, and some see it as the culmination of the great upheaval in the Church that started in the 1960s, it also differs from that of his predecessors. The papacies of John-Paul II and Benedict XVI produced much anti-neoliberal discourse, but they were firmly rooted in doctrine. Benedict was also affected by scandals that the Vatican administration found difficult to manage, including the leaking of confidential documents accusing the Holy See of corruption and favouritism, especially over contracts with Italian enterprises.
The post-financial crisis pope
The present renewal stems both from the current situation and from the pope himself. “In ethical and political terms, Francis fills a vacuum at the international level,” says François Mabille, professor of political science at Lille Catholic University.He is the post-2008 financial crisis pope, as John-Paul II was the pope of the end of communism. “By modernising social doctrine, he has introduced systemic thinking … and has successfully occupied the niche of anti-establishment solicitude.”Mabille says this was urgently needed: “The Church was living in a different era from the rest of the world. The world moved far too fast for Benedict XVI. The Church needed to become proactive, rather than reactive.”
Francis has shaken up his own house before setting out to shake up the world. He took his name from Francis of Assisi, believes in frugality, and wants to make the papacy irreproachable. He has put vestimentary trappings of office into storage and lives in a two-room, 70-square metre flat, rather than the luxury apartments of the Apostolic Palace. He loves symbols, which pays in an image-oriented society. He is direct, spontaneous, and plain-speaking, at the risk of a few diplomatic slip-ups (his spokesmen and nuncios do their best to put these right); his bonhomie makes him seem like the vicar to the world. He was elected by his peers to reform the Roman Curia — the administration of the Holy See — and has not minced words in listing 15 ailments afflicting it; top of the list, which includes “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, is a tendency to consider itself indispensable (7).
To help him govern, Francis has gathered an inner circle of eight practically minded prelates. He has set up commissions to reform Vatican finances and public relations; appointed more lay experts to advise his administration; created a tribunal within the Vatican to try bishops accused of covering up child abuse by priests; and appointed a first batch of 15 new cardinals, who will take part in the election of his successor. It looks as if the next pope will be chosen while Francis is alive, as he himself was when Benedict XVI retired. (Francis repeated, before visiting Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, that he is against “leaders for life”.)
The new cardinals were chosen among those who have served where social suffering is severe, for example the diocese of Agrigente, which includes the island of Lampedusa, where illegal migrants arrive. They are from Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America, rather than archdioceses whose incumbents used automatically to move on to the senior hierarchy in Rome, increasing the weight of Europe, and particularly Italy, in the papal conclave (8).
‘A bit crafty’
“This is a pope who is not afraid to break taboos,” says a French diplomat. “He has understood that he is head of state. He is growing into the role. He is pragmatic and highly political.” This changes the Church, because Francis is the Church, as he points out with Jesuit cunning (he calls himself “a bit crafty”) to those anxious to know if the institution is keeping up with him.
“People flock to see him,”says a papal advisor. In two years, more than 100 heads of state have been received at the Vatican. Some want him to mediate: the US and Cuba, which he has brought closer together; Bolivia and Chile, in dispute over Bolivia’s access to the Pacific (see Country without a port, pages 6-7); and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement, which has asked for his intercession when he comes to Cuba. The pope has re-opened a mediation bureau in Rome, but success is not guaranteed: in June 2014, he persuaded Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli president Shimon Peres to pray together in the gardens of the Vatican, with extensive media coverage, yet this did not prevent Israel’s attacks on Gaza a month later.
Francis, 78, was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio and grew up in Buenos Aires. He is “the first pope who really understands South-South exchanges, whether material or symbolic and religious,” says Sébastien Fath, of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. “He knows that African preachers have links with Brazilian churches, and that Indian Jesuits go to Africa as missionaries.” Francis is a “perfect Latino, who doesn’t speak English,” says Roy. He is the grandson of Piedmontese immigrants, “a kind of European-pope-who-has-left-Europe — a Europe with no future,” says the diplomat. “He doesn’t really see the world in geopolitical terms,” says Roy; he knows little of the world, and barely travelled before becoming pope. “He is pointing the finger at a materialist system, focused on the individual,which destroys traditional solidarity and forces the most vulnerable into poverty. He’s a whistleblower.”
Yet he does have has a distinct worldview: not so much South versus North as centre versus peripheries — spatial (poor countries, suburbs, shantytowns) or social (the precariat, the excluded). There are plenty of peripheries in the North and colonialists among the global elites; these are the areas he wants the Church to prioritise.
Francis has chosen his side: the “preferential option for the poor” and the “little people” he addresses individually in his speeches, as in Santa Cruz: rag-and-bone men, waste collectors, street vendors, carriers, peasant farmers, oppressed indigenous peoples, persecuted migrants, fishermen whose livelihood is threatened by major corporations. People talk of his strong missionary instinct. He is not a diplomat, but the Vatican has diplomats, led by the highly experienced secretary of state Pietro Parolin, who has undertaken delicate missions to Venezuela, North Korea, Vietnam and Israel.
“The pope believes the future rests on those who are working in the field,” says Roy. He is wary of organisations (including his own), which, he says, tend to deviate from their mission, producing a sterile, self-referential discourse, removed from reality. Diplomats describe his human and managerial approach as bottom-up, whereas those of his predecessors, conscious of being God’s vicar on Earth, were top-down. The day he was elected pope, Francis asked the faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square to bless him, reversing the usual roles.
Theology for the people
This attachment to the people, which can make him sound populist (he was close to a Peronist Youth group), is anchored in the “theology of the people”, a non-Marxist Argentine branch of liberation theology. “Theology for the people, not by the people,” says de Charentenay, emphasising the difference. “The pope’s theology is a popular and cultural version of liberation theology.” It is still a rehabilitation. Liberation theology derived from the Latin American interpretation of Vatican II in the 1970s, and was condemned by Benedict XVI and John-Paul II for its Marxism. In 2013 Francis gave a private audience to one of its founders, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez. This May he beatified Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, murdered by far-right militants in 1980 while saying mass; Francis’s predecessors had been in no hurry to initiate the process. According to Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian leader of the movement, Francis’s vision is “in the grand tradition of liberation theology,” and his reign could even be the start of a “dynasty of third-world popes” (9).
But Francis is also original in that he is a real leader, a manager-pope, the first ever to have exercised territorial, extra-diocesan responsibilities concretely, at regional level: from 2005 to 2011, he was head of the Argentine bishops’ conference (10). “The troops [at the Vatican] are far better organised,” says an observer in Rome, “and his personality and his personal involvement, have re-energised the Holy See’s diplomacy.”
Francis has set a course for his multinational concern. He skilfully varies his mode of attack to suit the target. To the outside world, his project has the familiar look of“Catholic internationalism”: helping to calm relations between states, promoting democracy, international dialogue, justice for peoples, disarmament, the international common good; all themes that can make the Catholic Church look like an NGO. Within the Church, he reminded his fellow cardinals who were about to elect him pope that it was important to evangelise, but also to rouse the Church from its “theological narcissism” and to reach out towards the “peripheries” (11).
Some of his electors may not have understood who they were putting in charge. When he preaches, Francis does not brandish a crucifix like John-Paul II, who was on the offensive from his first sermon as pope: “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. … open the boundaries of states, [of] economic and political systems.” Francis’s political instincts are different. He is not afraid to let the Church work with popular movements that do not share his faith. He has realised that though the Church remains universal, it is no longer the centre of the world — it is, at best, Paul VI’s “expert in humanity”.
This new approach has its limits: in the Middle East, where Francis launched the return of Vatican diplomacy in 2013 by calling for peace in Syria when France and the US still wanted to fight the Assad regime, the Holy See had to back down. A year later it asked the UN to do everything possible to stop the violence of IS (Islamic State), which was forcing Christians into exile by “a kind of genocide”. Fundamentalism has no time for interfaith dialogue.
Limits of new approach
In Asia, seen as having great development potential, Vatican diplomacy has made little headway. Relations with Vietnam may be thawing, but in China an entire branch of Catholicism, run by the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, a state organisation, is still not under papal control. Francis has done his best to win over President Xi Jinping — notably by avoiding a meeting with the Dalai Lama — and in July recognised the ordination of a bishop in China for the first time in three years. But the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris reports that in the last few months the Chinese authorities have been removing crosses from churches because they are “too conspicuous”, especially in Zhejiang Province. In India, people and property of the tiny Catholic minority (2.3%) are regularly attacked.
Francis’s problems are not limited to non-Christian countries. In the US, where he will address the Congress on 24 September, his popularity rating fell from 76% in February to 59% in July (45% among Republicans), after the publication of his encyclical in June and his speech in Santa Cruz (12). Both the tone and content of his message have been badly received. He is seen as excessively Latin America-oriented, with little regard for what capitalism has done for poor countries, and offering no solutions (13). The left suspects him of a charm offensive to make them swallow more bitter pills. They note that he maintains the Church’s doctrinal opposition to abortion, has not altered its position on the use of condoms against HIV infection, and fails to consider rapid population growth as great a problem as consumerism. He has said that population growth is “fully compatible with an integral and shared development.” Conservatives have told him to stick to his theological and moral remit. “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinal or my pope,” said US presidential contender Jeb Bush, who converted to Catholicism 20 years ago (14). Francis does not take offence, and has said: “Don’t expect a recipe from this pope” and “the Church does not presume to … replace politics.”
The world is waiting to hear what Francis has to say on social questions, on which the Vatican has been very quiet for two years. Last year he asked the Synod of Bishops to conduct a study on the family, due to be completed in October. He has several times appeared to be arguing for a change of position on denying communion to divorcees who remarry, and homosexuality. Though he has said “Who am I to judge?”, he recently froze the approval of a new French ambassador to the Holy See because of his sexual orientation.
Within the Church, many are waiting to trip him up. He wants to move away from Roman centralism and develop collegiality, give bishops’ conferences a share of doctrinal authority and promote adaptation of the liturgy to other cultures. All this threatens the unity of the Church, and the Curia, a world with which Francis was unfamiliar, is resisting fiercely. “He’s hit a brick wall,”says de Charentenay. On the family, he is hoping for “a miracle”. As to his other goals, nothing yet suggests he will succeed.
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