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Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 17:59:02 +0100
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Subject: Other News - The Crisis That Changed Pope Francis

The Crisis That Changed Pope Francis

By Paul Vallely - Newsweek

He was not what she was expecting, in several ways. The man who would one day be
Pope Francis had come to hold a service far from the grandeur of the great cathedral
of Buenos Aires. He had travelled taking the subway train and then the bus to
arrive in one of the shanty-towns, which Argentines call villas miserias misery
villages. He had picked his way down crooked and chaotic alleyways, criss-crossed
with water pipes and dangling electricity cables, along which open sewers ran as
malodorous streams when the rain came. There, amid ramshackle houses of crudely-
cemented terracotta breezeblock, he fell into conversation with the middle-aged
mother.

She told him of life in an impoverished slum, terrorised by gangs peddling paco the
cheap chemical waste product left over from processing the cocaine sent to Europe
and the United States, or sold to the affluent middle classes of the Argentinian
capital. Dealers mix the residue with kerosene, rat poison or even crushed glass and
sell it for a dollar a hit to the people of the slums. So addictive is the drug that one
days free supply is enough to get hooked, creating a short-lived high followed by an
intense craving, paranoia and hallucination. The dealers target the children of the
poor and adolescents who hang around because there is no work to be had.

The woman looked at the prince of the Church and apologised to him for the fact
that her son, amidst all that, had stopped going to Mass. The man, who as Pope was to
take the name of Francis the great saint of the poor looked into her eyes as
though she were the only person in his world. But is he a good kid? the priest asked.

Oh, yes, Father Jorge, she replied, eschewing the grander titles of the cardinal
archbishop. Well, pronounced the prelate, thats what matters.

People not dogma

Over the past two weeks, Pope Francis has gathered together the first
Extraordinary Synod of Bishops of his pontificate. There has not been such a synod
for more than 30 years. His aim appeared to be to persuade the leaders of the
Catholic church to adopt the same approach he had demonstrated to the mother in
the slum and which has characterised his ministry for the past three decades. It is
that the care of individuals takes priority over doctrine. realities are greater than
ideas, as Francis said in his first major document, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the
Gospel), which sets out his prioroties like a manifesto for his papacy.

More than half of the Catholic churchs leaders voted for changes in attitudes to
gay and divorced people in harmony with the approach of the new pope. But a
minority of conservatives prevented the changes from receiving a two-thirds
majority. It seems that Francis has some way yet to go to bring the whole Catholic
church into line with his new inclusive approach.

The grounds on which he chose to wage this struggle for the soul of Catholicism were
revealing. There were many pressing items on his list that he might have put before
the 250 bishops, theologians, lawyers and lay men and women he hand-picked to
attend the synod.

It could have been the reform of the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy. Or the sex
abuse sandal which has bedevilled the Catholic church for the past two decades. Or
how to make the secretive Vatican Bank more accountable. But instead Francis, who
has begun to deal with all those issues in other ways, chose a subject which directly
touches everyone of his flock the family. Boldly, it confronted the issue of why
large swathes of the faithful chose to ignore official church teaching on
contraception, pre-marital sex, cohabitation, divorce and homosexuality.

Autocratic style

Yet there is more to the notion of family than that for the man who was born Jorge
Mario Bergoglio in Flores, a lower middle class district of Buenos Aires, in 1936.
Though he was by birth an Argentine, the future Pope was raised on pasta and in a
distinctively Italian culture and faith tradition. His grandparents and father had
emigrated to Buenos Aires from Piedmont in the north-west of Italy six years before
he was born. They had no liking for the dictatorship of Mussolini and their older sons
had left a few years earlier.

The boy Jorg was the first of five children and, to give his mother some respite,
Bergoglios grandmother Rosa took him to her home nearby every day. His
grandparents spoke Piedmontese to one another and he learned it from them, which is
why he is fluent in Italian as well as Spanish and can even sing a few risqu songs in
Genoese dialect, thanks to a reprobate great uncle. His family had no car and could
not afford holidays, but the house was filled with relatives, cooking, opera, laughter
and love.

The familys chief legacy to the boy was its faith. Nonna Rosa told him stories of the
saints and taught him the rosary. The family prayed together every evening. It was a
peasant religion that rejoiced in popular pieties, processions, novenas and shrines.
Today he retains a special place in his heart for the simple faith of ordinary people.

But the family was not a place of total concord. His mother was angry when she found
that he was not studying medicine, as she had been told, but theology.

I didnt lie to you, the future Jesuit responded with the casuistry for which his
order has been notorious. Im studying medicine but medicine of the soul. His
mother was so upset she refused to go with her son when he entered the seminary
three years later, aged 19. It took her years to accept that her notion of family
should accommodate her eldest son becoming a priest.

For Bergoglio, the notion of family extended to embrace the Jesuits, the religious
order founded in the 16th century by the soldier-turned-mystic Ignatius Loyola.
After being taught philosophy and theology by Jesuits at seminary he decided to
enter the order who saw themselves as contemplatives in action.

But families have tensions and rivalries as well as affection and support. The Jesuits
in Argentina were riven in the 1960s and 70s with the arrival of Liberation Theology,
which wanted the church to work for the economic and political enfranchisement of
the poor. Progressive Jesuits, including their leader, Father Ricardo OFarrell,
embraced this. But conservatives wanted to stick to their traditional job of educating
the children of the rich. They complained to Rome about OFarrell and the Jesuit
leadership in Argentina replaced him with a young conservative Jorge Mario
Bergoglio, who was made Jesuit Provincial at the young age of 36.

However, Bergoglio did not heal the split in the Jesuit family. He made it worse with
his inexperienced autocratic style. So deep was the division that one senior Jesuit
wrote privately, on the eve of the papal election, that a Bergoglio papacy would be a
catastrophe for the Church, concluding: We have spent two decades trying to fix
the chaos that the man left us.

Interior crisis

So divisive were his 15 years as Jesuit kingpin in Argentina that, when it ended in
1986, he was sent into exile by Jesuit leaders in Rome. He went first to Germany,
where the leitmotif of family once again emerged. In a church in Augsburg he
discovered a painting that had been commissioned to celebrate the work of a wise old
Jesuit who had rescued the failing marriage of a 17th-century Bavarian aristocrat.
Entitled Mary Untier of Knots, it showed the Virgin Mary untangling the knots in the
long ribbon used to celebrate the wedding of the nobleman and his wife.

The painting spoke to Bergoglio about the tangles he had exacerbated among
Argentinas Jesuits through his inexperienced leadership style which, he later
admitted, was hasty and authoritarian and led to him being perceived as
ultraconservative. He returned to Argentina only to be sent into two years internal
exile in the remote city of Crdoba, some 650km from Buenos Aires, where he
underwent what he later described as a time of great interior crisis.

Though its not possible to see into another persons soul, it is clear that in this
period of exile, in which he was given no full-time job to do, Bergoglio found a way to
see further into his own.

Bergoglio has always been a man of deep prayer. For many years his habit has been to
rise at 4.30am to 5am every morning to spend two hours in silent prayer before the
tabernacle before his working day begins. It is in that period of prayer that he makes
his big decisions, one of his aides told me. He would also in Crdoba have undertaken
the set of spiritual exercises devised by the Jesuits founder, Ignatius of Loyola. At
the heart of these is a process of discernment which helps the practitioner to strip
away his layers of self-justification and self-delusion, and penetrate through to the
inner core of his behaviour and motivation.

What is clear now is that Bergoglio emerged from that spiritual crisis an utterly
different man. He had had a profound conversion that reconfigured his understanding
of the way God wanted him to behave. He developed a new model of leadership, one
which involved listening, participation and collegiality. When he arrived at his next
job, as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires, the old Bergoglio had vanished. He had
transmuted from an authoritarian reactionary into the figure of radical humility who
is today turning the Vatican upside down.

Shocking transformation

Returning to the city of his birth as a bishop meant that Bergoglio embraced an even
larger family. He went to the villas miserias and spent long hours with the poorest of
the poor. He became known as the Bishop of the Slums. Over his 18 years as bishop
and then archbishop in Buenos Aires, one priest told me, Bergoglio talked personally
to at least half the people in his slum. He would turn up, wander the alleyways, chat to
the locals, bless their children and their homes, and drink mat tea with them. He
doesnt see the poor as people he can help but rather as people from whom he can
learn, said Father Guillermo Marc. He believes the poor are closer to God than the
rest of us.

Many were staggered at the transformation. One of his former Jesuit pupils, Father
Rafael Velasco, who is now Rector of the Catholic University of Crdoba, told me:
Bergoglio had been so very conservative that I was rather shocked years later when
he started talking about the poor. It wasnt something which seemed at the top of his
agenda at the time but clearly became so as a bishop. Something changed. And not
just in Bergoglio himself. Over the next two decades Bergoglio transformed the face
of the church in Buenos Aires. He quadrupled the number of priests serving in the
slums. He became concerned with the water pressure in the pipes as much as the holy
water in the churches. He backed self-help groups, co-operatives and politicised
organisations exactly the kind of work he had condemned two decades earlier.

The man who was once the scourge of Liberation Theology among Argentinas Jesuits
now helped form a union among the cartoneros some of the poorest people in Buenos
Aires who make a living sorting through the citys garbage each night to find and sell
recyclable materials. He wanted to help them to protect their rights, said Federico
Wals, who was Bergoglios long-standing public spokesman.

He even embraced much of the economic analysis that had led Liberation Theology to
fall foul of the Vatican under the anti-Marxist Polish pope, John Paul II. Bergoglio
began to use the language of Liberation Theology, condemning oppressive economic
systems as structures of sin.

When Argentina became the biggest debt defaulter the world had ever seen in 2001,
almost half the population was plunged below the poverty line. Bergoglio responded by
denouncing the unjust distribution of goods. What the poor needed was not charity
but justice; not to share ones wealth with the poor is to steal from them, he
proclaimed. Bergoglio had begun to talk like a liberation theologian.

But if Bergoglios contact with the direct poor was making him a political radical and
enemy of the Peronist governments of Nstor Kirchner and then his wife, Cristina
Kirchner it was also affecting his attitudes to the way the church should minister
to people. The hard life of the teeming slums created high levels of unemployment,
crime, drug use and prostitution, which brought high levels of divorce, remarriage and
cohabitation.

In the slums of Buenos Aires he learned to see the world differently, says Father
Augusto Zampini, a diocesan priest from the city, who has taught at the Colegio
Mximo where Bergoglio was once Rector. The future Pope did not alter his doctrinal
orthodoxy on matters like the churchs ban on divorced and remarried Catholics
taking communion. But he did not allow church doctrine to overrule his priority of
pastoral care for the troubled folk he met in the slums.

When youre working in a shantytown 90% of your congregation are single or
divorced, Zampini says. You have to learn to deal with that. Communion for the
divorced and remarried is not an issue there. Everyone takes communion. Bergoglios
priority became understanding the problems faced by the poor, rather than focussing
on obedience to unbending rules.

He showed particular sensitivity toward those living in difficult situations, and those
who felt marginalised from the life of the church. He was never rigid about the small
and stupid stuff, says Father Juan Isasmendi, the parish priest in Villa 21 slum,
because he was interested in something deeper.

Rebellion against Rome

Not everyone approved of this embrace of heterodoxy. Jernimo Jos Podest was a
progressive Catholic bishop whose radical teachings in the 1960s irritated the
Vatican. He was drummed out of the episcopacy by Rome at the behest of Argentinas
conservative bishops. By the time of his death in 2000, Podest was poor and living in
obscurity. No one in the church would have anything to do with him apart from one
man.

Bergoglio visited the ostracised bishop on his deathbed and gave him the last rites.
He then ensured that the mans widow, Clelia Luro, and her children were provided for
even though she was a feminist as radical as was imaginable on the Catholic
spectrum, who used to celebrate mass with her husband. Despite that, Bergoglio
continued to phone her every Sunday until her death last year.

Rome doubtless disapproved of the archbishops contact with the disgraced prelate.
But Bergoglio did not shy away from what he saw as his duty of compassion. He was
used to Romes displeasure. In his time as archbishop of Buenos Aries he became
immensely impatient with junior Vatican officials who treated cardinals around the
world with an infantilising disregard. They would speak to us as if we were altar
boys, one cardinal complained to me. Bergoglios recommendations for who should be
made bishop were routinely overturned. Conservative enemies in the church were
constantly reporting him to Rome behind his back.

Last year Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by resigning. The cardinals who met
to elect his successor held days of private debate before voting. In the discussions,
senior churchmen from all round the world complained of being treated by Rome as
Bergoglio had been. The Vatican was supposed to be their servant but behaved as
though it was their master.

The cardinals articulated two priorities for the new pope. He should reform the
scandal-hit Vatican Bank and the dysfunctional Vatican bureaucracy known as the
Curia. And he should restore a sense of collegiality to the governance of the church
so that it was run by bishops collectively rather than by the pontiff behaving like a
medieval monarch.

Francis acted swiftly to reform the bank and the bureaucracy, bringing in teams of
top management consultants, sacking ineffectual regulators and closing over a
thousand dodgy accounts. He set up a Council of Cardinal Advisory as a counterweight
to the Curia; its members came from every continent, and included conservatives as
well as moderates, but all had in common that they had previously been fierce critics
of the Vaticans haughty centralism.

But the issues confronted in this months synod were more controversial within the
church. Francis laid the ground carefully, sending out numerous signals that he wants
change. He married 20 couples something popes rarely do and included among them
several already living together in contradiction of official church teaching. And he
angled the preparation for the Synod so that debate focused on one totemic issue
the ban on remarried Catholics taking communion.

The pope could have simply announced he was delinking the practice of receiving
communion from the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. But Francis does not
want to be a pastoral autocrat in the way that previous popes have been philosophical
or theological dictators. He wants to change the way the church goes about making
decisions, to turn it from a monarchy into a body in which pope, prelates, priests and
people constitute a collegial communion.

He began by sending out a questionnaire to ordinary Catholics asking their views on
church teaching on contraception, pre-marital sex, cohabitation, divorce and
homosexuality. It was an unprecedented move. In the past the faithful had just been
expected passively to pray and pay. Next he made the responses many of which
were highly critical the basis for the agenda of the Synod discussions. Then on the
eve of the Synod he announced that discussion must be frank and fearless the
opposite of the climate under previous popes where dissent was discouraged or
supressed.

Change on the march

He got what he wanted. There was free and fierce debate between liberals and
ideological conservatives (the most strident of whom, US Cardinal Raymond Burke,
has been going round claiming that the pope is about to sack him from his post as the
Holy Sees most senior canon law judge). Pastoral conservatives have divided between
the two sides. Yet the vote on welcoming gays failed by just two votes to get the
two-third majority.

Change is clearly on the march. A series of documents were drawn up an interim
report, small group reports and a final report which was less welcoming to gays and
the divorced than Francis wanted. These are now the subject of a years intense
debate. Then there will be a larger Synod on the family next October after which the
pope who concluded by warning against hostile rigidity by traditionalists and
destructive good will by liberals has the final word.

It will not be a straightforward business. Indeed it could get rather messy. But then
family life is like that. And Pope Francis is, above all else, a family man./ October 23,
2014