The rock star pope

by Editor · February 12, 2014

These are exciting times for the Catholic Church when even the rock magazine Rolling Stone puts the pope on its cover, to go with a lengthy feature story which tries, and fails, to make sense of a man who has caught the world�s imagination.

A man jumps as a friend takes a photo in front of a large drawing by street artist Mauro Pallotta of Pope Francis as a superhero on a wall in the Borgo neighbourhood near the Vatican. The graffito was removed by city officials within a couple of days. �It marked a new city record given…most illegal urban �decorations� are ignored for years,� according to Catholic News Service reporter Carol Glatz. Other graffiti in the area were left untouched. (Photo: Alessandro Bianchi, Reuters/CNS)

Invariably, Rolling Stone compared Pope Francis to his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who announced his resignation from the papacy almost a year ago. The magazine treated the pope emeritus with prejudice and undue harshness.

Of course, in style, temperament and emphasis there are marked differences, as there always will be between popes.

Where Pope Benedict was by nature reticent and introvert, Pope Francis is presenting himself as a gregarious extrovert who seeks closeness with the people.

Where Pope Benedict expressed the symbols of the papacy in ways that borrowed a lot from the baroque, Pope Francis abstains from ostentation.

Where Pope Benedict stressed, among other things, the Church�s teachings on abortion and the traditional family, Pope Francis takes it as a given that the Church�s teachings on these issues are well known and therefore gives a louder voice to teachings less known, particularly on economic justice.

Where Pope Benedict was perceived, sometimes correctly, as closing off debate on sensitive issues, Pope Francis seeks to know the mind of the faithful, even at the risk of being confronted with uncomfortable truths.

Where Pope Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, assumed the papacy with the baggage of having been prominent, and not universally loved, as the Vatican�s doctrinal head under Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope as a virtual unknown.

Pope Benedict, a gentle and humble man, was invested by the critics of the Church with the caricature of having been an �enforcer�, and was unjustly accused of complicity in the sex abuse scandal. In some quarters he never could shake that image.

Pope Francis was a blank canvas on which people could project their own hopes, as Rolling Stone has done.

Almost a year into Pope Francis� papacy, this projection continues. The reaction to his November apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, and especially its passages that savagely critiqued capitalism for failing the poor, illustrate the point.

On the left, Pope Francis was widely hailed for being an open-minded pontiff who speaks out for social justice. On the right, Pope Francis was attacked as a Marxist who had departed from the good sense of his predecessors.

Both sides were wrong, of course. The modern Church�s social justice teachings go back more than 120 years. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both were as scathing of capitalism and its neglect of the poor as Pope Francis is.

This newspaper has said before that Pope Francis is leading a revolution in the Church, but it�s not a revolution of doctrine, as some people hope.

Pope Francis� papacy may well preside over certain pastoral solutions, perhaps in the delicate area of the reception of Communion for civilly divorced and remarried Catholics.

Time will tell whether Pope Francis will be more open than his predecessors to a plurality of viewpoints on sensitive issues within the episcopate and consecrated life.

He de-emphasises matters that were important to his predecessors in favour of other issues, but that does not indicate a shift in doctrine.

Pope Francis will not change doctrines and disciplines. The next pope will still be elected by a group of mostly elderly men, and the Latin-rite priesthood will still be open only to men who make a promise of celibacy.

In the next pontificate, abortion and same-sex marriage will still be contrary to Church teachings, and the Church will continue to oppose cohabitation and artificial birth control.

Pope Francis is a doctrinal conservative. His revolution is in the way the Church presents itself to the world.

Rather than the smaller but purer Church envisaged by Pope Benedict, Pope Francis is throwing open the doors and invites the world to enter, proposing that the sinner has a better chance of conversion to Christ inside the Church than outside.

It is this, along with Pope Francis� compassion, modesty and directness, that captures the imagination of the public.