The World of Religions No. 59 – May/June 2013 –
Called upon to commentate on the event live on France 2, when I discovered that the new pope was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, my immediate reaction was to say that it was a truly spiritual event. The first time I had heard of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires was about ten years earlier from Abbé Pierre. During a trip to Argentina, he had been struck by the simplicity of this Jesuit who had abandoned the magnificent episcopal palace to live in a modest apartment and who frequently went alone to the slums.
The choice of the name Francis, echoing the Poverello of Assisi, only confirmed that we were about to witness a profound change in the Catholic Church. Not a change in doctrine, nor even probably in morality, but in the very conception of the papacy and in the mode of governance of the Church. Presenting himself before the thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square as "the Bishop of Rome" and asking the crowd to pray for him before praying with them, Francis showed in a few minutes, through numerous signs, that he intended to return to a humble conception of his office. A conception that harks back to that of the first Christians, who had not yet made the Bishop of Rome not only the universal head of all Christendom, but also a true monarch at the head of a temporal State.
Since his election, Francis has multiplied his acts of charity. The question now arises as to how far he will go in the immense project of Church renewal that awaits him. Will he finally reform the Roman Curia and the Vatican Bank, shaken by scandals for more than 30 years? Will he implement a collegial mode of Church government? Will he seek to maintain the current status of the Vatican State, a legacy of the former Papal States, which is in flagrant contradiction with Jesus' witness to poverty and his rejection of temporal power? How will he also face the challenges of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, subjects that deeply interest him? And even that of evangelization, in a world where the gap continues to widen between ecclesial discourse and people's lives, especially in the West? One thing is certain, Francis has the qualities of heart and intelligence, and even the charisma necessary to bring this great breath of the Gospel to the Catholic world and beyond, as shown by his first declarations in favor of a world peace based on respect for the diversity of cultures and even of all creation (for the first time, no doubt, animals have a pope who cares about them!). The violent criticism he was subjected to the day after his election, accusing him of collusion with the former military junta when he was a young superior of the Jesuits, ceased a few days later, notably after his compatriot and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel – imprisoned for 14 months and tortured by the military junta – affirmed that the new pope had, unlike other ecclesiastics, "no connection with the dictatorship." Francis is therefore experiencing a state of grace that can lead him to all daring actions. Provided, however, that he does not suffer the same fate as John Paul I, who had raised so much hope before dying in a mysterious manner less than a month after his election. Francis is undoubtedly not wrong to ask the faithful to pray for him.