While the new Pope, Francis, has made a point of emphasizing
simplicity—rather than wearing the usual gold ring, he has insisted on
one made of silver—today he gave way to Vatican tradition and formally
assumed his office following most (but not all) of the elaborate
ceremonial script worked out in minute detail over more than a thousand
years. Even within this deeply traditional institution, the script has
changed, sometimes quite substantially. Popes are now “inaugurated” and
not crowned; Pope Paul VI, in 1963, was the first who declined to wear a
crown, although he was still carried about in a special papal litter (
),
a kind of portable throne—a practice that his successor, the
short-lived John Paul I, abandoned in 1978. And Francis obediently read
from the heavy Latin tomes held up in front of him by the papal retinue,
after being led outside St. Peter’s Basilica by hundreds of men in
golden robes and tall white hats who chanted solemnly in Latin and
flowed like a gold ribbon through the aisles of the church. On the
loggia of the basilica, they faced hundreds of thousands of faithful who
had gathered in the arms of the enormous colonnade in St. Peter’s
Square.
Tradition is so central to the Catholic Church
that Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently remarked that it should be always
be spelled with a capital “T”: Tradition. As a result, the fifty-six
hundred accredited journalists in Rome, as well as millions of Catholics
around the world, have spent much of the past five days since
Pope Francis’s election
parsing the large and small ways in which he has varied the usual
routine. Much was made of his first words when he appeared at the window
of St. Peter’s—“
Buona sera” (“Good evening”), a simple human
greeting rather than a specifically papal or religious expression, as
well as of the last words that closed his Sunday homily: “
Buon pranzo” (“Have a good lunch”). There has, however, been little question that Pope Francis, the
former Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires,
has been trying to send a series of messages since his selection: his
decision to wear a plain white priest’s cassock instead of cardinal or
papal robes, his request that the Argentine clergy not come to his
inauguration and instead donate the travel funds to the poor. Some of
the messages have been more explicit. In speaking to the press two days
after his election, he said that he wanted “a church that is poor and
for the poor.” He has reportedly annoyed parts of the traditional
Vatican bureaucracy by pointedly ignoring the prepared remarks drawn up
by his would-be handlers and speaking off the cuff, with great
simplicity and even a sense of humor. He even appeared to violate the
rule against discussing the internal workings of the papal conclave when
he spoke to the journalists:
I will tell you the story. During the election, I was seated
next to the Archbishop Emeritus of São Paolo and Prefect Emeritus of
the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes—a good friend, a
good friend! When things were looking dangerous, he encouraged me. And
when the votes reached two-thirds, there was the usual applause, because
the Pope had been elected. And he gave me a hug and a kiss, and said,
“Don’t forget the poor!” And those words came to me: the poor, the poor.
Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi.
Then, joking, he said that some of his fellow cardinals suggested he
should take the name of Clement XV in order to “pay back Clement XIV,
who suppressed the Jesuit order.”
The inauguration, though it kept closer to the script, was not
without similar touches. Francis made a couple of trips around the
piazza in the so-called
Popemobile,
a kind of customized white jeep or golf cart the Popes have used in the
past thirty-five years to circulate around the large piazza. After the
assassination attempt on John Paul II, a heavy bulletproof plexiglass
sheet was added to the front of the vehicle for better security. Francis
dispensed with the shield and even stepped down from the Popemobile to
embrace a severely disabled man in the crowd.
The messages of his first two homilies—the one he pronounced at the
Sunday Angelus service and the one at today’s inauguration ceremony—were
short, simple, and highly inclusive. He recounted the story of the
adultress from the New Testament on Sunday: “He who is without sin, let
him cast the first stone.” He quoted an old woman who had told him that
without mercy the world would not exist. “I asked her if she had taught
theology at the Gregorian University,” he said, joking about the Jesuit
university in Rome.
As I left St. Peter’s Square today, I ran into a group of Franciscan
friars from Southern Italy. They were very satisfied with the
proceedings. “Very Franciscan,” one of them said. “Simple, sober, clear.
The homily was only about seven and a half minutes and contained a
strong but simple message of love and faith.” “That’s what we need,” a
second friar chimed in, “because many people are losing faith, also
because of the disgusting sins of the Church itself.”
The homily was dedicated to the rather humble figure of St. Joseph,
the carpenter husband of the Virgin Mary who, faced with the almost
incomprehensible miracle of Mary’s immaculate conception, takes mother
and child away to safety:
Joseph is the custodian, he protects Mary and Jesus…. We
must remember that service is power. He does so not out of weakness but
out of strength. We must remember that service is power. We must be
custodians, caring for others, caring for the Church but also for those
outside the Church, stewards of the environment and all of creation.
Residents in the St. Peter’s area noted that both the number of
spectators and the enthusiasm for the new pope have been higher this
year than in 2005, when Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI.
The apparent gamble of Francis’s papacy
is to bring about a change in the Church’s attitude and behavior
without (in all likelihood) a substantial change in doctrine. Luis
Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, the secretary of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, made it clear that although many things in the
Catholic world are subject to change—“Twenty or thirty years, you would
have never seen women teaching theology in a Catholic university, now
there are many”—doctrine is not one of them: “There cannot be women
priests, that’s impossible. It’s established doctrine.”
Similarly, in the Sunday sermon at Rome’s Pontifical North American
College, following Francis’s inauguration, Cardinal Francis George, the
Archbishop of Chicago, adopted a somewhat combative tone toward
America’s “post-Freudian culture,” which insists on seeing “celibacy as a
threat.” He also criticized the press and secular society, which “judge
the Church as good as long as it does social services and bad to the
extent that it makes truth claims.”
With a much gentler tone, Pope Francis, in his remarks to the press,
alluded to the difficulty the secular world has in understanding the
imperatives of the Church. “The Church,” he said, “is certainly a human
and historical institution with all that that entails, yet her nature is
not essentially political but spiritual: the Church is the people of
God, the holy people of God making its way to encounter Jesus Christ.
Only from this perspective can a satisfactory account be given of the
Church’s life and activity.”
Many were struck by the skill and delicacy with which he alluded to
the fact that many in the press were not his natural constituents:
“Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others
are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of
you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each
of you is a child of God. May God bless you!”
But this should not be mistaken for a retreat on matters of
traditional doctrine. The initial impression is that what Francis and
others in the Church have in mind is a Church that is more pastoral,
more attentive to the needs of the poor than its traditional
prerogatives, and more forthcoming with the outside world, but no less
firm about issues—whether gay marriage, sexual morality, or the
contraception provisions in Obama’s healthcare reforms—that have divided
many Catholics. Pope Francis is clearly enjoying a honeymoon period;
the conflicts are yet to come, and we will see whether the Church’s new
tone will change the nature of the debate.
While the new Pope, Francis, has made a point of emphasizing
simplicity—rather than wearing the usual gold ring, he has insisted on
one made of silver—today he gave way to Vatican tradition and formally
assumed his office following most (but not all) of the elaborate
ceremonial script worked out in minute detail over more than a thousand
years. Even within this deeply traditional institution, the script has
changed, sometimes quite substantially. Popes are now “inaugurated” and
not crowned; Pope Paul VI, in 1963, was the first who declined to wear a
crown, although he was still carried about in a special papal litter (la sedia gestatoria),
a kind of portable throne—a practice that his successor, the
short-lived John Paul I, abandoned in 1978. And Francis obediently read
from the heavy Latin tomes held up in front of him by the papal retinue,
after being led outside St. Peter’s Basilica by hundreds of men in
golden robes and tall white hats who chanted solemnly in Latin and
flowed like a gold ribbon through the aisles of the church. On the
loggia of the basilica, they faced hundreds of thousands of faithful who
had gathered in the arms of the enormous colonnade in St. Peter’s
Square.
