#1,034: Pope Francis: Requiescat in Pace

In the 2005 conclave that elected German-born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger Pope, the second-place finisher was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the cardinal priest of San Roberto Bellarmino, and former Archbishop of Buenos Aires. After Ratzinger’s election (he took the Papal name Benedict XVI), Cardinal Bergoglio left Rome, intent upon returning to Argentina where he assumed he would live out the rest of his life (he was nearly 75 at the time) engaging in study, prayer and good deeds. There was little reason for him - or indeed, anyone in the Vatican hierarchy - to believe that he would have another chance at the papacy. And, as one of his biographers noted: There was little evidence that he even wanted the job.

But as is said in the Jewish rabbinic tradition: All things are foreseen, but free will is given . . . basically meaning that the various twists and turns of life and history are known only to The Almighty. As things turned out, on February 11, 2013, the Vatican confirmed that Pope Benedict would resign the papacy on February 28 as a result of advanced age (he was nearly 86 years old and the fourth-oldest person to hold that office). Benedict’s papacy was of the old school; conservative, highly Latinized, European and oligarchic. It was also beset with turmoil, intrigue about top secret lobbies and financial chicanery.

The conclave that gathered after Benedict’s resignation (the first in nearly six centuries) sought a reformer with a strong administrative hand. No one thought that Cardinal Bergoglio would be voted in; given his age (75 at the time) he wasn’t even on the shortlist. But when the white puff of smoke wafted its way upward from the Sistine Chapel, the Catholic Church - and indeed the world at large - immediately saw how different a path they had chosen. For the future Pope Francis set many firsts:

· The first Jesuit to serve as Pope. (Jesuits have often been called "The Rabbis of the Catholic Church,” due to their deeply scholastic bent);

· The first Pope to come from Latin America;

· The first pope to take as his papal name "Francis,” after Saint Francis of Assisi, the austere friar who dedicated his life to piety and the poor and who, according to tradition, received instruction from God to rebuild his church.

Pope Francis’ journey from the Flores barrio of Buenos Aires to the Vatican was a long eventful one. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on Dec. 17, 1936 to Italian immigrants. Young Jorge, the first of 5 children born to Mario and Regina (Sivori) Bergoglio, was deeply influenced by his grandmother Rosa Bergoglio, who in Italy had joined Catholic Action, the 1920s movement that defended the church against the encroachment of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist state. The rise of Fascism had helped push the family to leave. When his mother Regina was bedridden after the difficult birth of one of his sisters, Jorge, then 12, was placed in a school run by Salesian priests. The Salesians helped imbue him with a sense of duty toward the poor, as well as a realization of his own responsibility for improving the state of the world. The teenage Bergoglio enjoyed sports and dancing the tango at local clubs. After graduating high school in 1954, he announced to his family that he was going to attend a Jesuit seminary . . . not precisely what his parents thought would be his path.

In 1972, the then 36-year father Bergoglio took charge of the Argentine Jesuits. Argentina was in the throes of a “dirty war,” with a brutal military government killing and torturing thousands of opponents. And the Latin American church was sundered, as many senior prelates remained close to the ruling classes while many Jesuits embraced liberation theology, which called on the church to press for social change on behalf of the poor. Conservative church leaders denounced that theology as Marxist.

During the country’s 2001-02 economic crisis, he organized food kitchens, tripled the number of priests assigned to the slums and built schools and drug rehabilitation centers as state services retrenched. He converted his official residence into a hostel for priests and lived in a modest room in the diocesan building in central Buenos Aires. Before every Easter, he visited prison inmates, AIDS patients or older people, a practice he continued during his papacy.

Cardinal Bergoglio also had chilly relations with the Vatican. It represented “the heart of everything that he believed the church should not be: luxury, ostentation, hypocrisy, bureaucracy.” By this time in his career he had already adopted as his motto miserando atque eligendo, translated roughly as “ . . . by having mercy and by choosing." True to form, when the Cardinal came back to Rome in late February 2013 to be part of the papal conclave, he paid his own bill at the Vatican hotel where he stayed, rode about town in a modest Ford Focus, lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments and, in a Holy Week ritual performed at a youth prison, washed the feet of a young Muslim woman.

His first public pronouncement upon being elected Pope showed just how different the man and his papacy would be. “Buona sera,” good evening, Francis announced to the faithful from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, breaking the ice with unaffected style. He joked about being from Argentina, noting that in fulfilling their duty to produce a pope, “it seems that my brother cardinals have gone almost to the ends of the Earth to get him.”

His humility could be disarming. When asked about a priest who was said to be gay, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” Over the next dozen years, he tried to move the church away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality, and shifted its emphasis to global problems like climate change, poverty and migration. He tirelessly traveled the world, often visiting places that had but a handful of practicing Catholics . . . like China. His vision, expressed in major documents like the encyclical “Laudato Si,” (“Praise Be to You”), linked Catholic theology to protecting the environment and championing those on the margins, while denouncing the excesses of global capitalism in exploiting the poor. He repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.

Pope Francis could be scathing toward the prelates in the Vatican. He once compared the hierarchy to a “ponderous, bureaucratic customs house.” He accused some church officials of deluding themselves as being “indispensable” and afflicted by the “terrorism of gossip.” In his Christmas speeches he railed against “peacock priests” and “airport bishops,” who drop in when convenient, see themselves as superior to their flock and have become out of touch. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Francis suggested that Donald J. Trump was “not Christian” because of his preference for building walls rather than bridges. IT responded: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian.” The battle lines were drawn. (Perhaps that is why IT, unlike the rest of the world leaders who gathered for Pope Francis’ funeral, wore a blue suit and blue tie instead of the traditional black and black.)

On some issues, the Pope could make it difficult to understand where he stood. He rejected same-sex marriage yet called on priests to be welcoming to people in nontraditional relationships, such as gay men and lesbians, single parents and unmarried couples who live together. He supported civil unions for gay couples but approved a Vatican decision to bar priests from blessing them — a decision he later said he regretted, and then reversed.

His most enduring legacy may well be the transformation of the clerical ranks and the reshaping of the College of Cardinals, once dominated by conservatives appointed by Benedict and John Paul II. Indeed, the vast majority of the Cardinals who will be gathering for the next Conclave are his appointees; men of every color from all over the world.

When asked if he would accept the Papacy back in 2013, the future Pope answered: "I am a sinner . . . but I shall accept.” This is not to paint the man as a saint, for he had his enemies - both within the church hierarchy and among many of the planet’s worst autocrats. As an administrator (one of the Pope’s most important behind-the-scenes jobs) he could be a tyrant; to many liberals within the Church he was a disappointment, not going far enough on cultural issues. And yet, for whatever faults he may have had, he was one of the most humble, compassionate and forward-thinking Popes of the past century.

Francis did not stifle views he disagreed with and believed in a patient process — he called it discernment — in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before going forward. “Bosses cannot always do what they want,” he told Reuters in 2018. “They have to convince.”

Less piety, more compassion. Less pontification, more engagement. Less judgment, more acceptance.

May we all learn from this great man’s legacy.

Requiescat in Pace, Papa