Francis, Man of the World
Wonder Land
Why does the pope fascinate the world? The white vestments and the splendor of events in St. Peter's Basilica reflect abiding tradition but remain pomp. Pomp alone, like a royal wedding, lasts as long as Cinderella's coach. The pope's claim on the world's attention is deeper.
The world today has 1.2 billion Catholics, nearly 20% of the globe's population. From the time of Peter, who was elevated to the papacy at the first conclave (Jesus had the only vote), the pope's portfolio has been more than guiding the spiritual life of his church. He is also the protector of his flock. In the homily for his inaugural Mass Tuesday, Pope Francis said repeatedly he is "to be the custos, the protector."
As protector the pope must be a man of the world. Even as the American politician Sen. Rand Paul exhorts his country to withdraw from the world's troubles, no such luxury has ever existed for a pope. Or for any great institution that hopes to keep the world's respect.
In 202 A.D., after years of calm, Pope Zephyrinus found himself faced in Rome with an edict from Emperor Septimus Severus, making conversion to Christianity punishable by death. Thousands of years forward in the advance of civilization, high on Pope Francis' to-do list is protecting Christians in the Middle East and Africa from being beaten or bombed by radical Islamicists.
A pope cannot choose with whom he wishes to do business. "Tragically in every period of history," Francis said in his homily, "there are 'Herods' who plot death, wreak havoc, and mar the countenance of men and women."
China has perhaps eight to 12 million Catholics, though the government's active suppression makes a census difficult. The Chinese put out a statement last week that congratulated Francis then demanded he break diplomatic relations with Taiwan and stop meddling in China "in the name of religion." In other words, self-deport his institutional authority. It won't happen.
I'm happy to have a pope named after Francis of Assisi. Still, let no one doubt that the first pope from the Society of Jesus is acutely aware of how Jesuit superstar Francis Xavier in the 16th century carried Catholicism to India, Japan and China. Four centuries later, a Wikipedia historian of this effort cuts to the chase in the entry's first sentence: "The history of the missions of the Jesuits in China is part of the history of relations between China and the Western world."
The practice of religion -- sometimes called the freedom of religion -- is unavoidably an issue of public policy. Governments either allow it or suppress it. Catholics advocating for it in 16th century England, such as the Jesuit Edmund Campion, were drawn and quartered. That's behind us in free-as-a-bird Western Europe, where the pope's challenge is saving the life of the soul. But in Iraq, Nigeria or China, where Christian spirituality is strong, the challenge is life or death. The Archbishop of Canterbury said two years ago that for Christian minorities who have lived beside Muslims in Iraq back to the time of Christ, life "is becoming unsustainable" as they are driven out by fundamentalists. China, too, centuries ago allowed an array of believers.
The pope has a political base. Don't be misled by stories that overstate Catholicism's internal fractures over what's permissible along the spectrum of sexual behavior. Across the globe, the papacy draws on a 2,000-year-old reservoir of institutional loyalty. The challenge for any pope in our times is to choose where and how to deploy such power. The success of those deployments, however, will depend crucially on whether this pope can get the men working alongside him to share his goals.
John Paul II's biographer, George Weigel, describes in detail how Karol Wojtyla, on becoming pope in 1978, pushed the Vatican's never-make-waves bureaucracy to mount a direct challenge to Soviet communism's claims of moral authority. He won.
The German-born Benedict was a shimmering intellect who clarified the internal contradictions of modern Islam in his Regensburg lecture (read the text, not the spin) and who in 2010 in Birmingham thanked England for winning the Battle of Britain. But he was a less-direct personality than John Paul and failed to lead or reshape the Vatican's foreign-policy bureaucracy.
That bureaucracy allowed a shocking blow to the papacy's stature when Benedict on his visit to Cuba last year failed to meet the Ladies in White, dissidents who march each Sunday after Mass in Havana for their imprisoned husbands. Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires surely noticed. That embarrassment alongside the Curia's collapse in handling priestly abuses is reason enough for Francis to begin by accepting some key resignations in the Curia.
The new pope, famously humble, radiates human warmth. Note well, however, that what Karol Wojtyla and Jorge Bergoglio held in common before the papacy was experience with hostile governments. Give Francis space to get his bearings. The world in time will discover an astute political participant.
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