Style Matters

The Economist
July 30, 2013

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/07/pope-gays


ON THE lips of a more worldly sort of cleric, the pope's comparatively generous comments (by recent Vatican standards, at least) about homosexuals might have been taken as a calculated move. "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?" That was the disarming rhetorical question which Pope Francis put to journalists accompanying him back from Brazil; it prompted reports of a major shift in the church's attitude to same-sex relations. While carefully citing the church's catechism, he also said gays should be "integrated" into society rather than marginalised.

The church does not, of course, make major doctrinal refinements in off-the-cuff remarks to the press. Other procedures exist for that. And the reason the question even arose has to do with some very awkward news reports over the past month. One of Italy's best-known church-watchers has asserted that Pope Francis was trapped, in effect, by the gay lobby into naming a prelate with a very murky personal life to a job that would supposedly involve cleaning up the troubled Vatican bank. Pressed about this matter, the pontiff said he hadn't come across any specifically "gay lobby" although there were plenty of other lobbies of "greedy people" in sight. A "quick investigation" had found the allegations about the newly appointed cleric to be unfounded, he insisted.

To a cynical mind, the pope's headline-catching refusal to judge gay people might sound like an artful way of neutralising the most embarrassing saga that has come to light during his young papacy. But Pope Francis has drawn a generally positive response from the secular world, even though he made it clear that the church still considered homosexuality a sin.

(He has also struck a conservative note on the issue of women priests, saying the church had spoken and said no; but he said the role of women must not be confined to that of "altar girls" or the leadership of charities. Actually, even reaffirming women's ability to head major charities would be a step forward; under the previous pope, a British woman, Lesley-Ann Knight, lost her position as head of Caritas, a huge Catholic charity, after Vatican infighting.)

So far people have generally taken at face value the image of Francis as a "barefoot pope" who is personally modest, feels compassion for the disadvantaged and is endowed with a basic human warmth that his predecessor seemed at times to lack. He is simply likeable, and that ensures that he commands some respectful attention (even from those who disagree with him) when he seems to be speaking from the heart.

In the leader of a religious organisation whose core beliefs are not open to negotiations, style matters a lot. People can sense hypocrisy and pomposity, and they can also sense the opposite.