Can the Pope Change the Vatican?

By Alexander Stille
New Yorker
December 5, 2013

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/12/can-the-pope-change-the-vatican.html


From the first day of his papacy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Papa Francesco, changed the mood music around the Vatican by presenting the world with a very different kind of pope. Wearing a simple white cassock, he declined to live in the papal apartment and chose instead to stay in a Vatican guesthouse so that he could continue to live in a community. He scandalized some Church traditionalists, washing the feet of female juvenile delinquents and expressing nonjudgmental compassion for gay priests, and treated everyone—even journalists—with infectious, sunny warmth, simplicity, and disarming candor. Without saying so, he seemed to be casting off a traditional idea of the pope as a solitary, infallible absolute monarch. Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 until 1958, ate alone all but a few times during his nearly twenty-year papacy. Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, had paid close attention to papal vestments, steeped in the liturgical meaning of this or that medieval garment.

The papacy during the last years of Benedict had come to seem an institution in sad decline, closed off behind the Vatican walls, out of touch, on the defensive, fighting a losing cultural war with its own followers, resigned to a smaller Church of “true believers,” in a hostile or indifferent secular world. Francis changed that almost overnight by showing how radically challenging it could be if a world leader tried to put into practice the basic precepts of the Christian gospel—dedicating oneself fully to task of loving and caring for others—and doing so with genuine joy.

Yet the question remained: Would these stylistic changes translate into significant, lasting shifts in the life and doctrine of the Catholic Church and, if so, how? We are beginning to get some concrete answers. Francis’s candid public interviews and his most recent publication, a two-hundred-and-twenty-four-page apostolic exhortation called “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), have attracted the most attention. But he has also made a series of careful management changes that may transform the Church.

The changes he outlines can be characterized by what he calls a paradoxical combination of “prudence and boldness.” Some of the boldness is present in the document’s language. It contains some ringing rhetoric as well as the directness of a priest talking to his parishioners. “The first novelty is the use of the first person,” Father Vicinio Albanesi wrote in the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana. “There is no ‘royal we,’ and no convoluted, vague sentences.” This is accompanied by some wonderfully homespun, direct language. The clergy, Francis writes, must be so close to their flock that they “take on the ‘smell of the sheep,’?” and only then are “the sheep … willing to hear their voice.” This means “standing by people at every step of the way, no matter how difficult or lengthy this may prove to be.”

Francis also included long passages decrying growing economic inequality, insisting that it is as much a Christian imperative to intervene in an “economy that kills,” as it is to respect the commandment against killing itself. “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” (John Cassidy has written more about that aspect of the document.)

But there is also considerable prudence in “The Joy of the Gospel;” on the surface, it does not appear to contain major doctrinal changes. Church traditionalists will be heartened by Francis’s clear statement that the stand against abortion will not change:

I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations.” It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.… Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right.

Similarly, Francis (as he as he has done before) made clear that there will be no ordination of female priests. But then, Francis adds a note of considerable interest: “It can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.… The ministerial priesthood is one means employed by Jesus for the service of his people, yet our great dignity derives from baptism, which is accessible to all.” This may seem like mere word play, sugarcoating a bitter pill, but what he is saying is actually quite radical. If you conceive of the Church as a pyramid of power, with the priesthood at the top, the Roman Curia above them, and the pope at its pinnacle, then the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a plain, intolerable injustice. But if you imagine a decentralized Church, in which local parishes and bishoprics have far more autonomy and there are many other ways of acquiring authority and serving, the priesthood recedes in importance. (But if all the bishops, and those with decision-making authority, are priests—and therefore men—it’s not clear that even a decentralized Church will necessarily guarantee a voice for women.)

Indeed, much of the document is concerned with reorienting the priorities of the Church rather than changing its doctrines. (These passages reaffirming aspects of traditional Church teaching occur toward the end, while the great bulk of the exhortation sounds notes of love, inclusion, and missionary passion.) While never criticizing his predecessors, Francis makes clear that he thinks the Church in recent decades has made a major mistake by placing divisive social issues at the center. “The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” he said in an interview this past August with Antonio Spadaro, the director of the Jesuit magazine La Civilta Cattolica. “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.… We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible.”

Francis explains that there is a “hierarchy of truths”: loving and caring for people comes way before, say, scolding believers with complex lives on the ways in which their behavior strays from traditional dogma. The confessional “must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best,” he writes.

But Francis is doing more than just telling his fellow-priests to emphasize the “good news” of the Gospel rather than the “bad news” of Church dogma. Francis has initiated very significant organizational changes that have received far less attention than his remarkable public appearances, according to Andrea Tornielli, a longtime Vatican journalist, coordinator of La Stampa’s Web site, Vatican Insider, and author of two books on Pope Francis. “He is undertaking a deep reform of the Roman Curia,” Tornielli said in a telephone interview, referring to the Vatican bureaucracy based in Rome, “and he is creating new structures of governance.” Among the most important is a group of eight cardinals—jokingly referred to as the G-8—who act as a kind of regular cabinet for the pope. They come from all over the world and give the Pope input from outside the Vatican. Moreover, the Pope has made clear that he intends to delegate more power to the various conferences of bishops.

Francis has called for a Synod of Bishops next year to discuss “the pastoral challenges for the family,” asking bishops to query their parishioners on issues ranging from divorce to gay marriage. The fact that his “Joy of the Gospel” contains few doctrinal changes does not mean, according to Tornielli, they may not be coming: “Given the things he has said about decentralization, it would be against that spirit of collegiality for him to announce major changes in doctrine all by himself. The point is to create structures of consultation so that decisions are reached through a process of collegiality.”

With his curious mix of “prudence and boldness,” Francis is taking on one of the fundamental dilemmas of the Catholic Church: Who decides? During its early history, there was much more internal democracy within the Church: bishops were generally elected by their parishioners and major doctrinal issues were decided at ecumenical councils rather than by the pope, a term that didn’t really come into common use until the seventh century A.D. This tug-of-war between bishops and the pope was eventually won by Rome and actually escalated in the nineteenth century with the declaration of papal infallibility by Pius IX, in 1870. Pope John XXIII, who initiated the Second Vatican Council in 1959, attempted to introduce the principle of “collegiality” into the Church, along with other reforms, but failed to carry them out fully before his death in 1963. Soon after, the papacy returned to its traditional monarchic structure.

Francis refers to John XXIII often in his exhortation. “We have made little progress in this regard,” he writes. “The papacy and the central structures of the universal Church also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion. The Second Vatican Council stated that, like the ancient patriarchal Churches, episcopal conferences are in a position ‘to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit’. Yet this desire has not been fully realized.”

As for infallibility, “the image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God,” he said in the interview with Spadaro. “The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows.… And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together.”

Often, in the past eight months, many have found themselves wondering, How did this radical reformer ever get elected pope? Many thought that because all the cardinals electing the pope were appointed by the doctrinally conservative Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the new pope would be a carbon copy of his predecessors. Instead, there was clearly a welling up of demand for reform, especially from cardinals from outside of Italy, for a less Rome-centered Church. This, undoubtedly, increases the chance that major changes in the way the Church operates will actually stick.