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Will the real Pope Francis please stand up?
By John L. Allen Jr.
ROME — On Thursday last week I was on CNN discussing two recent statements by Pope Francis: one that Catholics don’t have to breed “like rabbits,” and the other that couples who choose not to have children are part of a “greedy generation.” The host’s question was both simple and pointed: “Is it just me, or is the pope talking out of both sides of his mouth?” In fairness, looking at the full context of those two lines dissolves most of the apparent contradiction. The pope’s message seems to be that large families are great, but no one is obligated to have one, and that the trick is to be open to whatever God has in store. Still, the surface tension in his rhetoric on family size is part of a larger pattern, which has been especially intense lately, of Francis doing or saying things that leave lots of people deeply confused. Anyone trying to keep track of his sound-bites can be forgiven once in a while for wishing that the real Pope Francis would just stand up. This is the pope, for instance, who famously said his attitude towards a gay priest is, “Who am I to judge?” and soon found his image plastered on the cover of The Advocate. Yet over the past month, he has repeatedly denounced efforts to redefine the family, an obvious critical reference to gay marriage, and he’s also blasted campaigns to promote gay rights in the developing world as “ideological colonization.” For those who’ve been paying attention, such apparent contradictions are nothing new. Francis is forever calling on Catholics to recapture their missionary zeal, and yet he’s also dismissed proselytism as “solemn nonsense.” He talks about listening to women’s voices so much he can sound like a closet feminist, yet he sometimes uses language that makes many women cringe — referring to “spinsters,” or making awkward jokes about priests being under the thumb of their housekeepers. To take another example, Francis has launched an ambitious financial house-cleaning in the Vatican that reached a crescendo this week when his finance czar delivered a first-ever report to the College of Cardinals on exactly how much money the Vatican has — which, it turns out, is about 30 percent more than previously believed, with total assets standing at around $3.2 billion. The drive to come clean is part of Francis’ skepticism about the corrupting effects of money, yet to pull it off he hired a “who’s who” of aggressive profit-seeking capitalism as consultants and advisors — McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and so on. At one stage, an Italian writer jokingly suggested relocating the Vatican from Rome to New York to save all those doyens of profit the commute. Francis’ official motto is a Latin line about mercy, but watching him in action it occasionally feels like it ought to be Emerson’s quip about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds. What explains the seeming inconsistencies?
1. Francis is a Latin American.
2. Francis is a pastor.
Frankly, every pope is, to some extent, bound to be a contradictory figure. The Catholic Church is a motley crew containing wildly different impulses, and a pontiff has to embrace them all. As John XXIII once said, “I have to be pope both for those with their foot on the brake, and those with their foot on the gas.”
Most basically, however, Francis is a master of the time-honored distinction in Catholicism between doctrine and the pastoral application of doctrine, and many of the apparent contradictions he exudes can be explained by grasping the difference.
Here’s an example. Catholicism has a clear teaching on marriage, yet Catholic schools all around the world have to decide what to do when parents who don’t follow that teaching want to enroll their kids — couples with multiple divorces, or same-sex couples, or couples living together outside of marriage.
Some schools may discourage such parents in order to avoid confusion. Others may welcome them with open arms, on the grounds that some contact with the faith is better than none, and that the Church should love the sinner while still hating the sin. Both positions are fully consistent with the official teaching, but they create a very different vibe.
Francis is a man of tradition at the first level, but a pope of great compassion and mercy at the second.
Seen in that light, his digs at “ideological colonization” and his signature line “Who am I to judge?” actually are consistent, because the former is about doctrine and the latter is concerned with application in a specific case.
Similarly, the “greedy generation” line about childlessness is a doctrinal point, while telling couples they’re not compelled to breed like rabbits is a matter of compassionate implementation.
Given his endless capacity for one-liners, this pontiff may still sometimes leave the world scratching its head. Grasping the difference between doctrine and application, however, often will go a long way to getting the real Pope Francis on his feet.
The College of Cardinals becomes a global village
There was a sense of history being made in Rome on Saturday, as Pope Francis presided over a consistory ceremony to create 20 new cardinals, including 15 who are under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope.
The late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner once predicted that in the long run, the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s, a summit of Catholic bishops from around the world that launched the Church on a course of modernization and reform, would be remembered as the moment when the Church became a self-consciously global family of faith.
In the same spirit, the consistory of February 2015 may well go down as the moment when the College of Cardinals became a global village.
Watching Francis induct new Princes of the Church from Panama, and New Zealand, and Tonga, and Myanmar, and Cape Verde, it seemed that a mini-United Nations was being assembled. In effect, it was a consistory to mirror the demographic reality of Catholicism in the early 21st century, where the “typical Catholic” isn’t anybody in the West, but rather a poor mother of four in Botswana or a Filipino migrant laborer in Bahrain.
The numbers are familiar: There are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world today, of whom two-thirds live in the global south. That share will rise to three-quarters by mid-century, because the global south is also the zone of Catholicism’s greatest growth. Despite impressions of contraction and decline in the West, the Catholic population of sub-Saharan Africa shot up by almost 7,000 percent in the late 20th century.
As of today, the College of Cardinals looks and sounds a good bit more like the Church it’s supposed to lead.
This is also a crop of new cardinals who in various ways embody Francis’ vision for the Church, one in which both the joys and the heartache of those “typical Catholics” around the world are front and center.
Cardinal Francesco Montenegro, for instance, is from Agrigento in Sicily, hardly a major center of ecclesiastical power. Yet he was the cleric who welcomed Francis in July 2013 when he made his first trip outside Rome to the island of Lampedusa, a major point of arrival for impoverished migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
Some 20,000 people are believed to have died trying to make the crossing over the Mediterranean to reach Lampedusa. Francis went there to lay a wreath in the sea to mourn their loss and to blast a “globalization of indifference” to immigrants and the poor, a passion that Montenegro clearly shares.
“The peripheries have all these situations that are not exactly at the center of the [world’s] political and economic life,” Portuguese Cardinal-elect Manuel José Macário do Nascimento Clemente said Friday.
“The pope wants [refugees and the poor] now to be at the center of the life of the Church, also to be at the center of the life of the world,” he said.
Francis gave one of his trademark calls to humility in his address to the cardinals on Saturday, among other things urging them not to give in to “the mortal danger of pent-up anger, of that smoldering anger which makes us brood over wrongs we have received.”
“This is unacceptable in a man of the Church,” he said. “Even if a momentary outburst is forgivable, this is not the case with rancor. God save us from that!”
To a great extent, the era of the global village in the College of Cardinals is a journey into the unknown.
For one thing, it’s not clear if these new Princes of the Church will be successful in projecting their voice in the governance of the Vatican, or if their inexperience and possible timidity will actually strengthen the hand of the old guard.
It’s also not clear what a more globally diverse body of cardinals will mean in terms of the pastoral or ideological direction of the Church, but it’s highly unlikely to result in uniform movement in any given direction. Saturday’s crop includes a couple of advocates of dropping the Communion ban for divorced and remarried believers, for instance, but it also includes a cardinal who signed a letter back home supporting a constitutional ban on homosexuality.
It’s going to take time to figure out what it all portends. In the meantime, there’s a great sense of adventure in Rome as an era opens for which there simply isn’t any script.
Vatican money in context
It may not be the sexiest news story around, but history was made in another sense in the Vatican on Friday when Cardinal George Pell, the pope’s hand-picked engineer of financial reform, stood in front of all the cardinals of the world and offered them an apparently honest reply to a very simple question which, nevertheless, has long been maddeningly difficult to answer.
The question is, “How much money does the Vatican have?”
It’s been hard to respond with any precision over the decades, and not merely because some players in the system may have motives for keeping things secret in order to line their own pockets. Most basically, it’s because the entire accounting system was pre-modern, hyper-compartmentalized, and built on faith that clergy and laity considered “part of the family” could be trusted.
As a result, the actual financial condition of the Vatican has been virtually a mystery of the faith, almost as imponderable as how God can be one but expressed in three persons.
That era ended on Friday, when Pell reported that after an exhaustive study of the books and accounts of the various departments, there was actually more than $1.5 billion in additional assets that didn’t show up on the 2013 balance sheet, bringing total assets to around $3.2 billion. The situation may actually be rosier still, as the report suggested the Vatican’s real estate holdings may be under-valued by a factor of as much as four.
“We’re sound,” Pell said of the Vatican’s financial condition. “We’re muddled, it’s been muddled, there’s been inadequate information, but we’re far from broke.”
For the record, the report delivered on Friday concerned assets that belong directly to the Vatican. It should not be confused with the roughly $10 billion in assets under management at the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called Vatican bank, most of which belongs to dioceses and religious orders around the world, not the Vatican.
Cardinals largely professed themselves impressed and pleased with Friday’s disclosures, especially since many of them felt that at best, they’d been given incomplete information in the past, and at worst, that they’d been lied to.
From the outside, however, the take-away from Friday’s historic step in the direction of transparency might be that the Vatican is almost gallingly flush, sitting on a billion-dollar-plus pile of cash it didn’t even know it had.
There are two considerations that temper any such conclusion.
First of all, Pell also reported a previously understated liability, which is an almost $1 billion hole in the Vatican’s pension system. While Pell stressed that things are stable for the next 10-15 years — an official reassured nervous elderly cardinals that their pension checks are not about to start bouncing — the fund will nevertheless require massive infusions of funding going forward in order to remain solvent.
In other words, a good deal of that previously unreported pool of assets is already spoken for.
More basically, while $3.2 billion is hardly pocket change, by the standards of major global institutions, it’s fairly small potatoes. Microsoft, for instance, reported total assets in 2014 of $172 billion. Getting closer to an apples-to-apples comparison, the University of Notre Dame reported total assets in 2013 of $10.3 billion.
One Catholic university in the United States, in other words, has a financial footprint more than three times larger than the Vatican’s. To put the point differently, Notre Dame could fund the Vatican three times a year and still have cash left over for new football uniforms.
To be clear, $3.2 billion is likely not the whole story. The worth of the Vatican’s real estate holdings, especially if they’re carried on the books at four times less than their real value, could significantly reshape the picture.
The bottom line is that no one needs to be losing sleep about whether the Vatican can afford the heating bill this month. On the other hand, Pell’s report should not be taken as a confirmation of its staggering wealth — because, to be honest, Vatican wealth isn’t all that staggering, even after discovering some surprise cash.
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