UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
POSTED BY ALEXANDER STILLE
From the first day of his papacy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope 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.
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