VATICAN CITY
The Guardian
March 12, 2018
By Catherine Pepinster
The pontiff’s efforts at church reform have stalled, letting down liberal Catholics on issues such as child abuse and the role of women
If there is something the Roman Catholic church does supremely well, it is the spectacle of an election. From the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel voting and the white plumes announcing the election of a new pope, to the new man stepping onto the balcony of St Peter’s to greet the crowds, it is one moment of high drama after another.
Now such a huge global figure, it is hard to believe that when Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires first greeted the crowds on 13 March 2013, and announced he would be called Pope Francis, most of the world – including Catholics – asked, “Who’s this?”
As Francis quipped on the day, the cardinals went to the ends of the earth to find a new pope. They made their decision based partly on the troubles the Catholic church faced, troubles that had so overwhelmed Benedict XVI that he had resigned. These troubles included the decline in Catholic numbers in the west, the mess of the church’s finances and evidence of money-laundering and corruption, the Vatican’s bureaucracy, the child sexual abuse scandals and the fading influence of Catholic sexual morality in the face of more secular influence.
And just as Francis had pleased the cardinals, he quickly won over the world. His modest lifestyle, his ready engagement with ordinary people, his desire for reform of the church’s structures and more compassionate attitudes to divorced, remarried and gay people, made him hugely popular. At the Vatican, he quickly took action, setting up a group of progressive cardinals to investigate how to reform it.
Five years on, Francis’s efforts at reforms have got stuck. The pope recognises the problems of overhauling the unwieldy structure of the Vatican bureaucracy: he has likened it to cleaning the Egyptian sphinx with a toothbrush. Then there is his calling of synods to discuss the family, especially the treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics. They have won him huge support among millions of people in the pews, but have led to open hostility from conservative prelates.
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