UNITED STATES
Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Mar 14, 2013
Pope Francis meets the criterion of personal holiness that so many were looking for in the new pontiff–a “servant of the servants of God” in the spirit of his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. A staunch advocate for the poor in an age of globalization, he seems like just the man to inspire the wavering faithful in Latin America and around the world to return to the fold.
And yet, is the 76-year-old Jesuit up the challenge of putting the Church’s house in order. If he has a record dealing with sex abuse cases or making administrative reforms in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, it has get to emerge. What we do know is that after coming in second in the last conclave, he expressed relief at not having gotten the job. “In the Curia I would die,” he said.
One way to understand what happend in the Sistine Chapel yesterday is to open your copy of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy to Book III, chapter 1, on the importance of institutions returning to their first principles.
The political theorist was an admirer of St. Francis, and was convinced that but for his and St. Dominic’s success in providing examples of primitive Christian values of poverty and humility, the religion would have been wiped out by the corruption of church leaders: “for by their poverty and by their example of the life of Christ, they brought it back to the minds of men where it had already been extinguished; and their new orders were so powerful, that they were the reason why the dishonesty of prelates and the heads of the religion did not ruin her.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.