CANADA
Toronto Star
By: Daniel Baird Published on Sat Dec 07 2013
Last February, while living in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a remote and nominally Muslim former Soviet Central Asian Republic, I remarked, on the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s unprecedented resignation, that there was nothing the Catholic church could do to repair itself in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal. The church, it seemed to me, had lost anything like the kind of moral high ground it needs to stand on, and the Vatican was on its way to becoming like the British monarchy: a decorative but ultimately powerless and irrelevant relic.
That was before I knew the church was about to elect the Jesuit Bishop of Buenos Aires, whom some called the “Bishop of the slums,” as the first non-European to ascend the throne of Peter.
From the moment of his election in March, the reign of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, has been unusual. He is the first pope in more than a millennium not to take on the name of one of his predecessors, allying himself instead with the radical St. Francis of Assisi, a saint known for his intense identification with the suffering, the despised, the dispossessed and the destitute. Pope Francis clearly intended upon being a pontiff concerned more with the poor and the vulnerable than with Church doctrine and canon law.
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