ROME
Anchorage Daily News
BY MATTHEW SCHOFIELD
McClatchy Foreign Staff
March 6, 2014
ROME — Seated in one of the thousands of stacking chairs packed between the enfolding arms of St. Peter’s Square, pointed at a small stage on the steps of one of the world’s most recognizable places of worship, Texan Bob Boillet uses the word everybody seems to be using when talking about the head of his church, Pope Francis.
The word? “Hope.” It’s a big word for many Roman Catholics these days. There’s hope for inclusion, for acceptance and mostly for forgiveness.
“He talks about a more open-armed church. I like that,” the 48-year-old San Antonio resident said. “Actual change won’t be easy, especially when that change is about some dearly held beliefs. But he talks about a more open, more accepting church, and that gives me hope.”
It’ll be a year ago next Thursday when a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel announced that the Roman Catholic Church had a new head. The choice was a 76-year-old Argentine cardinal named Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He arrived to find a church that many thought was out of touch with the modern world.
His church was struggling most visibly with a child sex abuse crisis, but there were other problems, such as how to deal with the modern realities of marriage, divorce and contraception. The Vatican bank had been shunned by most of Europe’s central bankers. There were reports of homosexual orgies that involved members of the Vatican’s government, fueled by a series of leaks of secret Vatican reports.
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