ShareThis
The announcement of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis marked a new beginning in may ways. He is the first Pope from outside of Europe in 1,272 years. He is the first Pope who is Jesuit, a movement founded to renew the church. He is the first to call himself Franciscus, after St. Francis of Assisi who was a friend of the animals and the poor.
His open style could not be more different from that of his predecessor Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. When his fellow Cardinals elected Bergoglio, he reportedly sighed, "May God forgive you." He has famously taken public transportation for years; after his inauguration he refused not only the papal purple slippers and other accessories of opulence, but also the papal Mercedes with chauffeur and climbed the bus with all the Cardinals.
It is hard to overstate the hope and connection the new Pope elicits in ordinary people. Watch this moving video of Pope Francis greeting some one thousand of the faithful after his first mass as Pope. See especially how open and unguarded he is, and the affection he shows to the children who come before him.
On the other hand, from the moment of Pope Francis' inauguration, nagging questions about his past abounded. What was his role during the Argentine military dictatorship? When Héctor Baratti was abducted 1977, then-head of the Jesuits in Argentina Bergoglio wrote a letter to the Bishop asking for help.
But nothing happened, and the henchmen threw Héctor Baratti out of a plane above the ocean, alive. The body was swept to the shore. Later Bergoglio claimed to have known nothing of Héctor Baratti. Did he lie to the court?
I will leave it to Catholics to choose what they think of Pope Francis, but this much is clear: we tend to put people in boxes that don't allow for their full complexity. We think in categories of good/bad, like/dislike, black/white. Perhaps Jorge Bergoglio is all of the above, and more. He is, after all, a human being. And whatever his past may have been, he now faces the chance to lead the church into a brilliant future.
What do you see?
Is Pope Francis a power-hungry man who sided with the powerful against the weak, or a humble leader who stands with the human beings he serves? Or both? I look forward to reading you on
my blog: http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.
P.S. To learn how to lead consistent with the Ten Commandments, check out The Rabbi and the CEO: The Ten Commandments for 21st Century Leaders (now available in German and Polish).
Thank you very much for this blog post, Dr. Zweifel. As the "cult that won", the Catholic church has had a long run and has attracted a huge following. But organizations that ride high and amass great power and prestige are prey to many ills. Think of large financial instutions in the USA, for example, or even some national governments. Will Pope Francis be able to make a difference, given the great weight and obstinancy of the traditional, often unexamined, and perhaps outmoded beliefs and practices that are "the way it is" in the institution? There's no SEC or other regulatory body overseeing the Catholic Church, nor has the instutition set itself up to listen closely to its stakeholders. Salvation will have to come from within, and it’s going to take time. The church has a lot of material wealth, and that can sustain it through many a rough patch. But the ultimate determinant of the Church’s health and sustainability (its real "bottom line", if you will) is the number of adherents. I’d say that’s Pope Francis’s big statistic. That’s his leadership number to watch.
ReplyDelete@mr.wolfson: thank you for your insightful and well articulated assessment. (on a personal note, i miss our conversations "über gott und die welt.") i could not say it any better. to use a term from political philosophy, it might be a question of agency vs. structure: is the agency (leadership) of the new pope stronger than the structure (institutions, rules, norms) of the church? and this question assumes that jorge bergoglio even intends to make change, which is a big if, given many of his pronouncements over the years. the only part of your post that could be debated is that "it's going to take time." is slow change possible? does it not need the kind of transformational shock therapy that we have seen in post-communist regimes like russia (gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika) or poland (price liberalization) or in post-apartheid south africa, where a new leader imposes change from above?
ReplyDelete