A few weeks before his death, Pope Francis did the best: exasperating conservatives.
In an extraordinary intervention in mid-February, the Pope launched a frontal confrontation with the new American administration, slamming President Donald Trump’s plans to expel millions of undocumented migrants as a “violation of dignity” and accuse the vice-president JD Vance of poorly using an obscure theological term. Washington responded with a predictable fury, but the Holy See was not discouraged.
It was a movement of vintage Francis: impulsive, instinctively protector of the poor and defenseless, and – fortunately – the light on the theological jargon. But he also illustrated the Pope’s will to abandon diplomatic subtleties and adopt a divisor and frank approach to an era of increasing fragmentation.
Francis, deceased Easter Monday at the age of 88, leaves behind a complex heritage. He was elected in 2013 on a mandate to clean the church, after his predecessor Benoît XVI suddenly resigned following the supposedly Vatileaks scandal. First Latin American pontiff and Jesuit, he was also the first to use the name of Francis, in reference to Francis d’Assise, the champion of the poor of the 13th century. But he leaves an institution which, although determined outside in the advocacy for the dispossessed and marginalized, made inadequate efforts to treat his own failures, from the priestly abuse to the abusive use of the Vatican finances.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires of Italian migrants Mario, a rail worker, and Regina, a housewife. According to intelligent, playful and loved football, he worked, he worked as a bouncer and a nightclub concierge, before studying chemistry and working as a laboratory technician in a food laboratory. A serious pneumonia led to the abolition of part of one of his lungs in 1957. Shortly after, he joined the Jesuits, after a visit apparently inspired with a local priest.
Bergoglio first had trouble reconciling his vocation with more civil instincts, later admitting that he was “dazzled” by a young woman whom he met during his seminar. Nevertheless, he quickly climbed the ranks of the Argentine church, acquired a reputation for magnanimity and winning the “Bishop” sobriquet for having doubled the number of priests in the poor districts of Buenos Aires.
But he was already a figure of division: during the bloody “dirty war” of the junta against her opponents in the 1970s, Bergoglio – then the leader of the powerful Jesuits of Argentina – was accused of accomplice silence when the soldiers removed dissident clerics who were under his authority. Others, however, said that he had tried to protect his subordinates.
In the eternal city
Francis slipped into his now familiar personality of humility and simplicity when he was named Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001, cultivating a name to avoid priestly extravagance, living modestly and using public transport. After leaving Benedict XVI, he seemed to embody the ideals of reformists in a desperate church to change, becoming the first pope from outside Europe from the Syrian Pope of the 8th century III.
His papacy marked a break with the distant academic style of Benedict. He directed a journey so that the church looks more like a “field hospital”, prioritizing the needy and minimizing the importance of sexuality. “Who am I to judge,” he told journalists in 2013 when he was asked if a gay person could become a priest.
This message, delivered with characteristic cheeks, marked the start of Francis’ candidacy to make the progressive ambitions of the second Vatican Council – the world consultation of the 1960s who sought to align the church with the liberal revolutions of that time. From the start, he projected a tolerance message, defended migrants and severely criticized excess capitalist, while trying to balance this program with the conservatism of rapidly growing Catholic cohorts in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
To a certain extent, Francis was able to strive for the structure of the old millennial church, opening the high -level Vatican offices to women and people.
But for the most part, these chaotic efforts were only the conservatives and the disappointed liberals. For example, he maintained obstacles to priests and was forced to dilute a historic declaration of same -sex blessings under pressure from indignant African bishops.
Francis was also a divisor on the international scene. He won the admiration of followers in the world of world and received a return of supporters of supporters in the West with his urgent calls for peace in Ukraine, the silence on the Chinese oppression of religious minorities and the severe convictions of the Israeli Invasion of Gaza – reflecting a vision of the complex forged in the Argentinian left peronist. His leadership style could also be unpredictable because he would cancel the plans after leaks by journalists and abandon promises.
All of this helped feed an increasingly radical conservative faction – especially in the United States
THE de facto The leader of the opposition to Francis was Cardinal Arch-Conservative Raymond Burke, renowned for having wore ridiculously ostentatious cosplay clothes, while moving that the Catholic church is “too feminized” and pinning the priest’s shortage on the introduction of the altar. Burke clashed several times with Francis on his supposed awakening program, with a particularly bizarre quarrel which takes place on the alleged offer of condoms in Myanmar by the Order of the Knights of Malta. Burke widths continued without ceasing for years. He challenged the pontiff’s push to end the ban on the church of communion for the remarried divorced and fulminated from his repression against the Latin mass. The pope responded by quietly marginalizing Burke, finally removing his right from an apartment in the subsidized Vatican.
Indeed, Francis did not shrink purple, and his avuncular image denied a talent to play opponents of each other, trampled on them when they expected the least. More prosaically, he liked to insult them – even by saying that his pompous conservative criticisms are mentally unstable.
His conservative enemies, on the other hand, used Benoît as Totem for their values while he still lived. They claimed that the stone throne was vacant under the reign of Francis, some even onbilling it even “the Antichrist”.
They were helped by Francis’ efforts, including his unequal efforts to clean the Vatican finances. In 2017, a high -level auditor was mysteriously ousted, leading to a sloppy investment in London real estate, as well as to the conviction and imprisonment of former Cardinal Angelo BECCIU. Francis met Becciu in private when the trial was underway, raising questions about his judgment.
His treatment of allegations of abuse against the best lieutenants raised similar questions. The pontiff was considered to protect and even raising close friends accused of serious sexual misconduct. This included the Jesuit priest and the Mosaic artist Marko Rupnik, whose garish works of art were replaced by the Vatican even after the exit of rape accusations.
The inconsistency could have been the decisive characteristic of the reign of the Pope. Rather than reforming the church, he largely left chaos – and a theological quagmire – for the one who succeeds him.
While the conservatives now sharpen their knives, this battle seems to be heavy.
On the one hand, Francis has radically reshaped the geographic rupture of the office elite over the years, appointing 110 of the 138 cardinals who will be eligible to elect his successor, many of them from outside Europe. But the initiates of Rome warn that it is not a guarantee of their support for his vision after his departure; Vatican alliances rarely survive a new pontiff.
All the same, a large part of the drama around its papacy was an elite: when he died, he appreciated the approval ratings among the 1.4 billion faithful in the world which would be the desire for most politicians.
Politices
