Pope Francis: Loved, loathed for Vatican reforms
What you need to know:
In this third and last part of our special series based on British author, Austen Ivereigh’s book, ‘The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical Pope,’ Daily Monitor’s TABU BUTAGIRA examines the raft of reforms the Catholic Church has undergone under Pope Francis. He has dismantled the Vatican bureaucracy, overvalued its powerful bank and cleaned the finances and introduced modern business-oriented management approach to the institution. Pope Francis has set his eyes on growing the church through evangelisation, although his liberal pronouncements have left conservative Catholics anxious. The constant references and deeds of mercy for the poor and care for nature as the central message of his papacy have endeared him to both the faithful and the irreligious, giving him the clout of global moral and spiritual leader. The Pontiff’s humility has demystified power and high position.
Unaware he would inherit the throne of St Peter, then Cardinal Bergoglio had in his decisive four-minute speech to fellow cardinals cut out the work for Pope Benedict XVI’s successor: He must be a man who helps the Church to go out to the existential peripheries that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelising.
The crowd in St Peter’s Square in a drenched evening was frenzied, if not fanatical, when the White Smoke billowed to confirm the election of a new Pope.
Cardinal Bergoglio who, upon accepting his election, had taken a papal name to honour Francis of Assisi then moved into the adjacent Sistine Chapel Room of Tears to wear his distinctive cassock and sash. He, against tradition, kept his old black shoes and silver pectoral cross instead of the traditional red and golden papal ones.
The account by Austen Ivereigh shows that Francis spurned the ornate chair offered for him to sit on in the chapel, instead standing and embracing each cardinal. He declined to live in the splendour of papal apartments --- cavernous, marble-floored rooms with heavy furniture --- and chose to stay at Casa Santa Marta.
“‘My brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to give Rome a bishop’, he said when he appeared on the balcony at 8:22pm,” Ivereigh writes, to greet electrified faithful as their new leader. A groundswell of revolution was underway.
On his return to Casa Santa Marta, the Pope declined the papal limousine and rode in a bus together with the electors. That night over dinner with cardinals, he said “may God forgive you for what you have done [electing him Pope]”.
Four months later, in July 2013, the English and Welsh bishops had an audience with Francis. When he saw Westminster’s now emeritus Archbishop, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor who ran his campaigns, the Pope broke into a wide smile, and joked: “It’s your fault. What have you done to me?”
On the first of his pontificate day, he crossed Rome to the Patriarchal Basilica of St Mary Major. On his return, he stopped at the Via della Scrofa to “collect his suite case --- went up and packed his belongings himself --- and to the astonishment of his staff, paid his bills, telling them that as Pope he should set an example”, something he has continued to do.
Back at Casa Santa Marta, he against practice papal vested together with the cardinals in the Hall of Blessing the same way before his election. Ivereigh writes that when masters of ceremonies clamoured to guide him on protocols --- what to say, when as Pope -- he replied: “That’s alright; you don’t have to worry about me.
I have been saying prayers for 50 years. But stay close, in case I need you. At prayers, he preached standing like priests and not seated like a Pope and rather than read from a prepared text, he spoke spontaneously”. That is the same way in which, while flying back to Rome in January, this year, he announced his six-day, three-nation Africa pastoral visit now underway.
Pope telephones his sister, newspaperman and parishioners
In the impromptu manner that has come to define his papacy, Francis telephoned his dentist in Buenos Aires to cancel an earlier appointment, and dialed up to thank his newspaper supplier Daniel del Regno, saying “seriously, it’s Jorge Begoglio, I’m calling from Rome”.
And his telephone call to parishioners at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires was blared on loud speakers and, in the message, he tells them to “care for each other, the young and the old, and the world”.
This is how Ivereigh captures the maiden telephone conversation between the new Pope and his sister, Maria Elena Bergoglio.
Pope: “Look, it happened, and I accepted”.
Maria: “But how are you, how do you feel?”
Pope: “…[Francis laughs] ‘I’m fine, relax’.”
Maria: “You looked really good on Television, you had a radiant expression. I wish I could give you a hug.”
Pope: “We are hugging, we are together. I have you very close to my heart.”
Maria to interviewee: “It’s not easy to explain what it is to talk to your brother, and your brother is the Pope […between sobs and laughs …] it’s complicated”.
It was a new dawn, different ways of doing things, Vatican officials acknowledged.
“We are going to have to get used to a new way of doing things,” Ivereigh quotes Vatican Spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi telling journalists who cover the Vatican.
After celebrating his first Mass as Pope, Francis greeted the congregation one by one, prompting the media to christen him “the world’s parish priest”.
With the simple but powerful gestures aside, Pope Francis dived into the big-ticket, high-impact reforms.
Less than a month after his election, he created a “Council of eight (later nine) cardinals from across the world to reform the Curia, one of the most significant actions in the church’s history over 100 years,” writes Ivereigh. “With just one Italian among them, the cardinals who meet every two months are from India, Germany, the Congo, the US, Australia, and Honduras, many heads or former heads of supranational bishops’ bodies, thus making Rome truly accountable to the local churches,” he notes.
Francis called the Council of Nine an “advisory group of outsiders” crucial in the reform of the Church’s governance, “the beginning of a church with an organisation that is not just top-down but also horizontal”.
The College of Cardinals, on the other hand, has under him become an equivalent Senate of the pre-reformation era. Ivereigh writes: “Over two-day meetings in February 2014 and February 2015, known as consistories, Francis asked the cardinals to deliberate on major questions: the admission to sacrament of the re-marrieds and structural reform of the Curia. In 2015, the cardinals were treated to what they never expected to hear a detailed breakdown of Vatican finances. His direction is reducing the Eurocentric imbalance by reducing the number of curial cardinals and amplifying the presence of poor countries, picking new [red caps] from Tonga and Myanmar [and fashioning a church] in which the “periphery shapes the centre”.
His other reform is converting the annual synod of bishops from a “predictable Vatican-controlled gathering into a powerful instrument of universal church governance, such that the pastoral realities of the local church can be brought to bear on the question of doctrine and discipline”.
“We can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost,” Ivereigh quotes the Pope telling cardinals in February 2015, emphasising a missionary, outward-oriented Church with mercy at its heart.
Graft had been Vatican’s untouchable jinx. Shortly after his election, Francis, according to Ivereigh’s book, met seven financers at the Casa Santa Marta, among them Jean Baptiste de Franssu, former chief of the asset management giant Ivesco; George Yeo, the former Foreign Minister of Singapore; and, Jochen Messemer, a top executive of German insurer, ERGO.
“He told them for the Church’s message to be credible; its finances must be, too. He insisted on strict rules, protocols, transparency, frugality and cost cutting to free more money for the poor.” “When the administration is fat, it’s unhealthy,” the said, according to Ivereigh’s recollections.
The Pope picked a senior Maltese banker, Joseph Zahra, to head the Organisation for the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See (COSEA).
Subsequently, following expert-led reforms, the Vatican created a new secretariat for the Economy to oversee finances. He put Australian cardinal George Pell in-charge, but accountable to a new Council for the Economy comprising professional lay experts.
In wide-ranging reforms, the Vatican Bank, officially called the Institute for the Works of the Religious, was stripped of its investment portfolio which was reduced to a saving and loan facility exclusively for religious congregations.
About 3, 000 Vatican accounts were closed as the pontiff purged questionable budgets and hidden accounts.
He tasked the Council of Nine to simplify and streamline overlapping jurisdictions of the Vatican’s nine congregations to reduce bureaucracy and end duplication while deliberately elevating the role of women and lay persons in the Curia.
Two new congregations are on the cards: for Laity and for Justice and Charity, which will absorb the existing pontifical councils, Ivereigh writes. Other congregations will be merged or closed altogether.
The new structure is not expected until 2017. Most Vatican staffs remain unconfirmed, Francis has chopped bonuses and the title of Monsignor for priests under sixty-five; and from February 2014, Vatican department heads were told to stop new hires, wage increases, and overtime to cut costs and offset budget shortfalls, according to the new book.
Ivereigh writes that Francis “is the most accessible of modern Popes, almost always at the Santa Marta restaurant at lunch hours, queuing for buffet with his tray for food like other patrons. He comes out to receive and greet his visitors personally and takes lifts with them assuring them, ‘I don’t bite’”. By circumventing old institutions, he has stirred resentment among old guards. The Pope’s soaring global popularity as chief shepherd of the 1.2 billion Catholics, however, contrasts the growing grumbling against him and his reforms within the Vatican.