Robert Royal at the Claremont Review of Books gives an excellent overview of the reign of Pope Francis entitled Is the Pope Catholic?:
But even the most admiring biographer cannot make much of a case that the future pope was highly successful—as a reformer or anything else—in Argentina. Francis is the first Jesuit pope. When he became the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina during the 1970s, he was so divisive a leader that his tenure ended after only six years. He then held various positions and pursued studies intermittently, in and out of Argentina, but remained so controversial that in 1992 he was asked not to reside in Jesuit houses any longer.
Through friendship with Cardinal Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires, he was recalled from a kind of internal exile, made an auxiliary bishop in the capital, and later succeeded his patron as archbishop. There certainly wasn’t much evidence of his carrying out reform, great or otherwise. Vocations were few and Church initiatives modest, though he did start sending more priests into poor areas to minister to the marginalized. When the Vatican was considering making Bergoglio a cardinal in 2001, then Jesuit Superior General Peter Hans Kolvenbach wrote a letter to John Paul II advising against it because of the controversies Bergoglio had provoked over many years and, it is said, because of psychological instability. (The letter, it is also said, has disappeared from the archives.) The basic facts here are not in dispute. Francis has admitted that he saw a psychiatrist during a troubled period in his life, and he did not really repair his relationship with his religious order—which remained broken for 37 years—until he became pope.
What Bergoglio became famous for—and Ivereigh does a good job in highlighting, while remaining silent about the lack of achievements—was his presentation of himself as a man who lived simply and, quite conspicuously, did not embrace the usual perquisites of a prince of the Catholic Church. People all over the world have learned of how he took the subway and not a limousine (often not even a car) to meetings, lived in a modest corner of the episcopal palace in Buenos Aires, and gave personal attention to ordinary people he encountered. He is the first successor of Saint Peter to take the name “Francis”—after il poverello, the little poor man, as Francis of Assisi is affectionately known in Italy. Although amplified to mythic proportions by an enthralled media, the new pope’s emphasis on simplicity and humility is genuine, as is his warm affection when interacting with the homeless, disfigured, or otherwise marginalized, and both traits go a long way toward explaining the enthusiasm that greeted the first days of his pontificate.
Whatever his track record in Argentina, Francis was elected to be a reformer, yet in the six years since he became pope, the rot in the Church has only become worse. Vatican finances, despite promises and early steps to make them more transparent, are still a murky—sometimes criminal—mess. The Roman curia (the Vatican offices charged with running a church of 1.2 billion people all over the globe) tell any visitor willing to listen these days that they are confused about their mission. The pope has shown himself quite willing to blur several Catholic teachings in order to meet halfway some of the worst developments in modern culture—a popular move with liberals and non-Catholics, but a betrayal for serious Catholics. And in several countries as well as the Vatican itself, the Church has been engulfed (again) by a lurid scandal of largely homosexual predation and cover-up, which—judging from the unhurried bureaucratic responses ranging from clumsy P.R. spin to stony silence—shows little sign of being seriously dealt with in Rome. This latest disgrace has damaged Catholicism’s moral credibility, touched high cardinals and Church officials (former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick most notably), including some of the pope’s closest confidantes, and even shaken public confidence in Francis himself—so much so that Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican nuncio (ambassador) to the United States, has called on him to resign.
At the center is the rather enigmatic figure of Jorge Bergoglio, who seems to inspire intense dislike and equally intense admiration at each point in his life, forcing those around him to form factions for or against him. He came of age while Juan Perón dominated Argentine politics, and later, after the military coup in 1976, had to try to protect his people while the generals who had taken control of the government conducted their guerra sucia or “dirty war,” sending death squads to silence political dissidents. Bergoglio learned to speak ambivalently in public. Like Perón, he boldly tells different groups what they want to hear, even if he often contradicts himself.
This characteristic lack of precision and consistency can be found, for example, in Francis’s recent rewording of The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which now makes it appear as though sacred Scripture and the entire history of Christianity can be waived aside when it comes to the permissibility of capital punishment. For many people inside and outside the Catholic Church this has raised the question: are other moral teachings also now up for grabs, or just the ones liberals don’t like?
Go here to read the rest. You might wish to consider subscribing to the Clairmont Review of Books. I do. and I find it very useful in interpreting the intellectual currents behind the events of the day.
