As both non-believers and fervent Catholics look on, the Mexican Catholic Church, which throughout its jagged history has tended to side with dictatorial elites, is having twitchy days since its new leader, Jesuit Pope Francis, was elected.
Many Mexican Catholics (much of the country) immediately took solace in the humility and warmth that has been demonstrated by Pope Francis. Yet north of the border, the U.S. Republican Party appears discomfited as Francis calls for “a poorer church.”
The Jesuit order, called “The Soldiers of Christ,” and more recently, “God’s Marines,” professes vows of poverty, chastity, aid to the poor and the downtrodden (aiming at way more than Mitt Romney’s rejected 47 percent). The Jesuit order is said to be the largest single order of priests and brothers of the Catholic Church. Yet Rome’s Vatican City – the Vatican and Curia, which rule the Church – is getting more jumpy daily, as Francis moves ahead with what seems to be tough, if soft-spoken, house-cleaning. (Pope Francis’s generally attractive goals and style comes just as the GOP is trying to woo Hispanics – mostly Catholics – to its unkind ideology; which, fertilized by Tea Party types, reeks of hate, an undisciplined and “evil” emotion that Francis finds sinfully destructive. “If our heart is closed, if our heart is made of stone, then stones will end up in our hands, and we will be ready to throw them at someone,” Francis said March 22.)
Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, at different moments leaders in the Republican presidential primary campaign last year, both described an embarrassingly misconceived, but clearly ideologically burdened Catholic Church that few Catholics recognized. More than 40 national Catholic leaders and prominent theologians released an open letter to the two Republicans to “stop perpetuating ugly” stereotypes that were both racist and denigrating in attacking “vital government program(s)” aimed at assisting the poor. “At a time when one in six Americans lives in poverty, it is clear that charity and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors.” Certainly not “while job seekers outnumber job openings four to one.” Implying that some politicians can’t count.Francis has bluntly rejected Santorum’s fever to find fundamentalism in the Church, saying that “warps and weakens the faithful. The teacher who is so arrogant as to make decisions for the disciple is not a good priest, he is a good dictator, an eraser of the religious personalities of others ... this kind of religiosity, so rigid, wraps itself in doctrines that pretend to provide justifications, but in reality they deny liberty and don’t allow people to grow.”
Apropos to the species Gingrich, a late-arriving womanizing convert, and a wanderer in a desert of bitter-seeming ideologists. Pope Francis said, “Ideologies falsify the gospel. Every ideological interpretation, wherever it comes from ... is a falsification of the gospel. And these ideologues, as we have seen in the history of the Church, end up being intellectuals without talent, ethicists without goodness.”
These stinging statements were applied to the recent wandering path of the Church itself, a notice to prelates and bureaucrats populating the Vatican, especially the Curia. (“Vatican” comes from the Latin vaticanus, meaning “hill.” Vatican City is an autonomous city state possessing everything it needs to function as such, the center of which is the official residence of the pope and the administrative center of the papacy. Vatican also refers to the authority and jurisdiction of the pope.)
The Curia is the “ensemble” of dicasteries (departments) and other bodies assisting the pope in the exercise of his “supreme pastoral office” for the good of the Church in its service to (and maintenance of) its many churches throughout the world. Much of its attention is centered on the maintenance of the unity of the Faith, “communion of the People of God and the promotion of the proper mission of the Church in the world.”
The Curia is the center of most of the trouble that Francis must face. It is administered by not a few people who would like to bring him down. He is a Jesuit, one of the “foot soldiers of Christ” who shun, when possible, ostentation and embrace the problems of the poor in great part through their emphasis on education, beginning with priests. He has already created a new “tone” for the papacy with words and acts of humility and warmth.
But under the last two papacies the thinking in much of the all-powerful Curia begins and ends with the priesthood. Such clergy views as aberrant the foot washing Francis performed on Maundy Thursday, “heretically” including two females among the 12 people whose feet he washed, and kissed at a Rome youth prison. Traditionally, popes have washed the feet of 12 men, re-enacting Jesus’ washing the feet of the 12 apostles before his death. Francis’ critics should get out more, for he’s been doing this as archbishop of Buenos Aires for some time, an act now widespread in the United States and elsewhere.
Yet Pope Francis will have to go further than applauded gestures and symbolism. It’s true that merely his elevation to pope has prompted many lapsed Catholics (20 million in the U.S.) to give the Vatican, and its squires, a second chance to demonstrate they are not merely male scam artists modeling expensive dresses.
But the inhabitants of the Vatican, particularly the Curia, are practiced at seeking increasing power and new, sly ways to use it in intrigue, dissemblance, and chicanery. Recent disclosures from Pope Benedict XVI’s own desk tell us this. Those documents also tell us that some in the Curia dote on meticulously covert tangles of strategic manipulation.
But ... is Francis practiced in methods able to counter these ingrained habits of the “traditionalists” of the Curia? No one seems to know. Many popes have tried reform, but history suggests that none have succeeded. Yet perhaps the eight cardinals Francis has selected from the world over as advisers in his attempt to reform the Church will be of help, several being veterans of harsh circumstances. This move of his is daring, and will enrage the traditionalists once it convenes in October.
His turn of mind – that Christ’s churches should imitate Him and help the poor, the sick, the downtrodden – may both bring back lapsed Catholics, suggest some, and attract the attention of young people who, witnessing the horrors of Newtown and Boston, wonder if the world makes any spiritual sense. Some people hope that sense may make itself known to them through the acts of someone like Pope Francis, coupled with those selfless acts of many samaritans who suddenly appear to aid the victims of senseless terror.