A man of the Church

March 13, 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the papacy. Signals that his papacy would be different started the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica ten years ago.

Mar 17, 2023

VATICAN: March 13, 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the papacy. Signals that his papacy would be different started the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica ten years ago. He was not wearing a red, ermine-trimmed cape, and he bowed as he asked the crowd to pray that God would bless him.

Pope Francis also told us early in his papacy that he is “a man of the Church.” His mission is to serve the Church, not to be served by it. Those who fear he will make changes that are untrue to the Church’s authentic teachings and traditions should have no fear. Yes, Pope Francis knows how to rock the boat, and to scrape away the barnacles that are attached to the barque of St Peter, but he has promised not to interfere with the essential mission and identity of the Church he was chosen to serve as its chief shepherd and teacher.

We also know that Pope Francis has deep compassion for the poor, the migrants, and those who have been relegated to the margins (the peripheries) of our society. We know that he grieves for families who are suffering from the horrors of war and injustice. And we know that this Holy Father can be intolerant of what he considers rigid or ideological positions that build walls instead of bridges among God’s people.

For a decade, even when discussing the internal workings of the Vatican, Pope Francis has insisted the Church is not the Church of Christ if it does not reach out, sharing the “joy of the Gospel” and placing the poor at the centre of its attention.

His decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace, his invitations to Vatican trash collectors and gardeners and other employees to join him for his daily morning Mass, his insistence on going to the Italian island of Lampedusa to celebrate Mass and pray for migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean, captivated the attention of the media.

But not everyone was pleased with the seeming ease with which he set aside pomp and protocol. And tensions within the Catholic community grew as he expressed openness to LGBTQ Catholics and to those living in what the Church considers irregular marriage situations.

In one of his first major documents, the apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, he laid out a programme for his papacy, looking inside the Church and outside at the world to see what needed to be done to “encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelisation, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality.”

Pope Francis has been laying the foundation for the new synod process since the beginning of his pontificate, said Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago. “There’s an organic whole to all of this.
“I just wonder if, from the very beginning, he had in his mind that this would be the trajectory of his pontificate, and the synod on synodality I think is, in some way, the opportunity for him to pull everything together,” he said. “There are people who want him to go faster, but he wants things to be held together and the Church to be held together.”

Asked what he thought was the most significant aspect of Pope Francis’ pontificate, the cardinal cited his predecessor, the late Cardinal Francis E. George, who participated in the 2013 conclave, and said the best description of Pope Francis was “He’s free.”

“He’s free in the sense of wanting to listen to different voices in the life of the Church,” Cardinal Cupich said. “He’s free in being imaginative, but also he has the kind of freedom that really allows him to be joyful in this ministry.

“John Paul II told us what we should do. Benedict told us why we should do it. And Francis is saying, ‘Do it,’ ” the cardinal said. Pope Francis is leading by example in how he cares for the poor, sees God at work in people’s real lives and reaches out to people often overlooked by the Church.

“I think history will look back on this pontificate as historic, as pivotal in the life of the Church,” Cardinal Cupich said. —Agencies