We’ll Follow You

WHEN FRENCH Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to proclaim the Latin words “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam…” the crowds below roared their approval. Over 100.000 people, who’d been waiting in the rain, some of them huddled under umbrellas for hours, had seen white smoke pouring out of the Sistine Chapel chimney just after seven o’clock. It was the evening of Wednesday March 13, and the 115 cardinals charged with the election of the new pope had only been in conclave since the previous afternoon. As night fell, word travelled at lightning speed across the city (and around the world), and thousands more people headed towards St. Peter’s Square, a sea of flags, smartphones and I-pads held high in the darkness to capture the historic event.

 

Who is he?

 

As Cardinal Tauran continued to speak in Latin, announcing the name of the new pontiff “… Georgium Marium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Bergoglio,” a few cheers went up, but the majority of people seemed a little taken aback. Who was this new pope? Where did he come from? And why wasn’t he one of the names that had been making headlines in the media over the previous weeks? Then they heard with delight that he had chosen the name Francis, the first pope in history to call himself after the humble saint from Assisi, protector of animals and the environment, not to mention one of the two patron saints of Italy. A few seconds later, the former Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires stepped out onto the balcony in his plain white vestments and won their hearts with the simple Italian greeting “Buona sera” (Good evening), and a joke about his brother cardinals going “almost to the ends of the world to find a new bishop of Rome.” In his brief words before pronouncing the traditional blessing to the city of Rome and to the world, he remembered his predecessor Benedict XVI, led the recitation of the Our Father, the Ave Maria and the Glory Be, but he also asked the crowd to pray in silence for him, setting the tone for a new style of papal ministry that would literally stun many observers over the following days and weeks.

 

A caring pastor

 

Simplicity, humility, authenticity were three words much in use, as the media scrambled to uncover details of Bergoglio’s previous life and work in his native Argentina. Born in 1936 to a working class Italian immigrant family (his grandparents had a vineyard in the northern Piedmont region), the young Jorge Mario worked briefly as a chemical technician in Buenos Aires before deciding to train for the priesthood. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1958, thus embarking on a path to become not only the first Latin American pontiff, but also the first Jesuit pope in history. He rose to the rank of Provincial Superior, then served as seminary rector and studied at graduate school in Germany, before returning to work as spiritual director for the Jesuit community in Argentina’s second largest city, Cordoba. In 1992 he was appointed auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, and in 1998 he took over as archbishop of the city, building a reputation as both an astute manager and a caring pastor, especially for the most vulnerable people living in the sprawling slums known as ‘villas miserias’. Renowned for his rather austere lifestyle, Bergoglio chose to live in a small flat and travel by bus or metro, wearing plain black rather than the cardinal’s red vestments he had inherited from his predecessor. Created cardinal by John Paul II in 2001, he memorably urged friends not to spend money on pricey plane tickets to Rome, but rather to give generously to the poor and needy instead.

It was immediately evident that the new pope had every intention of maintaining this simple lifestyle after his election too. Just hours after the crowds had gone home, photos surfaced on Facebook showing Francis shunning the papal limousine to return on a shuttle bus with his brother cardinals to the St. Martha guesthouse in the Vatican. Early the following morning, he travelled across Rome in an unmarked car to pray at the Basilica of St. Mary Major, and then insisted on stopping at the hotel where he’d been staying before the conclave to settle up his bill in person. Later, he picked up the phone to speak to his Jesuit superior, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, just as he had found a few moments immediately following the election to call some of his closest Argentinian friends.

 

The new bishop of Rome

 

With each passing day, new stories emerged of Francis’ relaxed and personable attitude to all around him, from the cardinals with whom he shared his meals, to the secretaries, electricians or cleaners that he stopped to exchange a few words with as he explored his new surroundings. Live television coverage of his meeting with all the cardinals on Friday morning showed him deep in conversation, laughing and warmly embracing many of them, to the evident discomfort of his aides attempting to move the lengthy line along in a more regulated fashion. Later in the day, he made another unscheduled visit to a Rome hospital to see a fellow Argentinian cardinal who had suffered a heart attack, chatting with other patients and staff before returning to the Vatican.

On Saturday he held his first public audience with several thousand journalists (myself included) who had been following the conclave, joking about how hard they had been working and explaining how he had decided to take the name of St. Francis, “a man of peace, a man of poverty, a man who loved and protected creation.” Breaking the vow of secrecy that each cardinal is supposed to observe about what goes on inside the conclave, Bergoglio made his audience laugh by revealing that some prelates suggested the name Hadrian, after the reforming Pope Hadrian IV, or Clement, after the 18th century Pope Clement XIV who briefly dissolved the Jesuit order. After reflecting on the similarities between his role and that of the media to communicate “the trinity” of truth, goodness and beauty, the new bishop of Rome announced he would give his blessing in silence, since “not everyone present belongs to the Catholic faith and others do not believe. I respect the conscience of each one of you” he said, “knowing that each one of you is a child of God.” As he shook hands, smiled warmly and waved goodbye, I noticed that I wasn’t the only hardened hack struggling to fight back unexpected tears of joy.

 

The power of service

 

At his inaugural Mass the following Tuesday, the feast of St. Joseph, the new Pope continued in a similarly direct style, reaching out not just to Catholics, but to the many other Christians and representatives of other faiths gathered in St. Peter’s Square. Referring to St. Joseph as the discreet, humble and faithful protector of Mary and Jesus, Bergoglio said the vocation of being a protector is not just for Christians alone, but for every single person of good will. “It means protecting all creation” he said, “the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us… It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness.” He appealed directly to the presidents, prime ministers and government officials from 135 countries attending the celebration to be “protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.” Speaking of his own position as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, he warned, “Let us never forget that authentic power is service, and that the pope too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant culmination on the Cross.” Inspired by the “lowly, concrete and faithful service” of Saint Joseph, he said the pope “must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important… the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.”

 

Franciscan focus

 

On Holy Thursday Pope Francis put those words into action as he chose to celebrate the Mass of Our Lord’s Supper in Rome’s prison for juvenile offenders. Just as he used to mark that celebration in a hospice, jail or home for the poor in Buenos Aires, the Holy Father re-enacted Jesus’ loving gesture of washing his disciples’ feet by kneeling to wash the feet of a dozen young boys and girls, many of them immigrants who turned to theft or drug dealing in their daily battle for survival; one was even a Muslim. A few days earlier, on Palm Sunday, the new Pope reminded us that Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, awakening great hopes in “the simple, the humble, the poor, the forgotten, those who do not matter in the eyes of the world.” Just as Jesus understands our human sufferings, he said, so we are all called to show the face of God’s mercy, as we too bend down to heal body and soul.

The Franciscan focus of this papal ministry has already drawn praise from leaders of other Christian Churches, in particular the spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox believers, Patriarch Bartholomew 1st. After attending the inaugural Mass in the Vatican – the first Orthodox leader to do so since the Eastern and Western Churches divided in 1054 – the Patriarch invited the Pope to visit him in Istanbul, and also to travel with him to Jerusalem next year to mark the 50th anniversary of the first great gesture of reconciliation between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, two pioneers of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue. Meanwhile, the new Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, whose inauguration I attended in England just two days later, quoted Francis’ call to be “protectors of the poor and vulnerable,” and told me he hopes to visit the Vatican later this year to explore ways of furthering cooperation and better relations between the two Churches. Evangelical Protestant leaders in Argentina were also quick to point to the many joint projects and prayer initiatives that Bergoglio had spearheaded before his election to the papacy.

 

A journey of love and trust

 

On the interfaith front too, there have already been some positive signs, starting with the new Pope’s warm relations with Jewish leaders in his native country. “He’s got a very deep capacity for dialogue with other religions,” one local Rabbi told reporters as he recalled Cardinal Bergoglio lighting the first candle on the menorah during a recent Hanukkah ceremony. In a 2010 book entitled On Heaven and Earth, based on conversations between Bergoglio and another Rabbi Abraham Skorka, the cardinal notes that authentic dialogue “is born from an attitude of respect toward the other person, from a conviction that the other has something good to say.” Local Muslim leaders have also described his attitude to interfaith relations as “a genuine and well-reasoned commitment under construction, because we know that we cannot get by without this dialogue.”

At 76 years old, the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio surprised many who were expecting a considerably younger candidate to follow in the footsteps of Pope Benedict’s resignation. Though he had reportedly been a close contender to Joseph Ratzinger in the conclave of 2005, Bergoglio was largely overlooked by journalists attempting to predict the outcome of this latest papal election. But from the moment he bowed his head on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and asked the world to pray for him, it was clear there would be many more surprises in store. As the new Pope appealed to all people of faith to follow him on “a journey of fraternity, of love and of trust,” the vast crowd fell silent and a large banner could be clearly seen, emblazoned with the blue Twitter symbol and the words @pontifex: we’ll follow U – a small but encouraging sign for the 265th successor of St. Peter at the start of his new ministry.