Gardeners happily welcome new Pope
The first ever from the Third World, a balancer in practice of liberation and devotional theologies, born in Argentina of Italian immigrants, an avid student of Science (Chemistry) before he delved deeper into philosophy and theology, devoted to Francis of Assisi in the Italy of his parental origins, and Francis Xavier, missionary non-pareil of his Jesuit congregation, Pope Francis I, hitherto known to only a relatively few as Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires in the land of Evita Peron, now comes across most comfortably and easily as the Gardener’s Pope.
Once again, said the Gardener, “the Holy Spirit beat the experts.” When the Spirit chose Benedict XVI eight years ago, Bergoglio was put “on hold” as it were, a “rival” to the post. Thus, in this latest conclave, no expert mentioned him in any serious list of candidates. He did not seem young enough to succeed a Pope whose abdication was occasioned by being advanced in years. We always forget how relative time is.
The Gardener’s friend, a former top honcho of the Divine Word Missionaries wrote us friends a few hours after the Francis announcement, and I want to quote lengthily from Father Tony Pernia’s remarks.
From: https://i.imgur.com/ Cardinal Bergoglio in the subway in Buenos Aires
What kind of person is Francis? “One morning, in Buenos Aires, one confrere generously offered to tour me around the city. When we were at the cathedral and the Archbishop’s residence, my confrere said: ‘Let’s see if the Cardinal is here and, if so, let’s pay him a visit.’ I protested that we had not made any appointment with him earlier. But my confrere said that we should just try. It turned out that the Cardinal was in, and he welcomed us like we had set an appointment with him. It turned out to be a very refreshing visit, and I was deeply impressed by the simplicity and humility of this ‘Prince of the Church’. One can see that he had a true love for people, especially the poor and the marginalized in society. Thus, one is not surprised with his choice of Francis as his pontifical name.”
The first non-European Pope? Not quite, if you see his face and how fluently he spoke Italian. But, yes, the first in modern times who was born outside Europe. More accurately, he is the first “Third World” Pope, the first Pope from the “South.”
Said Gardener Tony: “Cardinal Bergoglio’s election puts a new face to the Catholic Church, i.e., a Church that is no longer a European Church, but a truly global Church. It also reflects the so-called ‘demographic shift’ of the Catholic Church, i.e., the Catholic Church’s population shift from the global North to the global South (that is, Latin America, Africa, Asia), where about two-thirds of the 1.2 billion Catholics now live. In fact, almost 50% of all Catholics live in Latin America alone. So it is only reasonable that the head of the Catholic Church should originate from the same continent.
“To speak of the ‘global South’ is also to speak about mission and evangelization… or bringing the Gospel to peoples. As theologians put it, the Church exists by mission, just as fire exists by burning. If something is wrong with the Church today, maybe it’s because it’s not doing (or not doing enough or not doing well) what it is supposed to do. There is no fire because there is no burning. There is less Church because there is less mission and evangelization.” Francis of Assisi is not known because there are not enough Francis Xaviers. But now there is Pope Francis.
Is there any significance in his being the first Pope in many centuries to belong to a religious congregation? Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a Jesuit whose model is the first Franciscan. “It is therefore possible that Pope Francis I would see the need to reform not just the Curia but even the papacy itself along the lines of the more democratic and collegial style of governance of religious congregations.
“For instance, just as the Superior General of religious orders has a council to govern with him, cannot the Pope too have a council (e.g., of six, or eight or ten) who would share the responsibility of leadership with him? In a more complex world – more multi-cultural, pluralistic, post-modern, global, technological – it is no longer possible for one person to govern alone.
“Team leadership, or participative leadership, is becoming more and more a necessity. It would seem that Vatican II’s intuition about collegiality now needs to be taken seriously… the question of governance and consequently the reform of the Curia and the papacy itself. Indeed, the ‘ad-extra’ [external] challenge of evangelization will not progress if the ‘ad-intra’ [internal] challenge of governance is not attended to. The Church needs to put its house in order if it is to effectively bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth… we may still see the Catholic Church rebuilt under Pope Francis I.” The Malachi prophecy may be quite right after all in predicting a Roman Pope whose work will bring the church to an unrecognizable internal spiritual progress.
Since we really do not know Pope Francis just yet, we may want to know a bit more in an essential way of knowing who or what the model St. Francis was. More than half a century ago, the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton did a pretty good job of an introduction.
Chesterton suggested three ways of getting to know Francis. First we may deal with this amazing man as a figure in secular history. We may then describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world’s one quite sincere democrat. He also anticipated all that was most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property.
“All those things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented not only as a human but as a humanitarian hero; indeed, as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the Renaissance.”
There would still be a lot to be said about the man who tried to end the crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded with the Emperor for the birds. We may describe “in a purely historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other things that are already appreciated in modern culture.”
We may, indeed, try this first approach, as others have done, situating Francis purely in secular history without in any way raising any religious questions at all or take another approach – the second one – that goes to the extreme – of treating his life as defiantly devotional, complete with the whole history of the stigmata, his invention of the Christmas crib, his fasts and asceticism.
Chesterton preferred a third approach. He would put himself in the position of the ordinary enquirer or outsider, which many are (as he was, too, for a long time), and start from the standpoint of a man who already admires St. Francis, “but only for those things which such a man finds admirable.”
And he would say to the modern English reader: “By approaching the great saint’s story through what is evidently picturesque and popular about it…we may at least get a glimmering of why the poet who praised his lord the sun, often hid himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who was so gentle with his Brother the Wolf was so harsh to his Brother the Ass (as he nicknamed his own body), of why the troubadour who said that love set his heart on fire separated himself from women, of why the singer who rejoiced in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song which cries with all the passion of a pagan, ‘Praised be God for our Sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers’ ends almost with the words, ‘Praised be God for our Sister, the Death of the body.’”
Chesterton continued: “The first fact to realize about Saint Francis is that when he said from the first that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a newer and nobler romance….He was a lover, a lover of God and really and truly a lover of all.” No, said Chesterton, Francis was not a philanthropist. A philanthropist may love anthropoids. St. Francis did not love humanity but people. He did not love Christianity but Christ.
And as true lover, St. Francis may well have been truly crazy. Said Chesterton, “Tell it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the whole of the modern puzzle disappears.”
Contradictions galore of gathering flowers in the sun and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, of praising all earthly and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat, of glorifying gold and purple and then perversely going in rags, of showing pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic death. Troubadour? Crazy lover?
If the Italian from Assisi was and is his model to the point of appropriating that name for his papacy – the first ever by any one in the two thousand year history of this institution – doesn’t it look like not only the global church but the very papacy itself is in for lots of changes, fun, yes, and lots of suffering that changes do not spare? Vatican II may yet be in grave danger of serious implementation.
That smile of Bergoglio when he became Francis the other night – now, that was undoubtedly Francesco, Francis of Assisi. -end-