By the first act of his papacy, Pope Francis sent a message, urbi et orbi (to the city and the world) about just what kind of pope he’s going to be.
Appearing before cheering throngs packed into St. Peter’s Square, he spurned the red papal cape and ornate pectoral cross in favor of plain white vestments and a simple crucifix, and asked the people to pray for him before he blessed them.
Rather than riding back to his temporary quarters in the Vatican in the papal limousine, he took the bus with the other cardinals who had just elected him.
Most significantly, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the Jesuit bishop of Buenos Aires, chose the name “Francis,” in a deliberate echo of the church’s most popular saint, Francis of Assisi, a rich young man who forsook his fortune to become an itinerant preacher and founder of the Franciscan order.
Which means that the first pope from the American hemisphere is about to delight and infuriate in equal measure both Catholics and non-Catholics — just about anybody who views the papacy as a political office, rather than a religious one.
Those on the left and in the media who think the leader of the planet’s billion-plus Catholics ought to “moderate” his position on issues such as gay marriage and other social experiments are bound to be disappointed.
On the right, those who think any whiff of collectivism equals Marxism will be stunned by Francis’ advocacy for the poor and his criticism of global income inequality.
The surprise choice to succeed Benedict XVI was a brilliant stroke by the College of Cardinals, who sought both an insider — like many Argentines, Francis is an ethnic Italian, the son of immigrants; he was close both to John Paul II and Benedict — and an outsider who might actually attempt to clean out the Augean stables of the backstabbing, Borgia-like papal bureaucracy known as the Curia.
With the church’s center of gravity having shifted southward, from pagan Europe and doctrinally restive North America to Latin America and (increasingly) central Africa, Bergoglio’s elevation also made sense internationally.
In central and South America, Francis’s task will be to stop the slide away from traditional Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism, and to advocate for the poor while rejecting both the quasi-Marxist heresy of “liberation theology” (something, alas, much advocated in the past by Bergoglio’s fellow Jesuits) and the Peron-like fascism of Argentina’s kleptocratic Kirschner ruling family (with whom he’s repeatedly clashed).
Internationally, Francis must confront the murderous persecution of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Middle East — where radical, intolerant Islam is waging jihad against ancient Christian communities in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Turkey.
In this, he’ll likely recall his namesake as well: Francis of Assisi once tried, unsuccessfully, to halt the bloodshed of the Fifth Crusade in the early 13th century by traveling to Egypt and trying to convert the sultan Malik al-Kamil to Christianity.
At 76, the new pope is likely to move quickly to put his stamp on his office. Don’t look for a globe-trotting pontiff along the lines of John Paul II — but also don’t expect a bookish hermit like Benedict, who quickly backed away from criticism of Islam after his 2006 speech at Regensburg prompted outrage throughout the Muslim world.
Instead, God willing, we’ll get a pope for all seasons, who can root out the moral rot that crept into the priesthood over the past few decades (one of the cardinals eligible to vote at the recent conclave, Keith O’Brien of Scotland, resigned in early March after accusations of his homosexual advances to fellow priests became public), clean up the Curia and electrify the church in Latin America and throughout the Third World.
Most important, the humble Francis will lead by example, forsaking much of the pomp and wealth of Rome and at least symbolically returning the church to its mendicant roots — offering hope in equal measure to rich and poor, saints and sinners alike.
And for that, the whole world should be grateful.