Church, Interrupted

Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis

John Cornwell

• Publisher: Chronicle Prism
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781797202020
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

Church, Interrupted: Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis is a revealing portrait of Pope Francis's hopeful yet controversial efforts to recreate the Catholic Church to become, once again, a welcoming place of empathy, love, and inclusiveness. Bestselling author, Vanity Fair contributor, and papal biographer John Cornwell tells the gripping insider story of Pope Francis's bid to bring renewal and hope to a crisis-plagued Church and the world at large. With unique insights and original reporting, Cornwell reveals how Francis has persistently provoked and disrupted his stubbornly unchanging Church, purging clerical corruption and reforming entrenched institutions, while calling for action against global poverty, climate change, and racism.Cornwell argues that despite fierce opposition from traditionalist clergy and right-wing media, the pope has radically widened Catholic moral priorities, calling for mercy and compassion over rigid dogmatism. Francis, according to Cornwell, has transformed the Vatican from being a top-down centralized authority to being a spiritual service for a global Church. He has welcomed the rejected, abused, and disheartened; reached out to people of other faiths and those of none; and proved a providential spiritual leader for future generations. Highly acclaimed author John Cornwell's riveting account of the hopeful—and contentious—efforts undertaken by Pope Francis to rebuild the Catholic Church. • Well researched and brilliantly written, readers, scholars, and fans of John Cornwell will want to read his most controversial and compelling work yet.
• More than a third of America's 74 million Catholics said they were contemplating departure in 2018. It is estimated that over the past twenty years, the Catholic Church has been losing $2.5 billion dollars annually in revenues, legal fees, and damages due to clerical abuse cases. The decline in church attendance, marriages, and vocations to the priesthood and sisterhood tell a story of major decline and disillusion. Cornwell showcases Pope Francis's way forward, a hopeful message that gives reinvigorated reasons to stay with the church and help be the change the new generation would like to see.
• For readers within and outside Catholicism fascinated by the future and restructuring of the church, this will be a book they want to read again and again as the church continues to change and grow.

PART ONE

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INTERRUPTING THE CENTER

Taking the Church to the Periphery

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT POPES ARE FOR

The Tasks Facing Francis

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest single united religious community in the world, embracing every nationality, ethnicity, language, culture, politics, ideology, and geography. No wonder James Joyce dubbed it HCE: Here Comes Everybody. Despite undeniable failings, scandals, and crises down the centuries and into the present, Holy Mother Church, as she is traditionally known, was for millennia, and remains, a formidable force for moral and spiritual flourishing in the world, the Mother Church for all Christians. Despite the shame of their minority, the majority of the clergy and sisterhoods, the parishes and collective movements, comprise countless people dedicated to the common good. Her breakup would spell catastrophe for all Christians, and for the world. That her unity depends on the papacy is an open secret.

The pope’s spiritual domain reaches out across every continent; and the flow of information, back to his desk, is prodigious. It was said that John Paul I, a gentle, pastoral soul, died within a month of his election in 1978 overwhelmed by administrative pressures. He was of a nervous disposition. One day he dropped an armful of documents from his rooftop garden into the courtyard below. He retreated to his bed where his secretary found him lying in a fetal position, face to the wall, sobbing. As an American Vatican official once put it to me: “He took one look at his in-tray and freaked.”

The pope is assisted by a community of more than a thousand officials, comprising cardinals, bishops, priests, and laypeople, known as the Curia. But he carries his burdens of responsibility, finally, alone. He is no chairman of a board, making collective decisions. Historic imperial protocols survived until recently. Leo XIII, pope of the late nineteenth century, required his aides to remain on their knees in his presence. Pius XII would not allow bureaucrats to ask him questions or turn their backs on him; they took phone calls from him on their knees. As recently as the reign of Paul VI in the 1960s and 1970s, popes were carried through St. Peter’s Basilica on a litter, fanned by ostrich feathers. Paul was the last to wear the magnificent silver and gold papal tiara, the triple crown, signifying father of princes and kings, ruler of the world, and vicar or deputy of Christ. Paul attempted to describe the papal isolation in a private note to himself:

I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Hence the dizziness, the vertigo. Like a statue on a plinth—that is how I live now . . . my duty is too plain: decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone . . . Me and God. The colloquy must be full and endless.

The Church is a huge operation. While its 5,000 bishops administer their dioceses independently up to a point, the pope, who has nominated each one personally, exerts control over them and the half million priests and 700,000 religious sisters of the world. While the many congregations or orders of religious have their special rules and hierarchies, they are ultimately under obedience to the pope.

The Church is regulated from the center by its own legal system, canon law. For centuries the laws were a jungle of case histories. In the early twentieth century the legal system became highly regulated, modeled on the Napoleonic Code. The Holy See, the Seat and diocese of the Bishop of Rome, has a global network of papal embassies and ambassadors, nuncios, resident in more than a hundred countries.

The Church maintains thousands of schools, colleges, universities, think tanks, multiple media organizations, hospitals, clinics, international charities, global NGOs, and research institutes.

Finances of the Holy See, meaning the pope’s own “seat” of his bishopric of Rome, are partly run through the Vatican Bank; and there are other central savings and investment entities. The dioceses and religious institutions across the world run their own revenue, investment, and fiscal operations, as do parishes. A measure of the Church’s diocesan wealth is the extent of payouts in sexual abuse suits. By 2018 it was estimated that the crisis in the United States alone had cost dioceses $3 billion and rising. This does not count lost revenues. At least nineteen dioceses have filed for bankruptcy protection.

The Church boasts that it survives and thrives through its unchanging beliefs and practices: semper eadem, always the same. Yet it has yielded to many modern advances and developments, in particular the revolutions in communication that facilitate the Church’s outreach. Today the digital revolution is transforming the way the Church understands, regulates, teaches, and converses with itself. Church historian Eamon Duffy writes: “Catholicism is a conversation, linking continents and cultures, and reaching backward and forward in time. The luxury of sectarianism, of renouncing whatever in the conversation cannot be squared with the perspective of one’s own time and place, is not an option.” And yet the Church is under threat of splintering, while vast numbers of the faithful continue to abandon her. What keeps her together, tenuously, for the time being, is the Holy Father, also known as Universal Father.

In 2013, the year of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election, the demands on a new pope in terms of reactive leadership would have daunted a prelate younger by several decades. He had worked long and tirelessly as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, a deeply conflicted city and province numbering sixteen million inhabitants, with widespread poverty. He held senior posts of ecclesiastical responsibility at a time when Argentina was ravaged by its Dirty War of the late seventies and early eighties. At the same time, he assumed leadership responsibilities for the Church in Latin America at large.

The pressures of the papal office have increased in recent decades with the speed of communications and multiplying internal crises. Apart from the clerical abuse catastrophe and pressing Vatican financial scandals, Francis faced a host of global issues, starting with Europe, the home of Christianity. Despite repeated pleas by former popes, the European Union, from its Brussels center and participating countries, failed to acknowledge the continent’s Christian roots within its institutions and culture. Francis was the first pope to admit the obvious when he delivered one of his word-bombs aimed at exploding complacency: “Christendom no longer exists!” he said at Christmas 2019.

Vocations to the priesthood and religious sisterhoods were plummeting. Parishes were closing by the week in every European country, especially in Germany, where hundreds of thousands of the faithful were relinquishing their official church membership annually, thus withdrawing their personal payments (collected in government tax returns) made under German law to a citizen’s faith of choice.

When the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Küng viewed the masses pouring into Rome in April 2005 for the funeral of John Paul II, he wrote in Der Spiegel: “Don’t be fooled by the crowds. Millions have left the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II’s leadership. The Catholic Church is in dire straits.” The trend continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI and into the reign of Francis.

In the United States, according to figures published by the Pew Research Center in 2016, only 15 percent of cradle Catholics attend weekly Mass, and 35 percent of them no longer admit to Catholic identity. In the United Kingdom the figures were worse. Only 13 percent of baptized Catholics went to Mass and 37 percent no longer thought of themselves as Catholic.

Research by sociologist of religion Stephen Bullivant, in his 2019 book Mass Exodus, found a catalog of reasons for “disaffiliation,” as he termed it, beyond the obvious reaction to clerical sexual abuse. Informants who defected in the 1970s cited the bans on contraception, sex before marriage, divorce, and homosexuality. As the decades passed, they mentioned boredom with church services, combined with skepticism about doctrine, especially the teaching on hell; dislike of particular pastors; bad experiences in the Confessional box; rejection of belief in the afterlife. A significant number of dropouts, particularly among women, Hispanics, and African Americans in the United States, include those who felt let down by the Church in their hour of need. The latter often left Catholicism for another Christian denomination, or even non-Christian religion.

A different kind of attrition was occurring in Latin America, where 43 percent of Catholics are now concentrated, and where the virtual monopoly of the Catholic Church is being eroded by Pentecostal groups. In the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, the figure of Catholic affiliation in Latin America shrunk, according to a Pew survey in 2014, from 90 percent to 70 percent. Protestant evangelicals were challenging the former Catholic near monopoly with provision of education and improved living standards financed by charities in North America. Evangelicals, moreover, unconstrained by an ordained, exclusively male, and celibate leadership, were capable of spreading and maintaining the faith with lay preachers embedded in their communities.

Christians, including many Catholics, suffered greatly in Muslim countries, starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, continuing with the civil war in Syria in 2011, and the violence spreading sporadically across majority Muslim communities of Asia: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. At Easter 2019 hundreds of worshipers were murdered in two Catholic churches in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by ISIS terrorists.

The fate of the Church in mainland China, which numbers up to ten million Catholics, was a problem for successive popes. A split arose between the largely underground Church and the growth of an “official” Church approved by the government. In 2010 Beijing manipulated the ordination of several bishops without sanction from Rome. The bishops were automatically excommunicated. Should Francis continue to condemn the official Church and encourage the underground?

From the outset, Francis faced novel and long-standing doctrinal issues vying for his attention: demands for female ordination, a married priesthood, challenges to papal teaching on the moral status of gays, lesbians, and transgender people; demands for same-sex marriage. Topping the list, however, was the “irregular” status of growing numbers of divorced and remarried Catholics, perhaps as many as 40 percent, officially denied the sacrament of Holy Communion.

But there was another pressure, a burden on every pope’s conscience: the onus to lead the Church creatively, positively, rather than just reactively. How should he bring his own special talents and personality to bear on his mission as a world religious leader? What contributions would he make to the spiritual good of the world? How would he put a stamp on his papacy, offer views on major world events, tragedies, disasters natural and man-made? How would he relate to other Christian communions, as well as to other faiths? How would he offer religious hope in an increasingly faithless world?

A pope expresses his pastoral office with homilies at his morning Mass; addresses to special audiences—general and private; speeches on foreign trips; those special letters to the world known as encyclicals and exhortations. In addition, Francis made extensive use of spontaneous press conferences, especially on his frequent plane trips, and private interviews with journalists. Moreover, he exploited the power of visible gestures amplified by the media: the kissing of feet; the hugs and kisses; the wide-eyed ear-to-ear grin.

Then there are the encounters. A pope has a nonstop flow of visitors: heads of state, representatives of many hundreds of religious organizations; political leaders, special interest and advocacy groups, pilgrims; general audiences of tens, hundreds, and thousands; sporting teams; assorted trades and professions, the hairdressers, gynecologists, accountants. Then there are the Catholic bishops of the world coming into Rome from more than a hundred countries for their routine visits for personal and collective audiences, each seeking counsel for his own set of local problems.

At the same time, from the first day of his papacy he received invitations to make official visits to countries around the world. These grueling trips, often fraught with security problems, would require long-haul flights and loss of sleep every few weeks.

Perhaps most important of all, he is guardian of the Church’s doctrinal truth handed down from the Gospels, the early Church, its councils, the writings of his predecessors. In a very real way, the pope is both the symbol and the energizer of Catholic unity, the watchman over authentic Catholicism, holding together a global community: ut unum sint—that they may be one. All this he does while subjected 24/7 to searing media scrutiny.

A pope brings his own peculiar background, skills, experience, and personal history to the task. Pius XII was a canon lawyer and a diplomat; Paul VI served Pius XII for many years within the Curia before being sent to the diocese of Milan; John Paul II was a pastor and philosopher who grew to prominence as Archbishop of Kraków in conflict with the Soviet regime. Benedict XVI was a professor of theology before taking on the role of protector of the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy.

Francis was the first pope from Latin America, the first pope in the modern period to have run a teeming metropolitan diocese afflicted by poverty during a period of violent political conflict. He is the first pope named after St. Francis, with a determination to invoke the spirituality of St. Francis during his papacy.

He is the first Jesuit pope. Joining the Society of Jesus as a young man, his formation was based on a half millennium of Jesuit history and spirituality. The Society of Jesus, as it is properly called, embodies a world community of highly disciplined priests: intellectual, famous for their obedience, teaching skills, and missionary zeal. He would bring that training and commitment to his papacy, as well as disruptive tendencies for which Jesuits had been passed over as papabile, potential popes, since their foundation.

When he stood on the balcony above St. Peter’s Square on the night of his election, he acknowledged that the cardinals had made an extra­ordinary choice to meet the multiple crises afflicting the Church, a choice “from the ends of the earth.” There are tales of newly elected popes suffering frayed nerves and tears on their election. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York says that Francis accepted his election “without hesitation.” Certainly, from the outset, Francis appeared self-confident and calm. In so many ways, his life and vocation, his leadership qualities, honed during ...

Table of contents

• A Personal Preface
• INTRODUCTION: Prudenza Audace, or Bold Prudence: In Pursuit of the “Francis Effect”
• PART ONE: INTERRUPTING THE CENTER
• PART TWO: CHANGING THE STORY
• PART THREE: THE QUALITIES OF MERCY
• PART FOUR: ANNUS HORRIBILIS
• PART FIVE: CHURCH IN THE WORLD
• PART SIX: BELOVED AMAZON
• PART SEVEN: CONTAGION OF HOPE
• A Personal Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Index
• About the Author