In his first year in office, Pope Francis has transformed the image of the papacy. His demonstrative lack of ostentation has been an extraordinary contrast with almost all his predecessors. From the moment he signed out of his own hotel room after being elected pope, rather than sending a flunky to do it for him, he has shown a remarkable gift for public humility. He has refused to live in the papal apartments. He has described himself as first and foremost a sinner. He washed the feet of Muslim immigrant women to make a traditional gesture of humility reach out into the modern world. He has refused to criticise gay people, asking “Who am I to judge?” and then confirming the appointment of a man thought to be in a prolonged gay affair to a key job cleaning up the Vatican. But what, in substance, has he actually achieved?
The transformation of the image of the papacy is a real achievement. It does not in itself attract people back to the church, but it does remove a gigantic obstacle to their return. It is also clear that he thinks he was elected to do a great deal more than that. However, so far, everything he has accomplished is personal and could die with him. He is 77 and has only one lung. If Francis lives long enough, he may well follow his predecessor’s example and retire when the job becomes too much, after which his successor could undo everything in a year. So he needs to make large and lasting changes in policy and in culture. These will be extraordinarily difficult and have only just begun, but we can see already the direction he is heading in.
The temptation for observers is to look at the policies of the church and ask which of these he will change. But policy in the long run matters much less than culture: Written rules matter less than unwritten ones. A clear example of this is the experiment of married clergy undertaken by Pope Benedict XVI with the so-called Ordinariate of Anglicans who left their churches after women were ordained.
For the Roman Catholic church to lift the compulsory celibacy of a whole class of parish priests for the first time since some Orthodox-rite churches in the Ukraine were absorbed in the 17th century was a monumental change of policy. But because the new groups had essentially sold themselves to Rome on the basis of a fantasy — there were claims at the time that hundreds of thousands would follow them — they have had no effect on the wider culture of the church and have recently been rebuked by the cardinal in charge of them for bitterness and backbiting.
Celibacy among the clergy is one of the policy challenges that Francis must deal with: It comes after the treatment of remarried divorcees, who may not at present take communion even though this ban is fairly often ignored — and of course the ban on artificial contraception.
All these are instances of policies that the Vatican imposed, or attempted to impose, on a church that does not believe in them. It is not just the laity who reject them, but large parts of the clergy and the bishops, even if almost all have been too frightened to say so until now. The Roman Catholic church is, after all, an autocracy in which the punishment for disobedience can be arbitrary and cruel.
Francis believes in obedience, but he was cured of a belief in autocracy by his traumatic experiences in the Argentinian dirty war, when he was the young leader of the Jesuit order there and enormously unpopular with his subordinates for attempting to override their judgements. But how does an autocrat dismantle the structures of autocracy? How can he turn the Vatican bureaucracy into the servant of the wider church rather than its master?
This is where he reaches the limits of one man’s power and it is also where he has been recruiting allies all around the world. His appointment of a group of eight cardinals — variously liberal and conservative but all equipped with dislike and suspicion of the Vatican based on personal experience — promises lasting institutional change, of the kind that will be hard for any successor to reverse.
Later this year, there will be a huge conference of bishops from around the world on Catholic sexual teaching — the Synod on the Family. Here too the preparations reveal the shape of an alliance that can repeal some of the mistakes of autocracy. Questionnaires sent out to churches around the world have once more revealed the extent to which the laity have completely rejected the official line on artificial contraception and on remarriage after divorce. Both are prohibited in official teaching, though in both cases, there are workarounds: Rich or well-connected Catholics can get their failed marriages annulled, which leaves them free to marry in church again, while the official church promotes a frankly incomprehensible distinction between natural and artificial birth control. The difference, so far as the laity is concerned, was summed up by the late Duke of Norfolk, Britain’s most senior Catholic layman, who complained that the problem with the rhythm method is that it doesn’t bloody work.
The bishops’ conferences have responded either by publishing the results — as the German and Japanese have, which shows the extent to which the laity reject the teaching — or by suppressing the results, as the English have. There is fierce traditionalist opposition to softening the line on contraception and remarriage. However, Francis understands that the church can only be governed by consent and also that it can only be changed by consent. In his first year he has done all that one man can do. Now we will see if he can get his church doing it too.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Andrew Brown writes on religion. His most recent book is Fishing in Utopia, which won the 2009 Orwell Prize.
