This week
his committee of eight cardinals began work on a radical reform of the
scandal-hit Vatican
Paul
Vallelly
Independent/UK 4 October 2013
It ought to have been, for Pope Francis, a day of happiness. It was the first visit of
his life to Assisi, the home of the saint whose name the new pontiff chose as a
kind of mission statement. But the news came in that as many as 300 migrants
were feared dead after the sinking of an overloaded boat off the coast of the
southern island of Lampedusa. “Today is a day for crying,” he said instead.
Yet that was apt too. Lampedusa, the
first European port of overcrowded call for many people fleeing poverty and war
in Africa, was the first place to which Francis travelled outside Rome as Pope.
The great saint of Assisi, who cast off a pampered life as the son of a rich
merchant to live among the destitute, may be the great exemplar of embraced
poverty. But it is in places like Lampedusa that the reality of involuntary
poverty in this globalised world is made manifest.
The figure on the cross in Assisi’s Church of San Damiano was
one, the Pope noted, on which Jesus is depicted not as dead, but alive, his
eyes open to a world in which we all need to live more simply. Francis has
embraced that by shunning his gold-leafed papal palace for the spartan quarters
of a Vatican guest house.
As a measure of his intent to turn
the Church upside down the Pope took with him the eight cardinals with whom he
had spent the past three days in a closed meeting with no Vatican officials
present. It was the first gathering of a sadical new body Francis has set up to
act as a counter-weight to the bureaucrats who form the Church’s governing
Curia.
The chosen eight have all in the
past been strong critics of the way Rome has acted as the master of local
churches around the world rather than their servant. This week they began work
on a radical reform of the scandal-hit Vatican. But they are also looking at
how to give a greater role to lay people, to women, to divorced and remarried
Catholics – who have traditionally been marginalised– and to ensure that the
Church prioritises the poor. They have discussed setting up church courts all
around the world to deal with paedophile priests more swiftly and severely.
All this was once unthinkable. But
this new Pope has given an extraordinary interview saying the church had grown
“obsessed” with “small minded rules” and lost sight of the primacy of
compassion. Without change “the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall
like a house of cards”. This week he
gave an even more startling interview in which he said the Curial court was
“the leprosy of the papacy” whose “Vatican-centric view neglects the world
around us” adding “I’ll do everything I can to change it”. Being open to
modernity, he said, is a duty.
Conservative Catholics are blanching
at all this. The moral philosopher Germain Grisez, the darling of the
conservative theology of the previous two popes, has attacked Francis for
“letting loose with his thoughts” as self-indulgentlyas he might unburden
himself with friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine”. Ouch! Yet Pope
Francis, undeterred, is revealing himself as more revolutionary with every day
that passes.
‘Pope
Francis – Untying the Knots’ by Paul Vallely is published by Bloomsbury [Abridged]
Twitter: @pvall
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