It didn’t take that long, growing up Catholic in the strictest sense of the term, to realise the pope was a big deal. And in an age decades before social media, a remote and awful figure. Saturnine Latin face framed in a fuzzy black and white picture. He was our father in Rome, we were told. Italian. Similar in a way to a Mafia boss, but even closer to God. Not to be trifled with. Besides, he was infallible.
Human, too, obviously, but in an incidental way.
To fans, the late fallen Pope Francis was the “people’s pope”. Argentinian. A former nightclub bouncer. A Jesuit, a Catholic order famed for its learnedness, its centuries-old rebellion against the authoritarian church elite and their royal chums. Suspected Peronist.
Detractors tried to impugn him in the kidnapping by Argentine state squads of two priests who had evidently gone rogue, joining the pueblo in the barrios. Didn’t do enough to protect them against the junta, critics argued. The kidnapping victims said he wasn’t to blame. But that was only years later.
Estranged from the Jesuit leadership in Buenos Aires, Francis went to ground, apparently. When he re-emerged, he was all fired up about the poor. A ticket to success for a man who read the times. Divine intervention? Astute ecclesiastical jockeying?
The world is mourning, and in the houses of power, somewhat hypocritically, the late pope. Hypocrisy because his message of peace jarred with a world at war. He preached against the elite capture of supposedly democratic states and raised a flag against the misery of the poor and marginalised in a society driven by profit. He railed against consumerism and its corrosive effect on youth.
Critics often thought they’d caught the pope red-handed. Bloated hypocrite without skin in the game, they ranted. Lived in his own private country, with fortress-like walls, but criticised US President Donald Trump for his Mexico border wall. Surrounded by priceless artworks, attended to by a convent of docile nuns: who wouldn’t speak out against greed and other frailties from such plush lodgings, if only to ease the conscience?
Francis, meanwhile, refused to occupy the grand papal residence. Dossed down in a small room, owning only a pair of old shoes and a Bible
Francis, meanwhile, refused to occupy the grand papal residence. Dossed down in a small room, owning only a pair of old shoes and a Bible.
He broke with tradition by not having a number after his name. Just Francis. Numero nada. A no-digit troublemaker. Dangerous. Derided as an antisemite because he dared call Israel’s war in Gaza “cruelty”. Didn’t matter that he called too for the release of the hostages. Soft on Hamas, they said.
Mourned in death, ignored while alive. Writing encyclicals for the cynical late into the night, alone in his little chamber. Dragging the Catholic Church into the 21st century, a world where the once colonised are now the bulk of the church’s adherents. Retaining ancient traditions, embracing social media. The latest in a string of boat-rocking popes.
The church’s modernising tendency has a relatively short history. It was initiated by Pope John XXIII in the Swinging Sixties. He appointed the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which endorsed the revolutionary idea of having the priest face the people during the Mass, as opposed to turning his back on them. In Catholic jargon, this is called versus populum, or facing the people, the liturgical equivalent of the missionary position. Its opposite, priest with back to people, is logically called ad orientem, the preferred position before 1960.
And if you thought the Holy Trinity was the Rubik’s Cube of Catholic theology, how about an infallible, non-existent yet numbered pope?
This occurred when an editing error in the records inadvertently made up a pope who had never existed. He was John XX, an entirely fictional character discovered to be such in the early 19th century when the archives were scrutinised. Achieved nothing of import, apparently.
So every John since then is minus one. And even so, John XXIII, pope until 1963, was not the first John to be numbered as such. He was beaten to it by an “antipope” who chose the name during one of the church’s schisms back in the Dark Ages, when it was routine to have as many popes as there are ANC mayors of Ditsobotla. John nonetheless rejected the less controversial XXIV Roman numeral option, insisting on XXIII. An in-house joke, maybe.
Vatican II tried to rejuvenate a Catholic Church losing traction. The holy fathers even accepted evolution, but drew a line at the disestablishment of Adam, the first man, who was to be confirmed as a fixed and necessary feature in the otherwise godless pantheon thrown up by natural selection. No Adam, no original sin, no church. Adam and Darwin would have to learn to coexist in Rome.
On such delicate concords is the creed of fallen empires held together.
As a lapsed Catholic and a confirmed and sentimental philistine, I can only but bend a knee for the fallen pontiff. A man who put heart before mind in a world made increasingly less habitable for the meek who have yet to inherit it.
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