Pope Francis: A Leader with Mud on His Boots

By Greg Sheridan
March 15, 2013

The choice of the name, Francis, by the new Pope, is a stroke of genius. St Francis of Assisi is perennially the Catholic Church's most popular saint. To use the dreadful terminology of our time, St Francis is one of the most positive brands within the vast treasury of the Catholic Church.

This choice, which no doubt also reflects the Pope's spirituality, is a sign that the new man on St Peter's throne may have something of that genius for communications - or more crudely, public relations instinct - which so characterised Pope John Paul II, was so absent in the retired Benedict XVI, and is so essential in a modern pope. As Australia's Cardinal George Pell points out, the new Pope is a formidable man.

Argentina is a tough school. The Pope has done well there.

The main, indeed the only serious, reason people thought he was not a front-tier candidate before the election is his age. At 76 he is nearly the age at which Benedict became pope, only to feel he had to resign in his mid-80s.

Francis is going to be a central figure in global cultural dialogue, in the West, in Latin America, really in all parts of the world.

His election, so unpredicted, has wrong-footed the Western commentariat. This is even more the case because in many ways he defies simple labels. Is he radical, liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, democratic or authoritarian, collegial or centralist? These labels have little application in this papal election. In any event, Francis is a complex man.

Certainly, he is doctrinally orthodox. He believes in the physical resurrection of Christ, the inerrancy of scripture, the promise of eternal life. These are his central beliefs. Almost his first official statement was to point out that without a spiritual rebirth, the church is in danger of becoming just another charity. This point is important even to non-Catholics, because it will colour everything else he says and does.

Second, the Pope is socially conservative, or perhaps more correctly, morally conservative. A pope from the global south, from the developing world, was always going to be a huge disappointment to Western liberals. Catholicism in the global south is much more conservative than in the secular West.

The new Pope's position on contentious issues is the same as previous popes, but he expresses these views with what would be regarded as shocking political incorrectness in the West. For example, he describes abortion as "equivalent to a death sentence". Gay marriage, he says, is "destructive of God's plan".

In many senses the Pope wants to put the church at the service of society, but one part of that service is to point out to society, at times rather trenchantly, where it has gone wrong.

But another dimension of the Pope's identity is his passionate advocacy of the poor. Latin America is the demographic heart of the Catholic Church. It is also a continent with many millions of very poor people. Francis regards extreme poverty as a violation of human rights. Yet he is a strong opponent of the now nearly dead liberation theology movement. His own example is salutary. Despite being archbishop of Buenos Aires, he lived humbly and spent much of his own time with the poor.

In Francis, the cardinals have elected a pope who truly has "mud on his boots". But to describe Francis as a social justice pope may be something of a misnomer. Enormous amounts of fatuous nonsense, and some downright nastiness, has been promulgated by Catholic peace and justice bureaucracies in the West, so many of which were, for a time at least, captured by the political Left.


That is not Francis's way. His views seem more akin to those of Mother Theresa, who was often criticised by the Left for not taking a more systematic opposition to the excesses of capitalism. But her approach was that as a Catholic and as a human being she should provide support and solidarity for the marginalised. The technical questions about how best to run an economy so that it produces enough to sustain the basics of a good life for all its citizens is not the subject of church doctrine.

Nonetheless, as an expert in his own society, Francis has criticised both the IMF and some of the tenets of neoliberalism as it has been practised in some Latin American countries. In all of this, he is intellectually at one with his immediate predecessors. But this dimension of their statements and teachings never received much emphasis. It will be fascinating to see how Francis develops this side of his social teaching.

A few other points. His election will have an electrifying effect on all of Latin America. Argentines aren't naturally the most popular Latin Americans. They are more affluent than most of their continent and they are sometimes seen as too self-consciously proud of their European heritage. And Francis, after all, is the son of Italian migrants.

But this is a tiny qualification to what will be a continent-wide sense of vindication and arrival. Latin Americans often feel strangely isolated, despite their intimate connections to the US, and to Spain and Portugal. The continent is in some sense a world of its own. Francis himself betrayed something of this view when he said the cardinals, in selecting him, had gone "to the end of the Earth" to find a bishop for Rome.

Few Latin Americans occupy key international jobs. In many ways, the election of Francis is Latin America's most telling contribution so far to global leadership.

Although the vast majority of Latin Americans are Catholics, the church there is robustly challenged by ultra-activist, evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal movements. Something similar is happening in The Philippines. These churches are often more conservative than the Catholic Church, but they are also often more vigorous. Francis promises great dynamism and renewal in Latin America.

The old and utterly discredited allegations that he somehow didn't oppose the Argentine junta with sufficient vigour illustrate only that any Catholic cardinal anywhere in the world will confront some species of allegations about their past.

Francis faces immediate, specific challenges. He has to work out a way of confronting, in his papacy, the legacy of clerical child abuse. He must reform the Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia. This is a dull process task but it is essential. John Paul II ignored the Curia. Benedict tried to reform it but his will was too feeble. Francis is an outsider to the Curia but, as an experienced cardinal, knows all about how it operates - or, too often, doesn't operate. He needs a brilliant secretary of state whom he invests with full authority.

The main question mark over Francis is his age and health. His new job will require heroic vigour. He needs to manage himself carefully. Septuagenarians have often provided vigorous leadership: Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Konrad Adenauer. He can't micro-manage. He needs to teach and inspire.

The best form of leadership is to set the direction and appoint good people. Despite his age, Francis is emphatically post-post-Vatican II. He supports the so-called "new movements" in the Catholic Church, such as Communion and Liberation and the Neocatechumenal Way and many others which are vigorous and doctrinally orthodox.

It's a big, big job. But manifestly, he's a good man.

Greg Sheridan is foreign editor of The Australian.

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