Unpacking the heavily-laden symbolism of the first appearance of Pope Francis
The extent of the revolution which has just taken place in the Catholic Church was evident when the new Pope stepped out onto the balcony of St Peters around an hour after the white smoke had emerged from the chimney of the Sistine chapel and the mighty bells of the Vatican pealed out.
The world had had a few seconds to prepare itself. The French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran who made the announcement Habemus Papem – we have a Pope – in medieval Latin revealed two things. The first was the name Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The second was the name he had chosen – Francis.
With the name Bergoglio we knew some decisive changes had been set in train. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires is the first non-European pope for 1000 years. He is the first pope from the New World, most specifically from Latin America where the majority of the planet’s 1.2 billion Catholics live. He is the first pope ever from the Jesuits, the order renowned for having produced some of the most intellectually profound, and often freethinking, church thinkers over the centuries.
With the name Francis came a signal of another new departure. No pope had ever before taken the name of the great saint of the poor, Francis of Assisi. And Bergoglio was known for his commitment to social justice and his championing of the poor of his native Argentina in the teeth of a global economic crisis whose cost fell chiefly upon the shoulders of the most vulnerable.
Bergoglio, it was known, was a humble man who had moved out of his archiepiscopal palace and into a simple apartment. He had given up his chauffeur-driven car and takes the bus to work. He cooks his own meals.
But it was when he stepped out onto the balcony that the true weight of the change became evident to the world. There was none of the double-handed boxer’s salute with which Benedict XVI had celebrated his triumph. Instead, in plain white, wearing the simplest of crosses, he gave a single wave to the assembled crowds in St Peter’s Square and then stood and just looked. He was the Bishop of Rome presenting himself to the people of Rome.
FollowWhat would Nanki-Poo have made of the Government’s modified transparency
Despite its Japanese setting, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado is shot through with lines which could only be about England. “Modified rapture,” the wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo cries in a line dripping with Gilbert’s silvery-light Edwardian self-deprecation. The joke is that there is, of course, something absolute about rapture. Modification sits as well with it as does the idea that you can be almost pregnant or a little bit bankrupt.
In Britain nowadays there is talk everywhere of the need for openness and transparency. Yet modified transparency is all that is on offer. Those in power pay lip service to openness but their ventriloquist lips open only so far.
It is tempting to wonder what the quizzical Gilbert might have made of a National Health Service in which a manager is sacked for prioritising emergency care over routine ops – and then is gagged with a confidentiality clause as part of a hush-money pay-off. Or a BBC which promises to publish all the Pollard review documents into the suppression of Newsnight’s investigation into Jimmy Savile – and then blacks out damning parts of the testimony.
Or he might have arched an eyebrow at the coyness of the confessing cardinal, Keith O’Brien. Accused of making homosexual advances to his own priests, Scotland’s senior Roman Catholic abandoned his usual bold and brutalist rhetoric in favour of fey references to “times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me”.
Cardinal O’Brien: victim, villain or both?
For a moment I felt sorry for Keith Patrick O’Brien. Here was a classic tragedy: a big man brought low by a single fault. After a life of ambitious service he had been undone by one character flaw and his fall from grace had been dramatic and swift.
But what, in that classic Shakespearean formula, was Cardinal O’Brien’s flaw? Was it, from his own perspective, his homosexual inclinations or his weakness in acting on them? Or was it, as his critics suggested, the spectacular hypocrisy of a man who was so vitriolic in his public denunciations of homosexuality turning out to have such closet tendencies?
Neither of those can be correct. The crime of the ex-Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh cannot have been being gay for, except to those who impose moral intent upon nature, being gay is not a sin. But there is a whole gradation of states between a sexual tendency and the rank hypocrisy of a cleric who proclaims a moral blueprint for how people should conduct their lives and then does not adhere to it himself.
Between homosexuality and hypocrisy lie cognitive dissonance, psychological denial, self-delusion, moral superiority, abuse of authority, institutional secrecy, wilful cover-up, unrighteous indignation and plain lying. Research from the US Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently offered evidence for what many have long suspected: that many of those most-vituperative in speaking out against gays have unconscious or repressed tendencies to homosexual attraction themselves.
Freud called this “reaction formation” – individuals inwardly struggling to stifle feelings they regard as unacceptable who then project their inward terror out on others. Suppressed homosexual urges then turn to homophobia in a form of projected self-loathing. It may explain the virulence of the bluster and bombast of Cardinal O’Brien’s public hostile to homosexuality as “morally disordered”, a “grotesque subversion” and evidence of the “degeneration of society into immorality”. But it means Cardinal O’Brien is also a victim and that, as one commentator put it, the sense of sexual sinfulness the Church has forced on him was itself an abuse.
There is more to this than being trapped in a cycle of abuse. There is an inequality of power between a spiritual director and a seminarian, or between a bishop and a priest, which adds a different abusive element to the reports that the cardinal attempted to touch, kiss or have sex with people in his charge.
And there was a fundamental dishonesty about his initial reaction to the accusations, announcing he would fight them and threatening The Observer, which broke the story, with legal action. “Initially, their anonymous and non-specific nature led me to contest them,” he said in his most recent confession. But that is deeply dishonest. He knew well what he had done. And the complainants were not anonymous; they had sent sworn and signed statements to the papal nuncio.
The interview given by one of the accusers laid bare the extent to which he had been devastatingly and deeply damaged for life by what happed; he resigned from the priesthood when Keith O’Brien was made his bishop and has undergone long-term psychological counselling. Cardinal O’Brien, by contrast, as his partial confession has revealed, hoped until the last minute that he could bluff it out, as he has done for decades. It was the response of a trapped man, and not an honourable one.
The Vatican will hold an inquiry into the O’Brien affair but it will focus on the weakness of one individual. What it needs to address is what trapped Keith O’Brien – a culture of pretence in the priesthood and a canker of secrecy at the heart of a church which has systematically placed protecting its institutional reputation above the imperatives of the gospel.
The Church Times
Is the Pope a Catholic? And what kind will the next one be?
Is the Pope a Catholic? The question – delivered, as it invariably is, with heavy irony – is not really a question at all so much as the jocular paradigm of the ultimately self-evident. Certainly it is stretching the imagination to suppose that the gerontocracy that is the College of Cardinals might over the next two weeks come up with a successor to Benedict XVI who will be anything other than a guardian of Catholic orthodoxy. Yet the coming conclave to elect a new pope may be tumultuous.
The old men who make the decisions only get to be cardinals in the first place through long compliance to canonical Catholic doctrine. Dissidents and mavericks rarely get red hats, and certainly have not done so under the last two popes. So do not expect a Pope who will overturn church opposition to gay marriage, assisted suicide, abortion or even contraception which Catholicism sees as al inextricably interwoven in its theology of life and sexual anthropology.
Change is a relative concept. This is a church which prides itself on thinking in centuries where German bishops were regarded as very bold last week for holding a three-day plenary on how to promote the role of women in the Church where two German cardinals suggested that while, of course, women could not be made priests, they might now be made deacons. What further inhibits change is that 65 of the voting cardinals were appointed by Benedict XVI and the other 49 by John Paul II who both promoted only men cast in their own conservative image. Even a figure as creatively orthodox as the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols has been denied a red hat.
That is not all. For the first time since the medieval era the outgoing pope has not died in office so the time for choosing a successor has been truncated. Cardinals from across the globe rarely meet; many hardly know one another, have poor Italian and little sense of whom to vote for. Traditionally the electors size one another up during preparations for the papal funeral meetings called general congregations in the days before the conclave, which are interwoven with their numerous receptions and dinners.
But this time there is no period of mourning. And one of Benedict’s last acts was to accelerate the process for calling the conclave. That will heighten the inbuilt tendency for cardinals to chose someone they already know. For all the talk about it being time for a pope from Africa, Asia or Latin America – people said the same thing last time – the chances are it will someone who is already a big beast in the Vatican jungle.
A chance for the Vatican to spring clean
Our cellar flooded with sewage two months ago. The pong has gone but the clean-up seems unending, with stuff moved from room to room in a protracted sorting process. It will look worse before it gets better, a friend said sagely. The same is true of the Roman Catholic Church, I thought the other day, as the accelerated departure of Cardinal Keith O’Brien followed on the heels of a papal resignation unprecedented in seven centuries.
It is only the latest of a series of damaging news stories surrounding the Vatican which have left Roman Catholics like me punch-drunk with the repeated blows. On Ash Wednesday Pope Benedict XVI publicly lamented the rivalry and disunity of the factions disfiguring the church – a not so-veiled reference to the report he had commissioned, and just received, from three top cardinals into the Vatileaks scandal where the Pope’s own butler started passing secret documents to a journalist to expose the intrigue and in-fighting inside the Roman Curia.
Italian newspapers claim that the 300-page dossier exposes that one of the Vatican factions is a gay clerical mafia, which includes several cardinals, who indulge in sauna sex parties in private lives that run entirely contrary to church teaching. It shocked Benedict into resigning, placing the dossier in a papal safe for his successor to tackle.
The Pope’s respected press secretary Fr Federico Lombardi has dismissed all this as a swirl of “gossip, misinformation and sometimes slander”. But there can be no doubt of the gravity of the moment. The historian Professor Tom Devine has described the O’Brien affair as “probably the gravest single public crisis to hit the Catholic Church in Scotland since the Reformation” whose effects are “incalculable”. And this is only the latest in a succession of scandals, around sexuality, the Vatican bank and authoritarian intolerance which secularist critics like to see as a succession of nails fired into the church’s coffin with the ferocity of a high-powered staple gun.
It may well be that we are now seeing, to mix metaphors, the chickens coming home to roost after decades of controlling clerical secrecy. But, if my friend is right in saying that things will have to look worse before they get better, it may be a necessary purgation.
Glamorising violence: a disturbing flaw in the British character
Bruce Reynolds never captured the public imagination in the way that his fellow Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs did. Biggs was the archetypal Cockney geezer whose early notoriety turned him – thanks to 36 years on the run, much of it in full public view in Rio de Janeiro – into a kind of celebrity. Reynolds, who has just died aged 81, was never that, despite the fact that he was said to be the mastermind of what was in 1963 Britain’s biggest-ever robbery.
Reynolds’ fellow criminals nicknamed him Napoleon and he too went on the run abroad for five years. But he was never the iconic figure Biggs became with his cheeky-chappie attempts to avoid the heavy-booted attempts of Scotland Yard’s comedically-named detective Jack Slipper to bring him back to face justice.
There was to be no exotic Brazilian finale for Reynolds who was captured, far more prosaically, in Torquay and jailed for ten years.
It is one of the paradoxes of the English character that it has a soft spot for villains. Many of the 15 criminals responsible for The Great Train Robbery – in which a Glasgow to London mail train was stopped and £2.6m in used bank notes stolen – became celebrities. It was as if their schoolboy-style nicknames – Buster Edwards, Roy “Weasel” James and Billy Boal – turned their violent crime into a kind of game.
The judge at their trial warned against this tendency. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Edmund Davies focused on the violence used against the train driver, Jack Mills, who was struck over the head with an iron bar with such ferocity that he was never able to work again. “Let us clear out of the way any romantic notions of daredevilry,” the judge said. “This is nothing less than a sordid crime of violence inspired by vast greed.”
But the British public is in love with false romanticism. So are their newspapers which printed chortling stories over how the villains had played Monopoly with the stolen banknotes. Buster Edwards, who was believed to have wielded the iron bar, even became the subject of a 1988 film Buster where he was played by a pop star, Phil Collins. In the English folk tradition criminals become heroes, as has been the case since the time of the murdering mugger Dick Turpin whom legend has speciously transformed into a Robin Hood figure intent upon giving the rich their deserved comeuppance in a kind of poetic justice.
The essential quality the next Pope must have
At 8pm tonight Benedict XVI will climb aboard a helicopter to leave the Vatican for the last time as pope. He leaves behind him a paradoxical legacy. Theologically conservative and institutionally authoritarian he nonetheless demonstrated a pastoral sensitivity and a willingness to dialogue with a world which is increasingly secular, at least in Europe and the United States. Ultimately history may remember him as the first pope in modern times to resign, thus redefining the papacy as a job, rather than a vocation, with particular tasks and targets. He has set a benchmark and future popes who find they are not up to the job will come under pressure to retire. His final act may turn out to be his most modernising.
Benedict’s papacy has been one that has been continually marred by scandals, originating in clerical sex abuse but culminating in systematic institutional cover-ups. They were designed to protect the Church’s reputation, but in the end undermined its moral authority. The departing Pope has been much firmer in dealing with paedophile priests and other clerical abusers than is generally supposed. But he has done it behind closed doors, thereby reinforcing the impression that the Church continues to care more about institutional self-preservation than it does about promulgating the values of the gospel. If he was a new broom he swept in the old ways.
In his fight against the entrenched resistance of the Vatican bureaucracy Benedict XVI has retired defeated. It became clear he had been out-manoeuvred five years ago when he was persuaded by Rome’s vested interests to move the reforming Archbishop Viganò, who was clamping down on internal waste and corrupt practices, and pack him off to be papal ambassador in the United States. Viganò protested, but in vain. More recently the Vatileaks scandal was spun by the Church’s spin doctors as a “what the butler leaked” romp but it emerged in court that the Pope’s butler passed the secret papal papers to a journalist because he was worried at the extent to which underlings were pulling the wool over the pontiff’s eyes.
Many believe Benedict decided on his shock resignation the day three cardinals presented him with their report into the Vatileaks affair. It is said to reveal extensive Vatican intrigue and infighting, with one of the factions reportedly being a gay mafia of high-ranking officials involved in sex romps in a sauna. Certainly the Pope has locked the dossier in his safe with the instruction that it is for the eyes of the next pontiff only.
Make no mistake, Cardinal Keith O’Brien has not resigned – he has been sacked
Make no mistake about it, Cardinal Keith O’Brien has not resigned as Scotland’s leading Roman Catholic. He has been sacked by the Pope. And that is a measure of just how grave the crisis in the world’s biggest church has become.
Cardinal O’Brien was due to retire as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh next month anyway because he will then be 75. The usual drill is for a bishop to hand in his resignation to the Pope a few months ahead of the due date and for it to be accepted nunc pro tunc which in Latin means “now for later”. The cardinal handed in his resignation in November expecting it to take effect next month, or perhaps later.
The Pope’s decision that he must stand down forthwith came just one day after a newspaper report that three priests and one ex-priest from his diocese of have complained to the Pope’s representative to Britain, the nuncio Antonio Mennini, making allegations about the cardinal’s “inappropriate behaviour” towards them in the 1980s.
All this adds to the sense of crisis gripping the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics still reeling from a papal resignation unprecedented in almost 700 years. To add to that the Pope himself in his Ash Wednesday address condemned the manoeuvring of factions within the Church who seem hellbent on overshadowing all the good the church does in social action and ethical reflection.
And only last Friday the punch drunk church was told by the respected Italian newspaper La Repubblica that a report commissioned from three senior cardinals into the Vatileaks scandal claimed that there is a gay mafia within the Vatican curia involving several cardinals and sexual shenanigans in a Rome sauna.
The paper reported that only one copy of the report exists and that it has so shocked Pope Benedict that he has locked it in a safe and left it for his successor to handle.
A Vatican spokesman has dismissed the newspaper report as lurid imaginings by malicious conspiracy theorists. But, sadly, conspiracy theorists do not have to be too imaginative or malign to match fantasy to reality in the modern day Church of Rome.
For all that there are signs in the forcing out of Cardinal O’Brien that change is possible within the Church. The outgoing Pope has been much firmer in dealing with what he described as the sex-abusing clerical “filth” in the church than was his predecessor Pope John Paul II, even if he has insisted on handling it secretly behind closed doors.
But the latest developments show something new in the Church with priests daring for the first time to complain openly about the behaviour of the bishops upon whom they depend for ecclesiastical preferment.
Perhaps the winds of change truly are beginning to blow through the windows of the Vatican. Not before time.
Stealing from the aid budget is not the answer, Mr Cameron
A man once offered to sell me an AK-47 assault rifle for £6.50. It was no bargain. We were in Somalia; in some African countries you can pick up a Kalashnikov for less than £4. War is cheap. Peace is a lot dearer. And yet there can be no development without peace. So David Cameron, on the face of it, was only talking sense when he said he may use aid money to pay the British Army to do peace-keeping in poor countries.
Much cheering from Tory backbenchers, who like a bit of red meat tossed their way. And it doesn’t come much redder than taking cash from the world’s poor to top up defence spending .
But if there is no development without peace there is also no peace without development. War does not just kill people. It destroys roads, bridges, farming equipment, telecoms, water and sanitation systems. It burns hospitals and schools. It retards trade and economic life, or completely halts it. War tears asunder the fabric of society and creates havens for international terrorists
So the first pre-requisite of sound development is preventing war in the first place. When we were writing the report of the Commission for Africa we analysed a number of studies which showed conflict prevention is far more cost-effective than military intervention. A mere $1.5bn billion could have prevented the outbreak of fighting in Somalia compared with the $7.3 billion it cost the West to respond.
What the Americans call the ‘CNN factor’ means politicians only act when the global media arrive somewhere where things have got out of hand. Too late. More unglamorous earlier action does not attract headlines, but it is far more effective and hugely cheaper.
The irony is that Britain’s Department for International Development has been a world leader in such preventative measures through the very kind of aid Mr Cameron now proposes to cut to fund the Army.
Much has been learned about what works – and what doesn’t – in aid over the past three decades. As a result there has been a massive shift to focus on what actually reduces poverty. So much so that the 2002 International Development Act makes it illegal to use aid only to boost British businesses or for other political purposes.
I was too busy to get a proper meal before the football the other night so I had a burger on the way into the ground and then I had a steak pie at half-time. I know, I know. It all illustrates how far I am away from becoming a demi-tarian.
The word demitarian has been coined by Professor Mark Sutton, who is lead author of a UN Environment Programme study Our Nutrient World: The challenge to produce more food and energy with less pollution which was published on Monday. The professor’s motivation here is environmental. Modern farming practices are destroying the natural world and the most destructive of these involve diverting vast quantities of grain into consumption by the animals we kill for meat or farm for dairy products.
A call for everyone to give up eating meat is likely to fall on deaf ears, the good professor has decided, so he is suggesting that we should all eat half as much meat as previously – thus becoming become demi-tarians.
I like the idea of this. Since 80 per cent of the nitrogen and phosphorus used in farming goes on meat production a demi-diet will lessen the demand for the amounts of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides which Unep says are causing “a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health” – creating dead zones in the seas, killing fish, threatening bees and releasing more harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But it will also be better for our individual health.
My problem is that whenever I go to a vegetarian restaurant I look at the imaginatively-prepared veggie fare before me on my plate and think: “Where’s the meat?” So the idea of there being meat, but less, maybe the answer. At a recent UN dinner the chef used two-thirds less meat but with more vegetables to make up for it and only 10 per cent of the guests complained. Our parents and grandparents ate a lot less meat than we do anyway.
The modern lust for cheap meat is what has landed us in the present horse-beef meat scandal with its mislabelled ready meals and undocumented livestock food chains in which horse from a Romanian abattoir went via a Cypriot trader to a French meat company then a French food processing company before landing on British supermarket shelves. Since then the hyper-regulated Germans have been drawn in. And now the world’s biggest food company, Nestlé, is withdrawing pasta meals in Italy, Spain and France.
One wag on Twitter suggested that Prince Charles would have been avidly tuned in to the rolling news coverage of the shock resignation of Pope Benedict XVI – and indeed would have phoned the Queen to ask: “Have you got the telly on mother?”. But is the papacy a monarchical vocation? And if it is, ought it to be? Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, in the contrasting manners of their departure, have offered illuminating answers to those questions.
Benedict’s resignation – the first for almost 600 years – highlights how for centuries the Church has been chary of papal resignations. A living ex-Pope can present his successor with a big problem. The old pope stands, however silently, as a potential rallying point for nostalgic discontent; the new pope may spend much of his time looking over his shoulder. The modern media age adds another problem. At the first sign of papal ill health an avalanche speculation and questioning will begin which could be unnecessarily unsettling.
None of that explains why Pope John Paul II struggled on in office for years despite a courageous fight with Parkinson’s Disease which meant that eventually he was unable to walk or speak normally. His public bearing of his evident suffering was central to his theology.
The man who had been a fine athlete before becoming Pope had preached much to the world about the intrinsic dignity of the human person. Each individual, being made in the image of God, is to be respected simply for their being. In a world where people are valued for what they do or own this was a radical reminder. It was at the core of his insistence on the protection of the vulnerable – the poor, the sick, the disabled, the unborn and those close to death. All have the same intrinsic value and personal dignity as any one else. To be, not to do, is enough to define a person.
Preach the Gospel always, St Francis of Assisi is supposed to have said, and if necessary use words. John Paul’s drawn-out dying was part of his witness to the world. There was nothing romantic about it. Suffering is an evil and a trial in itself, he wrote in Evangelium Vitae, but it can always become a source of good. Not to comprehend that is to disregard God and over-estimate human autonomy – one of the besetting arrogances of our age. “Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross,” he wrote elsewhere, “spiritually uniting himself to the cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed”.
Legacy of the German shepherd: Benedict XVI turned out to be a pope of surprises
When Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope in 2005 the choice divided Catholics. Traditionalists cheered the appointment of a man who as a cardinal, had for two decades ruled the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog with a mitre of iron. Liberals feared that the conclave had made the most divisive choice imaginable.
But Pope Benedict XVI turned out to be a pope of surprises – a tradition he maintained with yesterday’s shock decision to resign, something no Pope has done for almost 600 years.
The surprises began when he issued his first major teaching document. The encyclical’s subject – love – was not what had been expected from a dogmatic hardliner. From the outset he understood as Pope he had to make a gear change to a much more pastoral and inclusive approach.
For the wider public that shift did not become evident until his visit to the UK in 2010. Shriller secularists predicted the man once known as God’s Rotweiller would not be well-received with his uncompromising views on society’s rampant materialism and moral relativism. But there was a gentleness about the way this German shepherd stated his religious certainties which showed a willingness to open up a dialogue with the secular world.
Benedict XVI’s most striking quality as Pope has been his thoughtful, cultured, deeply-read intellect which has enriched the dialogue with even those who disagree with his religious conservatism. He insisted faith and reason were not at loggerheads but that the history of Western Christianity showed that the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief each add something to the other.
Early on he did not understand the impact he might have by such thinking aloud. One of his first public forays was to return to his old university at Regensberg with a lecture on Faith and Reason which carelessly quoted a medieval attack on Islam. Remarks which went unnoticed from an academic theologian, he learned, could cause riots and murder across the world when they came from a pontiff.
But by the time he spoke to Britain’s civic leaders in Westminster Hall there was a humility to his acceptance of the need for dialogue between church and state. Governments should balance the freedom of individuals with the best interests of the whole society, he warned. Short-term politically-pragmatic freedoms could have unintended and harmful consequences in complex social and ethical situations. That culture had led to the recent global financial crisis and social injustices in both the rich and poor worlds.
