Pope Francis: Not so much a reformer as a revolutionary
Radical change has become in the new norm in Rome under the first six months of the pontificate of Pope Francis. The first pope ever from the Americas has brought with him – “from the ends of the earth”, as he put it – a fundamentally new perspective. Now conservatives in the Vatican are braced for what could be, next week, a bigger change than anything so far.
A new council of eight cardinal advisers – mavericks to a man – will meet for the first time on Tuesday to offer guidance from outside the dysfunctional and self-serving Vatican bureaucracy known as the Roman Curia. The new pope from Argentina has tasked them with the massive job of reforming the Curia. The new body has been described by the leading ecclesiastical historian, Professor Alberto Melloni, of the University of Modena as the “most important step in the history of the church for the past 10 centuries”. Even allowing for a little Italian exaggeration, this is clearly a big deal.
Pope Francis caused a stir from the outset by eschewing the monarchical trappings of the papacy and presenting himself as an icon of assertive humility. But there has been much more too him than a pope who rejects the papal palace, eats at the refectory table in his hostel, carries his own bags and makes impromptu calls on his mobile to a variety of ordinary people in response to letters whose envelopes were address only to “Pope Francis, The Vatican, Rome”.
He has also been radical in his pronouncements on church teaching. On the plane back to Rome from World Youth Day in Brazil – where his final Mass had attracted three million worshippers – Francis spoke freely in answer to reporters questions on a wide range of topics. His reversal of Rome’s attitudes to gay people – “who am I to judge?” grabbed the headlines. But in 80 minutes of Q&As the new Pope signalled change in many areas.
That was a message reinforced this month when he gave a 12,000 word interview to a Jesuit publication. It sent shock waves through the Catholic Church. He criticised it for putting dogma before love and doctrine before serving the poor. It had grown “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception and become a church of “small-minded rules”. Where his predecessor Benedict XVI’s wanted a smaller purer church, Francis wanted an inclusive one which was a “home for all”.
“We have to find a new balance,” Pope Francis concluded, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. ”
Conservative Catholics have struggled with all this, stuttering that the new Pope was changing no doctrine but merely offering a different style. Many of his comments could have been made by Pope Benedict, they said, it was only Francis’s tone which was different.
FollowWhatever happened to climate change?
Whatever happened to global warming? Apart from a succession of puerile puns – fracking awful quips, as the Energy Secretary, Ed Davey, might have put it in his conference speech – the issue hardly raised its head at the Lib Dem gathering in Glasgow. It is not looming large on the Labour agenda in Brighton over the next few days. And David Cameron, who once bragged his would be “the greenest government ever”, hasn’t waved his eco-credentials for ages now.
There’s irony, then, in the fact that more than 250 climate scientists meet in Stockholm tomorrow to finalise the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When it comes out on Friday it will be the most comprehensive report on climate science ever published. It will show that scientists have upped from “very likely” to “extremely likely” their judgement that it is human activity, rather than natural variations, which have caused most of the rise in global temperatures since 1951.
Since we have the irony pot on the table, let’s ladle out another helping. While the experts have been becoming more convinced, the rest of us have been moving in the opposite direction. The number of people in the UK who think climate change is happening, and is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, is falling, polls show.
How have we arrived at this paradox of experts and public moving in opposite directions? There are two key reasons – the complexity of the science and the simplistic nature of much media reporting, some of which is wilfully ignorant.
The history behind Chagall’s Christs
For a Jew, the great painter Marc Chagall, was intriguingly obsessed with the person of Christ. The exhibition Chagall: Modern Master, at the Tate in Liverpool until next month, powerfully immerses the visitor in a dream world of love and cruelty, birth and death, myth and magic in which floating figures, symbolic shapes and strong emotive colours conjure a new kind of psychic reality.
Marc Chagall was born Moyshe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk, a city in what is now Belarus, where Jews, who were banned from key parts of Russia, were tolerated. Revealingly Vitebsk’s 60,000 inhabitants were split almost equally between Christians and Jews. That balance had a significant impact upon his formation as an artist. The division created in him not a dichotomy but an enriched ambiguity.
One of the first pictures in the exhibition is Birth painted in 1910. Chagall, the eldest in a large family, was around for the birth of all seven of his siblings. The painting depicts a scene in a Jewish shtetl in which the men wait with anticipation in a gaggle for news from the birthbed. But with the cow at the back of the room, wise men at the door, and the father secretly present at the birth, the scene has echoes of the Christian nativity, crossing boundaries in a way which was to characterise Chagall’s entire career.
The forcefield of energy which was Chagall is an extraordinary fantastical mystical jumble of images – of his native Russian homelife, of the woman who was to be the love of his life, and of scenes of Paris where he widened the artistic horizons which had blossomed in Russia. It is a world which pays homage to Orthodox iconography as much as to the influence of avant-garde Western art.
There is no doubt how important his Judaism was – the Hebrew scriptures and the community are constantly represented in his art. He quoted the Torah in Yiddish to the end of his life. But one of its most striking paradoxes is the way that in a number of paintings Jewish and Christian images sit side by side and play off one another. Chagall’s Wandering Jews move amidst a landscape dominated by churches and suffer beneath the shadows of Christ upon the cross.
Chagall painted more than 100 scenes of Jesus and the crucifixion throughout his life. After early allusions it was absent from his work for two decades until the figure of Jesus made an eerie return in 1930 after the painter, on a visit to Berlin, witnessed an increasing tide of German anti-Semitism and was seized by a premonition of catastrophe. But it was from 1938, when news of the Nazi concentration camps began to leak through to the outside world that Christ on the cross became a recurring emblem.
This will not be a Just War, Mr Obama
The aptly named Samantha Power clearly takes a dim view of the United Nations. Which is a shame since she is the United States’ new ambassador to the UN. But Ms Power clearly thinks that the body is not doing the job it was set up to do after the Second World War when the international community wanted a way of establishing a global consensus to act as a brake on the arrogant predations of a single powerful nation such as Nazi Germany.
An effective UN, she reasonably argues, should prevent President Assad of Syria from perpetrating the mass murder of his own citizens, whether by poisonous gases or conventional shells and bombs. Instead, it has acted as a brake only on those such as Barack Obama who want to curb the murderous intent of Assad and his cronies. “The system devised in 1945 precisely to deal with threats of this nature,” says Power, “did not work as it was supposed to.”
Her argument continues thus. International law is not just stopping the good guys from keeping the bad guys under control. It is allowing Russia to protect its prerogative to obstruct action against its Syrian ally. Such ineffectual international law is best ignored. David Cameron clearly believes the same thing, though he bungled his chance to get Parliament to back a military strike on Assad.
But the Washington argument is only partially true. In its lifetime, the United Nations has been an imperfect tool in constraining the power of bully-boy nations. The UN has no big stick to wave when nations violate its resolutions. From Bangladesh in the 1970s, through Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, and Darfur a decade later, to Syria today, the UN has seemed powerless to intervene in genocide and crimes against humanity.
Over the years this has provoked repeated calls for reform of the UN and its Security Council, which also is seen as reflecting the balance of power in 1945 rather than a modern era in which new powers such as Brazil and India are emerging. The trouble is there is never any consensus on how the UN should be reformed. So the most common response, among those frustrated by UN processes, has been unilateral military action. In Bosnia, Kosovo, Mali and Sierra Leone that was both morally and politically justifiable. In Iraq – and in the Russian invasion of Georgia – it was not.
There is an obvious reform that would restore the original purpose of the UN to establish international consensus against the wayward exercise of power by the mighty. It is to remove the veto of the major powers in the Security Council. The veto of Russia – and also of China, though its motives have been largely unscrutinised in recent debate – is what has thrice protected the Assad regime, since only the Security Council can authorise lawful military intervention.
A shiver of apprehension ran down my spine when I heard that Downing Street has said the UK is drawing up contingency plans for military action in response to the chemical weapons attack in Syria. And the Foreign Secretary William Hague said that unilateral military action might be needed without the sanction of the United Nations.
We have been here before, as we were reminded when Tony Blair joined the debate this week and said that the enduring controversy over his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 should not stop politicians from acting now on Syria. We should stop wringing our hands, he said. But military action is the only alternative to hand-wringing. It is by no means clear that all other means are exhausted.
In the United States President Obama painted himself into a corner last year by saying the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” which, if crossed, would force US intervention.
Now they have indisputably been used. Yet though the West seems of one mind that the Assad regime is responsible we have not yet seen the proof, and that matters. Chemical weapons, Washington said this week, were a “moral obscenity”. Some weapons are certainly more horrific than others. Chemical weapons raise our levels of disgust and outrage. But it is not clear that they alter the moral argument.
An application of the precepts of the just war shows this. Intervening to prevent the killing of children and other innocents is clearly a just cause. Right intention is evident too. But the just war criteria demand that force is a last resort, has competent authority, is proportionate and has a good prospect of success. None of these are fully present.
Though the international diplomatic situation is fixed it is not yet a stalemate. Russia has made movement in agreeing to force Syria to allow UN weapons inspectors to the site where 300 or more died last week. Competent authority would suggest a resolution by the UN Security Council, on which Syria’s allies Russia and China have a veto. The requirement is not absolute; Kosovo was a just intervention without a UN resolution but Iraq showed how problems can arise from precipitate action.
A shiver of apprehension ran down my spine when I heard that Downing Street has said the UK is drawing up contingency plans for military action in response to the chemical weapons attack in Syria. And the Foreign Secretary William Hague said that unilateral military action might be needed without the sanction of the United Nations.
We have been here before, as we were reminded when Tony Blair joined the debate this week and said that the enduring controversy over his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 should not stop politicians from acting now on Syria. We should stop wringing our hands, he said. But military action is not the only alternative to hand-wringing. It is by no means clear that all other means are not exhausted.
In the United States President Obama painted himself into a corner last year by saying the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” which, if crossed, would force US intervention.
Now they have indisputably been used. Yet though the West seems of one mind that the Assad regime is responsible we have not yet seen the proof, and that matters. Chemical weapons, Washington said this week, were a “moral obscenity”. Some weapons are certainly more horrific than others. Chemical weapons raise our levels of disgust and outrage. But it is not clear that they alter the moral argument.
An application of the precepts of the just war shows this. Intervening to prevent the killing of children and other innocents is clearly a just cause. Right intention is evident too. But the just war criteria demand that force is a last resort, has competent authority, is proportionate and has a good prospect of success. None of these are fully present.
Logic and facts are not important to the critics of Britain’s aid budget
The nation’s mean-spirited malcontents rejoiced this week at the news that £480,000 of British food aid had been destroyed by al-Qaeda affiliates in a warehouse in Somalia. Aid money wasted, hah! Hot on the heels of their glee over a UKIP MEP’s comments about “Bongo Bongo Land” it was another high day for the lobby of right-wing politicians and newspaper populists who constantly call for charity to begin at home, though most of them are not notably prominent in promoting domestic charities either.
Yet the two cases highlight one of the paradoxes of aid as well as laying bare the naked prejudice which lies behind much of the opposition to David Cameron and George Osborne’s decision to stick by the commitment to spend 70 pence of every £100 in Britain’s national budget on what the Archbishop of York has called our “social and moral obligation to help eradicate the unnecessary suffering of others”.
The cry has been that, because this is a time of relative austerity in Britain, we should cut our aid to the most vulnerable. There is a flaw in that logic, which does not matter to those for whom it is merely a thinly-veiled exhortation to selfishness. The truth is that, for all the wild exceptions that opponents eagerly seek out, the vast majority of aid works. And though, even after the pledge by successive governments to increase spending to £11bn by 2015 we spend less than a penny in the pound on aid, those pence buy much more in poor countries than they would here.
The case for aid relies on a both moral imperative and pragmatic self-interest. To placate its right-wing backbenchers the Tory-led coalition has shifted the balance between the two so that by 2015 almost a third of British aid will go to “fragile states”. Countries which exist in a state of economic insecurity are bad for their citizens, the argument goes, and are bad for Britain too since they are seedbeds from which economic migrants, disease and international terrorism spread.
But giving aid to such places is not easy. Somalia is a nightmare for aid workers. There are many rival factions to keep happy. Aid is seen as biased because donor agencies like USAid are transparently political in their manipulation of aid. The Islamist group al-Shabaab, which controls many rural areas of the country, insists that Somalia has a drought but no famine. Famine is a political construct, it says, by the United Nations, Western powers and African Union powers to bolster the official government in the cities. Destroying stores of food aid thus becomes a political act – and one which is popular with the people because a large percentage of commercially-imported food and medicines are out of date.
The tricky politics of all this has not been helped by opportunistic comments from the Labour party whose spokesman sniped that the Somalia incident “raises fundamental questions about the Government’s competence”. It does not. It merely spotlights the difficulty of giving aid in conflict zones. Aid is far more effective in stable states like India. But then critics complain about giving aid to developing countries that are relatively rich – neglecting to acknowledge that there are still more poor people in India than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and that, without aid, economic growth will not trickledown to the poorest people. There is nothing simple about giving aid to people who live on the edge but the British government is making a pretty good job of it, all in all.
Paul Vallely is an associate of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester
from The Church Times
A letter to David Cameron from His Excellency the Ambassador for BongoBongoLand
Dear Prime Minister
As the Ambassador to the Court of St James representing the Government of BongoBongoland I am writing following the disparaging remarks of the British politician Godfrey Bloom, of the UK Independence Party, with regard to the British aid budget and its contribution to the economic development of my country.
You might suppose that I want to join the chorus of condemnation of the Ukip MEP’s offensive and erroneous characterisation of the people of BongoBongo as designer-wearing, Ferrari-driving owners of swish apartments in Paris. But you would be wrong.
Robust politically-incorrect language is part of the lexicon of popular public debate. Mr Bloom is an oafish clown who seems to have escaped from the set of a 1950s Carry On Up the Cliché comedy in which he would have been played by veteran comedian Jimmy Edwards propping up the bar of the Dog and Gun in the gin-and-Jag belt of some golden age Home Counties fantasy. But we can live with his language and evaluate it as we would his comments on one of his Yorkshire constituents as “the most delicious bimbette – absolutely thick, but good tits”.
This was, after all, the man who, as a member of the European Parliament’s women’s rights committee, opined that trafficked sex slaves were prostituted because they liked the job and if they didn’t would find work “as a Tesco check-out girl instead”. I think others can form their own views on Mr Bloom without help from me.
His caricature of the people of my country is about as accurate as characterising the United Kingdom as WongaWongaland, a country whose citizens are payday-indebted, tax-dodging, child-abusing, internet trolls – whose politicians are all Ukip Victor Meldrew sound-alikes of the ilk I believe you yourself, Mr Cameron, once described as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. Bongo is, in any case, far preferable to Wonga since, as you will doubtless already know, ubongo is Kiswahili for brain. Far better brainy than distrainy.
No, it is not the demotic language which concerns me. Far more disquieting is the response of those of your politicians and populist papers who took the line that Bloom’s language was offensive but his views on British aid were sound. The opposite is the case. The language might be dismissed as risible – but his views offend against the truth.
A priest of St Francis who was a prophet before his time
I took the first copy of my new book on Pope Francis last week to the church in which I grew up in Middlesbrough. Aptly enough the church is dedicated to St Francis, though that was not the reason I chose it. Rather I was there because it was the retirement Mass for the parish priest, Fr Peter Keeling, who has presided over many of the major events in the Vallely family across the years.
His farewell homily was a masterclass in priestly virtues. It began, as had that first appearance on the Vatican balcony of the new Pope, with an appeal to the people before him. He first apologised for what he may have got wrong over the years. By way of example he recalled the occasion when an elderly couple asked him to remember their dead son during morning Mass. When the crucial moment came Fr Peter momentarily forgot the first name of the man for whom they were to pray. He made a stab at it, and knew immediately that he had got it wrong.
Throughout the service he was seized with remorse. As soon as it was over he changed out of his vestments and rushed to the couple’s home. They opened the door with some surprise at seeing the priest they had seen on the altar only moments before. But they did not seem concerned at his abject apology. “Actually Father we didn’t hear because we didn’t have our hearing aids switched on. We often don’t at Mass.”
But if the leaven of humour is an essential part of the good news that is the gospel, so is the passion for justice. “It’s a pity, Father,” one older parishioner had commiserated, “that they never made you a Canon, like they did with previous parish priests”. Fr Peter had only laughed: “If they ever make me a Canon,” he quipped, “you can take me out and fire me”. His commitment to justice and peace causes had led to a number of run-ins with the authorities, ecclesiastical and civil, but he saw their disapprobation merely as confirmation that he was acting on an imperative that the Second Vatican Council had declared to be constitutive to the preaching of the gospel.
Many Roman Catholics had begun to fear that men like Fr Peter were to be replaced by a generation of pietistic priests turned in on the inner sacramental life of the church rather than on the outworking of gospel values in our wider culture. The election of Pope Francis – for whom Francis was not so much a name as a programme or action – has rekindled the hope that the Church will once again move in the direction on which priests like Peter Keeling were so focused.
Paul Vallely’s biography of the new Pope Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
has just been published b
y Bloomsbury at £12.99
Buy it here
Reviews:
Peter Stanford in The Sunday Times says:
“Paul Vallely’s biography of Francis…stands, in terms of seriousness of purpose and depth of understanding, head and shoulders above other recent rushed cuttings jobs”
Read Peter Stanford’s review in here: Sunday Times review of Untying the Knots
Mark Lawson in The Guardian:
“Vallely gives riveting accounts of the “conclaves” in which first, in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger was named Benedict XVI to follow John Paul II and then, in 2012, the first pope from the Americas was selected to succeed Benedict.”
“tough-minded analysis… lifts the book well above the nervous reverence of much papal biography, and should recommend it to an audience broader than Catholics”
“reads like a lost, unexpectedly literate chapter of The Da Vinci Code”
“it’s hard to imagine the rapid papal biography being done better”
read Mark Lawson’s review in The Guardian here
Michael Walsh in The Tablet:
“thoroughly convincing”
“Read this book, forget the rest”
read Michael Walsh’s review in The Tablet here
Raymond A Schroth SJ, in the US Jesuit magazine America:
“At last a book has put both Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, and Pope Francis in context, and explained the mystery of this man who seems to have come from nowhere to lead the Catholic Church at a critical time.”
“an honest portrait”
“Vallely meticulously assesses his subject”
read Raymond A Schroth’s review in America here
Luke Coppen in The Independent:
“Vallely skilfully unravels the competing narrative threads, without ever oversimplifying either Argentine politics or the new Pontiff’s complex personality”
“for such a sophisticated biography to appear now, less than six months after the papal election, is little short of a publishing miracle”
read Luke Coppen’s review in The Independent here
John Wilkins in the Church Times:
“in a different class from other instant biographies”
“a compelling account”
read John Wilkins review here: Church Times review of Pope Francis – Untying the Knots
Untying the Knots reviewed in The Economist:
“This book demonstrates that Pope Francis is a tougher, more complex figure than meets the eye. A turbulent life has given the pontiff a subtle sense of the realities of power, and the courage to act on it. Anybody who reads this book will eagerly await his next move.”
read The Economist review here
Tim Byron SJ reviews Untying the Knots in Thinking Faith – the online journal of the British Jesuits:
‘Untying the Knots’ – is a stroke of genius. It expresses succinctly but also with a certain profundity the challenge at hand.
“great insight”
“a contemporary biography with the cadences of a film script”
Vallely is an excellent, well-connected writer, and Pope Francis: Untying the Knots is an engaging and thoughtful read throughout. He turns out to be a good ‘untier’ of the knots
read Tim Byron’s review here
Tom Heneghan, religion editor, Reuters, writes:
“Paul Vallely’s Untying the Knots fills the gaps left by ‘instant books’ on Pope Francis”
Read Tom Heneghan here
John Cornwell in the Times Literary Supplement
“Vallely’s book is a formidable achievement”
Read John Cornwell’s TLS review here
Interviews:
listen to Sean O’Rourke’s interview with Paul Vallely on Today on RTE here
listen to Paul Vallely interviewed by William Crawley on The Sunday Programme on BBC Radio 4 here: Paul Vallely Interview on the Sunday programme
listen to Paul Vallely interviewed on Sunday Sequence on BBC Radio Ulster on BBC Radio here: Paul Vallely interview 4th August 2013
Watch Paul Vallely talking about the book on BBC TV here: BBC_World_News_2013-08-05_12-46-05
Buy Pope Francis – Untying the Knots here
I am taking a break from journalism to write a biography of the new Pope
Pope Francis – Untying the Knots will be published by Bloomsbury in July
Nothing sells newspapers like a combination of depravity and self-righteous indignation. There can be no dispute about the depraved behaviour of the gang of Oxford men just convicted of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 11. They were found guilty of 23 rapes, 15 conspiracies to rape and offences including trafficking, sexual exploitation and having sex with a child. The detail of the cases, which involved torture, was so shocking that much of it was not reported in the media. But where the press was unrestrained was in the almost gleeful tone with which it was reported that the men were Asians and their underage victims were white girls. Much of the coverage has been an exercise in covert racism.
The case, like the one in Rochdale last year, has proved a great stick with which to beat multicultural notions that social harmony in Britain is best served by celebrating every culture. The assaults grow out of Pakistani culture, it is hinted. Or, more insidiously, it is suggested that Islam is somehow to blame with observation that what unites the offenders is their religion. “The rapists are all probably in one sense ‘good’ Muslims, praying and fasting in the daytime, then prowling and preying at night,” opined one particularly rebarbative columnist in the Catholic Herald. The overt racists of the British National Party insinuate that it reveals something rotten at the heart of Islam itself.
What is really to blame, it is more generally suggested, is an over-sensitivity by police and social workers terrified of being accused of racism. “Sensitivities over race should not be allowed to take precedence over children’s safety,” editorials have pontificated, as if anyone could seriously hold the opposite view. All this is accompanied by sanctimonious assurances that no-one is suggesting that all Asians, Pakistanis or Muslims should be tarred with the same smeary brush. But much of the coverage subliminally invites exactly that demonising inference.
A variety of statistics have been trotted out to supposedly substantiate this. Yet academics seriously studying the phenomenon say that figures have been used selectively and out of context to create certainties where none exist. Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the Rochdale offences took place, insist 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white – and groom children via the internet or by worming their way into the affections of their mothers before abusing them in their own homes.
The leader of the Rochdale grooming gang has since been jailed for attacking a young Asian female. A Bangladeshi father has recently revealed his daughter is being groomed by a Turkish gang who have been giving her heroin. There are court cases in the legal pipeline involving sex gangs which are white, mixed race or with men of African as well Asian origin. None of these, I predict, will create the same media outcry.
To say that is not to deny that there are not serious issues for the Asian community to address. But across an increasingly wide scale Asians are doing that. read more…
