A Pope Who Looks Beyond the Church | Eight years …

Faced with this diagnosis, Bergoglio decides, first of all, to make a personal commitment to the search for solutions to conflicts and in a way little known before in the history of the papacy. Shortly after taking office, he became directly involved in the Syrian situation, calling on world leaders to deepen the dialogue in search of a solution.

And from there, there are many occasions where Francisco, with success and failure, has played his personal prestige and also the institutional weight of the Catholic Church in finding ways to guarantee peace. As an example, it should be remembered that he tried to bring Israelis and Palestinians together and made the greatest efforts to seek peace in Colombia between the state and the FARC. In December 2014, the United States and Cuba announced a reestablishment of communications between the two countries after more than 30 years of conflict. Without denying the great role of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro in this important step, the truth is that Jorge Bergoglio was the great mediator in the shadows.

Faced with the “piecemeal” war scenario, the Pope has adopted a double strategy. The first is to add the wills of the major monotheistic religions (Jews, Muslims and Christians) and to add the leadership of their main referents in favor of this objective. To this end, he held frequent meetings with authorities of different faiths and made his reflections expressly in November 2018 when, during a visit to Myanmar and on the occasion of a meeting with religious leaders, he asserted that “peace is built in the chorus of differences. Unity always occurs with differences ”and that“ peace is harmony ”. .

For the Pope, the search for dialogue and rapprochement with Islam was particularly important.

Alliance with popular movements

Francisco’s first trip after his election was to Lampedusa on July 8, 2013, to meet the immigrants expelled from their lands, the “rejected” as Bergoglio himself described them at another time. On this occasion, the Pope warned that “indifference towards others leads to the globalization of indifference”. In this gesture at the dawn of his pontificate, Francis drew a line: the reaffirmation of the option for the poor which has been characteristic of the Latin American Church (64% of the world’s Catholics) and a call for solidarity and collective responsibility towards those who are despised and separated from society.

In these texts, the Pope raises severe criticism of capitalist society from a Christian perspective and very attached to the social doctrine of the Church from Vatican Council II (1962-1965) and worked extensively in the Church of Latin America at general conferences such as Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979) and Aparecida (2007). Apart from these institutional instances, Bergoglio’s gaze is also based on the so-called liberation theology and the theology of the people, anchored in the pastoral practice of Catholic communities engaged in popular sectors.

However, it is clear that Francisco is not a revolutionary, nor does he claim to be. You could say that he is a moderate reformer who has a very critical view of capitalism and of today’s society and who chooses to side with the poor. And in this sense, it is also a political option, choose as allies and protagonists of popular movements around the world, understanding that in these organizations lies the seed of a possible change. During his pontificate, Francis made his meeting with popular movements a regularity to which on July 9, 2015, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia), he told them that “we need and want a change” and to whom anointed by telling them that “you are sowers of change”

For many, it is Bergoglio’s translation of the message of the Argentine martyr bishop, Blessed Enrique Angelelli: “with one ear on the people and the other on the Gospel”.

The Catholic Church: the chiaroscuro

Another characteristic of the pontificate of Francis was the decision to create a Catholic Church open to the world, its problems and its difficulties. Too a Church which opens its doors to receive, to welcome and which, in this position, also exposes itself within its limits, its contradictions and its inadequacies.

The first led the Pope to speak not only for his own, but for the whole of society. Address, in their documents and in their statements, to each by discussing their attitudes and positions.

The second made it possible to show the historical contradictions of the Catholic institution, its internal quarrels, the fight against Francis himself and the many unresolved problems: economic management, pedophilia, modes of government, clerical machismo. On these and other issues, Francis’ positions were more statements than facts beyond his repeated desire for a Church “for the poor and for the poor”.. For example, it is worth saying that, for example, the announcements of the reform of the Roman Curia did not really become significant events. Perhaps because it is within the ecclesiastical institution that the greatest resistance resides, perhaps also because the Pope does not manage to form sufficiently powerful alliances in his own institution to modify a structure that is many years old. centuries that resists change. In fact, a great unresolved task is to reform the Church itself, its forms of government and the building of collective consensus.

In short: Francisco is a Pope who lives in front of society, with the stature of a cultural political leader with global repercussions, ready to look at the world “from belowAnd committing to change it, and with internal problems and resistance that it has not yet been able to resolve in the Church itself.