On March 13, 2013, the Catholic Church swerved to elect Jorge Mario Bergoglio, until then 76-year-old Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who chose the name of Francisco and who was considered one of the highest representatives of the Church. of the poor in Latin America. He was the first pontiff of that continent, also the first Jesuit, and he showed the will of the College of Cardinals to change the course of the Vatican, plunged into a deep crisis after the unexpected resignation of Benedict XVI.
Tomorrow, Monday, ten years will be celebrated since the election of that pope who came “from the end of the world”, as he himself said on the balcony of the central loggia of Saint Peter's Basilica. In his first speech, he already advanced that he wanted the Church to look towards the poor, and since then he focused his mission on reforming the Holy See to end corruption. Ten years later, Francis has turned the Vatican upside down by withdrawing the management of funds from the once all-powerful Secretariat of State, reforming the Vatican administration and its different dicasteries and designing a College of Cardinals with many more cardinals from Asian and African countries, something which suggests that the next conclave will not follow the traditional dynamics. “He is a Pope who has definitively separated Catholicism from the West, not only from a geographical point of view, but also through his criticism of certain forms of capitalism and the dominant economic system. He has become a political and social leader on issues such as migration, environmentalism or the fight against wars, ”says theologian Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University (Philadelphia).
Francisco, a Jesuit, made it clear from the outset that he was going to reject customary visits, such as France or Spain, to focus on the peripheries of the Church, both in countries where Catholicism is persecuted, such as Iraq, or in the most poor of the planet On his recent trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan it was evident that the muscle of the Church is in Africa, while secularization is spreading in Europe. Another of the obsessions of his pontificate has been interreligious dialogue, from the historic meeting with the Russian Patriarch, Cyril I, in 2016 in Cuba, to reaching out to Shiite Islam by visiting the great Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani in 2021, the most respected authority within the Iraqi Shiites. In 2018, he signed a historic agreement for the appointment of bishops in China, a country with which the Vatican has not had diplomatic relations since 1951, two years after the communists came to power.
A first key moment of the Argentine papacy was the family synod in 2014, in which he openly faced the most controversial issues in the Church, from the acceptance of the divorced to the embrace of the LBGT community. There he began to make enemies. Shortly after, four powerful cardinals signed the famous letter of dubia (doubts), which protested because it suggested that the divorced and remarried could receive Communion again in some cases. Nor have ultraconservatives forgiven him for reversing one of Benedict XVI's biggest measures by reimposing restrictions on Latin masses. “We were not used to seeing that there are different opinions, which can be exposed to sunlight. Bergoglio's strategy, aware that all these disagreements exist, is to make them evident in order to seek unity in diversity”, explains Iacopo Scaramuzzi, a vaticanist for La Repubblica.
These internal tensions have accompanied him throughout the decade. In another tremendously controversial synod, the one on the Amazon – some ultra-Catholics ended up throwing indigenous statues into the Tiber – he did the opposite by withdrawing and denying the possibility that some married men could be ordained in the Amazon region to alleviate the lack of priests, a recommendation of the Latin American bishops that had set off alarm bells among conservatives within the Church. “The unity is apparent but the divisions are very deep. Not only between conservatives and progressives, but there is a kind of autonomous doctrine of the episcopates that tend to ignore what the Pope says, with a particularly strong fracture in Europe and in the US”, analyzes the journalist Massimo Franco, author of The Enigma Bergoglio.
Francisco has not escaped the scourge of sexual abuse either. A very difficult moment for him was in 2018, when, on a trip to Chile, he defended a bishop accused of cover-up. Upon his return, and after the enormous criticism received in the country, he retracted his mistake, agreed to remove all the Chilean bishops and ordered a large-scale investigation. In 2019, he organized the first church summit against pedophilia. But there are still serious doubts about its effectiveness. The recent case of the Slovenian Jesuit Marko Rupnik, who abused dozens of nuns, is problematic. He was excommunicated in 2020 by the Department for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is in charge of prosecuting abuses, but his punishment was lifted shortly after for unknown reasons.
The Pope arrives at this anniversary with knee problems that have forced him to use a wheelchair, but he shows no sign of wanting to slow down and in each interview he rules out an immediate resignation. He has long since abandoned the idea of the “two or three years” that he originally envisioned as the vicar of Christ, and has recently described the papacy as a lifelong job. Without the shadow of Benedict XVI in the Vatican gardens, at 86 he faces this new phase of the pontificate with an agenda full of plans.
