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Pope Francis Ten Years on

Stephanie Bennett - The Tablet - Thu, Mar 23rd 2023

Dear The Tablet Reader,

In our issue of 16 February 2013 we compared the resignation of Pope Benedict five days earlier to a final aria, possibly from an opera by his beloved Mozart. That leader article was titled A BOLD STEP – AND AN OPPORTUNITY. We noted that his legacy was more spiritual and intellectual than that of his charismatic predecessor, and we acknowledged his efforts to address the clerical sex-abuse crisis in the Church. For the next four issues it was all eyes on who would be next, and by our 16 March 2013 issue we knew the answer: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. “Bold and imaginative” was how we saw his election, the first Jesuit pope, the first from outside Europe, A POPE FOR THE WORLD. We called for the Vatican’s windows to be thrown open again to the outside world, and for Pope Francis not to let the machinery surrounding him distract from the message he has to preach.

Ten years on, many thousands of articles have been written about Francis’ papacy across a variety of global media. Fortunately for Tablet readers, our digital archive contains some of the most insightful, incisive, authoritative and well-informed writing on our current pope. Isabel de Bertodano wrote that on the eve of his inauguration, Francis called a friend in Buenos Aires to say “Hello, it’s Bergoglio. They trapped me here in Rome and they won’t let me come home.” He was speaking to an Argentine rabbi, who concluded that the Jews now have a very good partner in the Vatican. Six months into his papacy, we attempted to decode Pope Francis with commentary from three experts. His “experience of being a sinner is fundamental to the Pope’s sense of his own identity” wrote his fellow Jesuit, Michael Holman. None could be left in any doubt that the pope wanted a change of the Church’s culture and character, its priorities and structures, when his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel) came out in November 2013.

Our issue of 8 March 2014 cast a critical eye over his first year, with articles by Robert Mickens, Eamon Duffy, Julie Etchingham and Mary McAleese, the last of whom wrote that “an anti-authoritarian pope is in itself no guarantee that the Church will change, and Francis has said he wants change.” The Synod on the Family met in October 2014 and reconvened a year later, raising issues of marriage, divorce, sexuality, contraception, the well-being of women and the rearing of children.  Massimo Faggioli thought it “almost unimaginable that the process started by Francis will come to nothing.” Four powerful stories by five women in the same issue – Clare Watkins, Anna Cannon, Rose Murphy, Sophie Stanes and Deborah Woodman – on their struggles with the Church’s teaching on marriage and family, showed how much the Synod was missing by being dominated by men. Also in 2015, the pope issued his encyclical, Laudato Si’. This ‘eco-encyclical’ was the first by any pope devoted to the environment and reflects a major theme of his papacy. It was not without its opponents however, especially among conservative Republicans in the US Congress and multinational corporations, wrote Michael Sean Winters in Hostile climate.

To mark Francis’ 80th birthday in December 2016, our Rome-based correspondent Christopher Lamb wrote on the pope’s mission to continue the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, contemporary Catholicism’s defining moment – the aims of which The Tablet is committed to. Francis rejected “museum-piece Catholicism” and wanted to open the windows, as Vatican II did, to let fresh air into the Church. In the same year, Jeroom Heyndrickx wrote on Sino-Vatican relations, an area that has pre-occupied the present pope, who urgently wants to normalise the position of Catholics in China. The following year, Francis’  exhortation Amoris Laetitia opened the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to take holy communion – provoking a war amongst conservative opponents, while “among ordinary Catholics this pope’s popularity seems constantly rising”, wrote Paul Vallely. Still in 2017, Francis doubled down on his commitment to Vatican II: collegiality, synodality and subsidiarity encapsulated his vision for the Church. His legacy would be the reinvigoration of the spirit of the Council, wrote Chris Lamb. 

However, “Francis among the wolves” was the main article in our first issue in 2018. Marco Politi wrote a progress report on the Francis papacy so far, noting that while his approval rating remained high, inside the Church a sort of civil war was going on. To his critics, Francis was an intellectual lightweight compared to his recent predecessors. Much to his surprise, biographer Massimo Borghesi received a reply, in the form of four audio recordings, to a series of questions he sent to the pope which opened “the laboratory of Bergoglio’s thinking.”  2018 was a critical year for the pope; the purpose of his visit to Ireland was to celebrate family life, and inevitably the scandal of clerical sex abuse hung over his visit. We concluded that the “reconstruction of Irish Catholicism, if it is to happen, will be a long, hard process.” Francis had to look Ireland in the eye; a picture of a pensive Francis hanging his head graced our front cover one week later, with the header “A penitent in Ireland”. Inside, we reproduced the complete texts of his act of penitence, his homily at the papal Mass, and all the addresses he gave in Dublin and Knock.

By 2019 the ‘emeritus pontificate’ was under the spotlight. Was there one Pope too many? Austen Ivereigh expertly examined the tension between the two papal courts in Benedict’s runaway court, while the odd-couple pairing of Francis and his predecessor Benedict was portrayed on the big screen. Our reviewer of The Two Popes described it as almost a papal buddy movie, a tender double portrait which quietly honoured the gift of humility. 

2020 saw the publication of Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ exhortation following the Synod on the Amazon the previous year in response to the crisis in the Amazon region, both ecological and in terms of the shortage of priests in a vast region where many are Catholic. While most Western media focused on the pope’s caution in regard to ordination issues, our special report on Querida Amazonia paid particular attention to the pope’s “frozen idea of the feminine” and his deep sentimentality about women, seeing them as “the strawberries on the cake” in articles by Tina Beattie and Catherine Pepinster. As Covid-19 struck the UK and we were in the grip of the first lockdown, Austen Ivereigh obtained a rare interview with the pope, in which he spoke about working arrangements in the Vatican, and confessed to having his own “areas of selfishness” – “On Tuesdays, my confessor comes, and I take care of things there.” Later that year Francis released his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, the message of which – in a year dominated by the pandemic, populism and polarity – was “everyone is connected.”

The invasion of Iraq led by American and British forces began almost exactly ten years before Francis became Pope. In 2021 he made history by becoming the first Roman Pontiff to set foot in the land of Abraham, a visit that encapsulated the heart of his papacy and which symbolised his missionary, risk-taking approach. Amid the rubble of Mosul, he spoke about hope triumphing over hate. Six years since the publication of Laudato Si’, Austen Ivereigh assessed the impact of “history’s fattest, most read and most talked about social encyclical.” Austen concluded that it had shifted the thinking and outlook of the Catholic Church and reshaped modern theology.

The following year, Chris Lamb interviewed the papal ambassador to Britain, Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, to find out how the Holy See was working to broker peace in Ukraine. Just over a month ago, Chris accompanied Pope Francis and Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, on their historic joint ecumenical pilgrimage to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. Archbishop Welby told him on the plane back that “When the Churches work together, who in the past have literally been enemies, attacking each other…there is something spiritual that happens.”

Ten years on we can say that Francis has well and truly opened the windows, dismantled some of the machinery, and preached messages of hope, humility, peace, care for our common home as well as humanity, and justice for the poor. We at The Tablet look forward to as many more years as he can manage.

Stephanie Bennett

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