Sunday Times 2
Pope sees banner first year, but expectations high
View(s):From his simple sound bites to his breaking of Vatican rules, Pope Francis has made being Catholic cool in his first year.
He might not like his superstar status, but he certainly knows how to work a crowd and he has endeared himself to the public for looking out for the poor and radically shifting the church’s focus to mercy rather than moralizing.
“Now, people are happy to say ‘Well, actually I am a Catholic,’ and sometimes they’re quite keen to let themselves be known as a Catholic,” British Cardinal Vincent Nichols said. “And I think that’s the effect of Pope Francis. There is credibility around the Catholic project.”
But not everyone is thrilled and expectations are high for his second year, with high-profile travel, Vatican reform and discussion on hot-button issues like family and sex on the agenda.
Pope Francis waves to the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, the day of his election (Reuters)
The anniversary of Francis’ papacy is Thursday. Here’s a look at some key moments in Francis’ first year that give insight to what the future may hold for the 1.2-billion strong Catholic Church.
Francis the rule-breaker
Francis believes the church has too many “small-minded” rules and hasn’t been shy about breaking them. Just two weeks after being elected, he washed the feet of a woman and Muslim during a Holy Thursday ceremony reenacting Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet. Vatican rules state it should be performed on men only.
“People were reacting, ‘God, he’s breaking the rules!’” noted Monsignor Paul Tighe, No. 2 in the Vatican’s social communications office. “But in a sense he was bringing us back to the radicality of the choice of Jesus.”
Francis has declared at least two saints without going through the Vatican’s miracle-confirmation protocol, not to mention his decision to shun the papal apartments for the Vatican hotel.
Looking ahead
Francis has a high-profile trip to the Holy Land in May and a visit to South Korea in August where he will likely make an impassioned plea for peace on the divided peninsula.
In between, he must forge ahead with the unsettling reforms of the Vatican bureaucracy, where he has created a new finance secretariat to parallel the secretariat of state and where an overhaul of the scandal-marred Vatican bank looms large.
October will see the synod on the family. Surveys sent to ordinary Catholics around the world show the vast majority reject church teaching on contraception, divorce and homosexuality.
With expectations so high, it seems almost fitting that Francis marked the anniversary of his historic election on a weeklong silent retreat away from the Vatican.
But a friend, Claudio Epelman, an Argentine Jew who joined Francis for Christmas dinner for seven years while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, said Francis was up to the task.
“He will surprise us. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know,” Edelman said. “But he will go even farther than the expectations.”
© Daily Mail, London
| Pope quotes: Francis’ first year
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Thursday marks the first anniversary of the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as Pope Francis, the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years. Below are some memorable quotes from the pontiff, arranged in chronological order. -”Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.” – March 16, in an address to journalists. -”Living on 38 euros ($50) a month – that was the pay of these people who died. That is called slave labor.” – May 1, in a homily reflecting on the victims of the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed more than 1,100 people. -”If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him? – July 29, speaking to reporters aboard the plane returning from Brazil. “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?” – Nov 26, in an apostolic exhortation called Evangelium Gaudi. -”We are in front of a global scandal of around one billion – one billion people who still suffer from hunger today. We cannot look the other way and pretend this does not exist. The food available in the world is enough to feed everyone.” – Dec 9, in a video message launching a campaign against hunger. “If they are hungry, mothers, feed them, without thinking twice. Because they are the most important people here” – Jan 12, telling mothers at a baptism in the Sistine Chapel they should feel free to breastfeed their babies there. “To depict the pope as a sort of superman, a sort of star, seems offensive to me. The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps tranquilly and has friends like everyone else, a normal person.” – March 5, in an interview with an Italian newspaper. |