Pope Francis is the first ever from the
Americas, and is regarded as an austere Jesuit intellectual who
modernised Argentina’s conservative Catholic church.
Known until Wednesday as Jorge Bergoglio, the
76-year-old is seen as a humble man who denied himself the luxuries that
previous Buenos Aires cardinals enjoyed.
He came close to becoming pope last time,
reportedly gaining the second-highest vote total in several rounds of
voting before he bowed out of the running in the conclave that elected
Pope Benedict XVI.
Groups of supporters waved Argentine flags in
St Peter’s Square as Francis, wearing simple white robes, made his first
public appearance as pope.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening,” he said
before making a reference to his roots in Latin America, which accounts
for about 40 per cent of the world’s Roman Catholics .
Bergoglio often rode the bus to work, cooked
his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina’s
capital. He considers social outreach, rather than doctrinal battles, to
be the essential business of the church. He accused fellow church
leaders of hypocrisy and forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and
ate with prostitutes.
“Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out
and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out
and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit,”
Bergoglio told Argentina’s priests last year.
Bergoglio’s legacy as cardinal includes his
efforts to repair the reputation of a church that lost many followers by
failing to openly challenge Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship.
He also worked to recover the church’s
traditional political influence in society, but his outspoken criticism
of president Cristina Kirchner couldn’t stop her from imposing socially
liberal measures that are anathema to the church, from gay marriage and
adoption to free contraceptives for all.
“In our ecclesiastical region there are priests
who don’t baptise the children of single mothers because they weren’t
conceived in the sanctity of marriage,” Bergoglio told his priests.
“These are today’s hypocrites. Those who
clericalise the Church. Those who separate the people of God from
salvation. And this poor girl who, rather than returning the child to
sender, had the courage to carry it into the world, must wander from
parish to parish so that it’s baptised!”
Bergoglio compared this concept of Catholicism,
“this Church of ‘come inside so we make decisions and announcements
between ourselves and those who don’t come in, don’t belong,” to the
Pharisees of Christ’s time — people who congratulate themselves while
condemning all others.
This sort of pastoral work, aimed at capturing
more souls and building the flock, was an essential skill for any
religious leader in the modern era, said Bergoglio’s authorised
biographer, Sergio Rubin.
But Bergoglio himself felt most comfortable
taking a very low profile, and his personal style was the antithesis of
Vatican splendour. “It’s a very curious thing: When bishops meet, he
always wants to sit in the back rows. This sense of humility is very
well seen in Rome,” Rubin said before the 2013 conclave to choose
Benedict’s successor.
Bergoglio’s influence seemed to stop at the
presidential palace door after Nestor Kirchner and then his wife,
Cristina Fernandez, took over the Argentina’s government.
His outspoken criticism couldn’t prevent
Argentina from becoming the Latin American country to legalise gay
marriage, or stop Fernandez from promoting free contraception and
artificial insemination.
His church had no say when the Argentine
Supreme Court expanded access to legal abortions in rape cases, and when
Bergoglio argued that gay adoptions discriminate against children,
Fernandez compared his tone to “medieval times and the Inquisition.”
This kind of demonisation is unfair, says
Rubin, who obtained an extremely rare interview of Bergoglio for his
biography, the “The Jesuit.”
“Is Bergoglio a progressive — a liberation
theologist even? No. He’s no third-world priest. Does he criticise the
International Monetary Fund, and neoliberalism? Yes. Does he spend a
great deal of time in the slums? Yes,” Rubin said.
Bergoglio has stood out for his austerity. Even
after he became Argentina’s top church official in 2001, he never lived
in the ornate church mansion where Pope John Paul II stayed when
visiting the country, preferring a simple bed in a downtown building,
heated by a small stove on frigid weekends.
For years, he took public transport around the city, and cooked his own meals.
Bergoglio almost never granted media
interviews, limiting himself to speeches from the pulpit, and was
reluctant to contradict his critics, even when he knew their allegations
against him were false, said Rubin.