“Pope Francis After One Year”

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. The Boston Globe Paul Vallely Author, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots March 24, 2014 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Our first speaker [is] Paul Vallely, the author of a wonderful new book called Pope Francis: Untying the Knots that has been raved about by every reviewer. PAUL VALLELY: I just want to tell you something about how I came to write the book, and I want to highlight three things about it, which I think would be useful to you, in watching the way that the papacy developed. It grew out of a paradox, essentially. When the Pope stepped out on that balcony in St. Peter’s, we were swiftly told, those that didn’t know, that he was a man who took the subway, not chauffeur-driven cars. He turned down his lavish palace in Argentina, as he’s now done in Rome, and he cooked his own food in a two-room apartment. So things that come from Buenos Aires are being reproduced in Rome. So on the balcony, an icon of simplicity and of hope, a new pope in plain white. He wanted to be blessed by the people before he would bless them. He wore a plain metal cross instead of one made of gold and jewels. And he said that the Church of Rome was one which presides in charity over all the other churches, and the scholars watching, whether they were Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant, knew immediately that this was a quote from a first century saint, Ignatius of Antioch, and decoded it signaled an intent to restore collegiality inside the Church, but also between the churches, undermining a thousand years of papal monarchy. So this was big stuff. A pope who offered his first blessing, not just to the faithful, but, in the language of the Second Vatican Council, to all people of goodwill. A new pope. A fresh start. ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely March 2014 And he was on the balcony less than ten minutes, but in that time, he packed in a huge amount of symbolism of so many kinds, and it was his first indication, in his plainness and his simplicity, that power resides in humility. But he was making it clear that things were going to be different from now on. But then, the next day, the newspapers, certainly in the UK and I think in Argentina and probably around the world, were filled with allegations that this same man hadn’t behaved well during Argentina’s Dirty War in the ’70s and ’80s, when the military dictatorship eliminated 20 or 30,000 of its opponents or, indeed, anybody it felt was too critical, by drugging them and dropping them alive from aircraft. And Francis, who was then plain Father Bergoglio, had not spoken out against these military death squads. He’d been complicit in his silence, the allegation was, and, worse still, there were stories that he’d betrayed two Jesuits to the military, who had kidnapped and tortured them. The Vatican denied it all on his behalf, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they? And the critics in Argentina were running plausible-sounding allegations. So I got a call from the publisher, because I’d written something about that first appearance on the balcony in the newspaper, saying would I write a book about which of these was the true Francis? And I said to them, “Are you looking for a pro-Francis book or an anti-Francis book?” Because I’ve worked for publishers before, as I suspect some of you have. And it’s no good delivering a book that they then don’t like. And they said, “We’ll print whatever you find,” and that was the right answer as far as I was concerned. So I began with a completely open mind, and I was really shocked when I began to contact the people I knew in the Jesuits to say, “Who is this man, Bergoglio?” And one of them passed on to me an email, which he’d had a few days before the election, and it was from a very senior priest who was the current leader of the Jesuits in another Latin American country, serving provincial, and he wrote this: Yes, I know Bergoglio. He’s a person who’s caused a lot of problems in the society and is highly controversial in his own country. In addition to being accused of having allowed the arrest of the two Jesuits during the time of the dictatorship, as provincial, he generated divided loyalties. Some groups almost worshipped him, while others would have nothing to do with him, and he would hardly speak to them. It was an absurd 2 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely March 2014 situation. He’s well-trained and very capable, but he’s surrounded by this personality cult, which is extremely divisive. It will be a catastrophe for the Church to have someone like him in the Apostolic see. He left the Society of Jesus in Argentina in ruins, with Jesuits divided, institutions destroyed, and financially broken. We have spent two decades trying to fix the chaos this man left us. This was an extraordinary thing to read, and it wasn’t a lone voice. Three other very senior Jesuits told me similar things. And, indeed, the level of discontent within the Jesuits that, within hours of this kind of stuff going out, or circulating in private, or on emails and on the Internet, an instruction had gone out from the head office of the Jesuits in Rome, ordering Jesuits around the world to be more prudent in their recollections and to keep to themselves any unhappy memories they might have of the new pope. So what, I wondered, could generate this strength of feeling? And I set out to Argentina to find out. And the book tells the story, and what I want to do this morning is just highlight three things from the book, which I think will throw light on what kind of pope Francis is going to be. And the first is something about his style of religion, which is not much written about. The second is about the style of his leadership, in which I’ll touch on the topics of sin and humility. And the third is his relations with the Vatican when he was an archbishop. And all of these, in my view, have a major bearing on the shape of his papacy. So, first, his religiosity, actually, I use in a neutral term, not in a negative one. Secular media haven’t written much about this, the religious side of Francis. He was the eldest of five children from a busy and chaotic family, but his mother was temporarily paralyzed by one of the other births, and his grandmother, Rosa, stepped in and took the young Bergoglio off to her house every day, and he was with her all day, every day, and she just brought him back in the evenings. So it was his grandmother who really brought him up, and she taught him how to pray. She’d arrived in Argentina from Italy in 1929, just six years before her grandson was born, and although Bergoglio was born in Argentina, he was raised on pasta and a culture of — and a faith which was distinctively Italian. Hers was what intellectuals might dismissively call a peasant faith. She told him stories about the saints. She was particularly devoted to 3 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely March 2014 the Virgin Mary. The rosary was a key part of her life. Her faith was very colorful and emotional and full of novenas and processions and shrines and pilgrimages. And Bergoglio became very rooted in that view of religion, and it is still important to him, and it brought him into conflict with people in the Jesuits, who held a more intellectual view and regard that kind of religion as superstitious, which he has never done. He sees that as how ordinary people connect with God. And Argentinean Catholicism is replete with examples of this kind of folk religion, and I give lots of interesting examples in the book. But it brought him into conflict with some in the Jesuits, and even his scholarly predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, went to Latin America and warned the bishops there against what he called “deviated forms of popular religiosity.” Popular piety said Pope Benedict can incline towards the irrational. Now, this is something that Pope Francis does not agree with at all. He’s always been a good deal less suspicious of folk religion, and to him, the strength of Catholicism is the way simple people live their faith. And Grandma Rosa was a touchstone of that. And now as pope, and throughout his life as a priest, the first thing he does in the morning and the last thing he does at night is turn to his prayer book, which priests called a breviary, and inside his breviary are two pieces of paper, both written by Grandma Rosa. One was a letter that she wrote to him when he became a priest, and she thought she might die before she saw that day, so she wrote down what she wanted to say to him. She didn’t die, fortunately. And the other was her kind of last will and testament, spiritually, to her grandchildren about how they should live their lives.

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