“Pope Francis After One Year”

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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. And Bergoglio has remained faithful to the style of this spirituality with which she imbued him, and he thinks that the clever have something to learn from the simple and the poor.

So moving to the second area is leadership style. Bergoglio is sometimes said to be the first pope who was ordained a priest after the Second Vatican Council. That was the Great Revolution, which occurred in the Catholic Church in the ’60s and transformed the Church from a body which was turned in on its own in a sacramental life to one which was prepared to engage with the outside world and embrace what was good there and seek to change what was not.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

But Bergoglio’s formation as a priest and as a Jesuit in the early ’70s was essentially pre- Vatican II in its style and content. And in his first interview as pope with Antonio Spadaro for a series of Jesuit publications, Francis reflected on this quite critically, and he said, “Unfortunately, I still need philosophy from textbooks, which came from decadent Thomism.” Thomism is the deep tradition, philosophical tradition growing from the work of Thomas Aquinas, who many think is the Church’s greatest philosopher, from the high point of the Middle Ages.

But at the time Francis was being formed and ordained, Jesuits, like many other priests in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, were split between those who wanted to embrace the changes of the Vatican Council and those who wanted to preserve more traditional forms and attitudes.

In Argentina, the division went particularly deep, between those who wanted to embrace what was called liberation theology, the idea that the poor in the slums need an economic and a political liberation as much as a spiritual one — or as well as a spiritual one. And the other side of the divide was those Jesuits who wanted no change in the way they did things and in their primary work, which was educating the children of the country’s elite.

The traditionalists were backed by Argentina’s secular bishops outside the Jesuits. They were deeply conservative, and they feared that talk of a preferential option for the poor — a phrase from liberation theology — was a way of letting atheistic communism in through the back door. And this was the height of the Cold War, remember. And the Vatican also didn’t like liberation theology, because it essentially had a bottom-up methodology, and that challenged the top-down authority of Rome.

Now, at this time, the leader of the Jesuits in Argentina was called Father Ricardo O’Farrill. He was a sociologist who’d embraced the changes of Vatican II and of liberation theology, and he encouraged the Jesuits in Argentina to work with poor people in the slums, sometimes alongside Marxist activists. Many existing Jesuits were unhappy with the rapid change of pace under O’Farrill, and they lobbied the Jesuit Curia in Rome, the head office, to remove him from office. And Rome, fearful that a split was developing in the Argentinian province, agreed, and O’Farrill was removed in what was effectively an internal coup. And in his place, they put 36-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

Bergoglio was a charismatic figure. From his very early years, he’d been really highly regarded by both his fellows and his superiors, so much so he was made novice master, in charge of the training of new Jesuits, even before he’d taken his final vows. And just three months after he’d taken those perpetual vows, he was made provincial.

He was an unflinching traditionalist at this point, and he set about reversing many of O’Farrill’s reforms. He made changes in the liturgy, replacing some of the modern Vatican II songs with preconciliar songs and psalms and plainchant, and he changed the curriculum in the seminary, removing Vatican II-inspired books from the reading list, and even taking them out of the library.

He brought in conservative lay professors to replace teachers he considered too progressive, and liberation theology was forbidden, and he banned his priests from working with political organizations, with unions, with cooperatives, even with Catholic NGOs in the slums.

And what was most unforgiveable to many Jesuits was he handed over control of one of their universities to a right-wing Peronist organization called the Iron Guard, to which he was the spiritual advisor. And to give you a measure, in those days, the man who later became known as the archbishop who took the subway was driven around in a chauffeur- driven car chauffeured by other priests.

So this new provincial, very dynamic, very strong figure. He had this clarity of purpose, but he was also very autocratic in his leadership, and that caused problems. One of his students told me, “If you liked him, and he liked you, you’d be in a good position, but if he didn’t like you, you’re in for some kind of trouble, and if you didn’t agree with him, you’d be relegated outside the circle of power.”

And Argentina’s Jesuits, which had already been divided, found that the division was deepened into those who loved the new man and those who loathed him. And Father Michael Campbell-Johnston, who was an assistant to the head Jesuit in Rome, was sent to Buenos Aires to try and bring Bergoglio into line with what was happening in Latin America elsewhere. And he told me it was felt that Father Bergoglio could bring the two sides together and unite them, but, in fact, he did the opposite. He made the divisions even worse.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

And I’ll just say briefly that the most controversial episode of Bergoglio’s time as provincial came when two Jesuits, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were kidnapped by the military and tortured. And I examined in detail the allegations that Bergoglio betrayed them, and I conclude that these allegations are not true.

But what is clear is that Bergoglio was so reckless in his treatment of the men that the military saw it as a green light to snatch them. And there’s more I could say about this, but I don’t want to take up too much time on one incident. But his treatment of them epitomized — he’d locked horns with them over them refusing to leave the slums. They’d been his teachers. They felt in some ways that they needed to explain to him. He said to them, “No, you’re governed by a vow of obedience,” and they locked horns.

His treatment of them epitomized what the Pope said in the Spadaro lectures, was his abrupt and his authoritarian leadership style, which he said created problems. And looking back, he told Spadaro it was crazy that he was — and that was his word, crazy — that he was made a leader at such a young age. And as novice master, as provincial, and as rector, Bergoglio was head of the Jesuits in Argentina for a full 15 years.

But in this time, the world changed around him. The military junta collapsed after the war of the Falklands Malvinas, and democracy was restored in Argentina. The Cold War was warming. The changes of the Second Vatican Council, which had spread more rapidly through the rest of Latin America, began to seep through even to conservative Argentina. And the Jesuits in Argentina were still split into what they called the Bergoglianos and the anti-Bergoglianos, but the supporters of Bergoglio began to be outnumbered by his critics.

And the Jesuits in Rome decided they needed to get him out of the country and to put someone new in to begin healing this divide. He was sent to study in Germany, and then he was given a variety of positions within Buenos Aires. But he was living in Jesuit houses and in Jesuit communities, and he kept telling the people, who are now his superiors in the province, in the colleges where he taught and in the Jesuit houses where he lived, that they were doing this wrong, they were doing that wrong. He couldn’t let go of the fact that he wasn’t leader anymore.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

And, eventually, fed up with his meddling, the provincial in Argentina and the Superior General in Rome sent him into exile into Argentina’s second city, the Jesuit community there, which is 400 miles away. And the man who’d been like the kingpin of the Jesuits for 15 years in the province felt he had been sidelined and belittled by this. And one of his closest aides told me, “Córdoba was, for Bergoglio, a place of humility and of humiliation,” and those who knew him there said — remember him saying, “’I’ve got nothing to do here. They give me no work. My letters are intercepted. They read my letters. I don’t get phone messages. I feel completely shunned.'”

But in Córdoba, something extraordinary happened. He underwent an amazing transformation, and in exile, the book suggests — and the Pope later went on to confirm this in that Spadaro interview — he had a profound spiritual metamorphosis, which transformed his politics and his leadership style entirely.

What changed him? It’s not possible to see into another person’s soul, but it’s pretty clear that, in exile, Bergoglio found a way to see deeper into his own soul. He’s always been a man of deep prayer. We know that from his schedule now that we see in the Vatican. But as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he used to rise early to spend two hours in silent prayer before the tabernacle before he began his working day. And it’s difficult to overstate the importance of prayer in Pope Francis’ life.

One of his closest aides, Father Guillermo Marco, told me, “He likes to wake at 4:30, 5 a.m. every morning to pray. Prayer is so important to him that, as archbishop, he would rarely accept invitations to dinner, because he knew if he went out to dinner, he wouldn’t get up that early, and he didn’t want to miss his prayer time. His relationship with God is very strong, and he makes his decisions while he prays.”

The other thing is that Jesuits spend 15 years in formation, and one of the standard techniques they use is the spiritual exercises devised by their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. And at the heart of these exercises is a process of discernment, is the word they use, which helps the practitioner to strip away his layers of self-justification and self-delusion and penetrate through to the inner core of his motivation and behavior.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

And Bergoglio had two years in Córdoba of prayer and spiritual exercises in which to reflect on his divisive leadership of the Jesuits in Argentina, what he had done wrong or inadequately during the Dirty War.

And in 2010, he looked back on those early years in an interview with Sergio Rubin, from whom we’ll be hearing later tonight, and he told Rubin, “I don’t want to mislead anyone. The truth is, I’m a sinner who God, in his mercy, has chosen to love in a privileged manner. From a young age, life pushed me into leadership roles, and I had to learn from my errors along the way because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. It would be wrong for me to say that, these days, I ask forgiveness for sins and offenses I might have committed. Today I ask forgiveness for the sins and offenses that I did indeed commit.”

And in the very first interview of that — very first sentence of that interview he did with Spadaro last year, asked to define himself, he said, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

And when a man is elected pope, he’s asked if he accepts the job in Latin, and the normal response in Latin is “accipio,” “I accept.” But Bergoglio, in a Jesuit phrase, replied, “I am a sinner. I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.”

So even at this greatest moment, you might say, in his personal history, that sense of his own frailty and need for atonement and the need for mercy, which is his great theme as pope, the need for mercy, was present. Now, Francis only spoke elliptically to Spadaro, saying — he said, “I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Córdoba.”

But what we do know is the radical extent of that crisis was evident in the change it produced in Bergoglio, when he was plucked from exile by the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who was called Cardinal Quarracino. Now, Quarracino had asked Bergoglio many years before to run a retreat for his priests, and Quarracino had been very impressed with the quality of Bergoglio’s teaching, and he thought, “This man is wasted out in Córdoba.” And he made him a bishop. Now, this is very unusual. Jesuits don’t usually get made bishops. The religious order and the diocese are kept very separate.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

The change of heart that he’d undergone in his wilderness was manifested in a radical change of behavior. When he came back as bishop to the city of his birth, he turned from this conservative authoritarian figure to this icon of radical humility, and he developed a new model of leadership, one which involved consultation, participation, collegiality, listening. And he went to the slums and spent long hours with the poorest of the poor.

One of the priests in the slums who I spoke to for the book said that over his 18 years as bishop and archbishop in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio must have personally talked to at least half the people in his slum. He would just turn up, wander the alleyways, chat to the locals, drink mate, a local tea, with them.

And when drug dealers threatened to kill one of the slum priests, Padre Pepe, Bergoglio said quietly to him — and just the two of them there; it wasn’t ostentatious — “It will be better, if anyone was to die, if it was the archbishop.” And the next day, Bergoglio went to the slums, and he walked slowly through them, spending a lot of time stopping and talking to people and making his appearance very public, as though to say, “Here I am. Deal with me now.” And it was an act of extraordinary personal courage and an interesting reflection on the man who, earlier in his life had avoided confrontation and danger, was now putting himself in the firing line.

And he put himself in the firing line politically, too. He excoriated the president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, to his face from the pulpit for his neglect to the poor, and a new openness was developing in Bergoglio, and the man who’d once seen the poor as objects of philanthropy — he’d been happy to run soup kitchens, but he didn’t want any political activity with the poor in his early phase of life. Now, he began to see himself as bishop of the slums and to make use of some of the insights of liberation theology, which he’d not been keen on in his analysis of Argentina’s economic woes as a situation of social sin that cries out to heaven.

He now quadrupled the number of priests serving in the slums and, going back to what we said earlier, he told his priests that they were there to learn from the poor and not just the other way around. He became concerned, one priest told me, not just with holy water, but with the water pressure in the pipes. He now backed these self-help groups and cooperatives and unions, and he helped the cartoneros, who are some of the poorest

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 people in Buenos Aires, who make a living sorting out the recyclable materials from the garbage heaps, he helped them form a union to fight to protect their rights.

He rehabilitated the great figures of Argentina’s liberation theology, starting in 1999 with a public apology for what he called the Church’s complicit silence in the murder of Father Carlos Mugica, the first priest martyred in the Buenos Aires slums.

And he finished just months before he became pope at a ceremony at the Catholic University of Buenos Aires to honor the memory of one of the founders of liberation theology in Argentina, Rafael Tello. In his day, Tello had been silenced by the Church, but Bergoglio now conceded that Tello had made what he said was one of the most important contributions to the Church in Argentina, and he concluded rather rightly, “Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body.”

The most striking fruit of Bergoglio’s conversion was his humility. Now, humility’s a much misunderstood quality in the contemporary world, because humility isn’t the same as shyness or meekness or even modesty. Bergoglio lost none of his steely sense of purpose, but his style had changed. He felt that God wanted him to have a different style. He’d become consultative, delegatory, participative. His manner was distinctly different. He listened.

His critics claimed that there was something cynical in the change, and his political opponents in Argentina have seen many of the gestures he’s made since becoming pope, like paying his own hotel bill, carrying his own bags, and taking the bus with the other cardinals, as kind of gimmicky PR stunts, but that is a misreading, because humility is not, as his critics suggest, some kind of trick of his. It’s a distinct decision on how to behave.

For him, humility’s a kind of intellectual stance rather than a personal temperament. It’s a kind of audacious humility, and it’s a technique by which he seeks to impose on himself, on his own personality that he knows has a share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering behavior. Humility is a discipline for him. One of his priests in Buenos Aires said, “He’s worked out that to be a good shepherd, he needs to be humble. It’s calculated. That’s not to suggest it’s fake, but it’s thought through. It’s what deep prayer and spiritual exercises have taught him that God wants.”

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

Now, finally, the point I want to make briefly is about collegiality and what the book reveals about the relationship between Cardinal Bergoglio and the Vatican. Over his years as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Roman Curia and the way it restrained the autonomy that local bishops should properly possess, and he was unhappy with Rome’s response to what he saw as his constructive criticism of Pope Benedict and his remarks about Islam at Regensburg.

He resented the Curia’s refusal to accept his nominations for who should be new bishops in Argentina, and he was irritated by the high-handed advice of what his former aid, Guillermo Marco, called “Italians with empty churches telling bishops and countries with full congregations what they should and should not be doing.” And he also resented the way that some in Rome colluded with ultra-traditionalists in the Argentinean church who went behind his back to complain about him constantly to the Vatican.

And all this instilled in him a sense of the importance of the Church being run more collegially, and so much so that he stuck to the principle of collegiality among the Argentinean bishops, even when they came out with a decision that he disagreed with, such as the one on civil unions for same-sex couples, which he favored as an alternative to same-sex marriage. They said, “No, we don’t want either,” so he went along with it.

When the cardinals converged on Rome for the conclave after Benedict’s resignation, they knew something of all of these things that I’ve been telling you about, but they didn’t know the detail, but they knew about the simplicity and the depth of his faith that he’d inherited from Grandma Rosa and his ability to communicate that simply and profoundly and intuitively.

And those who knew about his record on the Dirty War — and there had been a stock Bergoglio dossier sent ’round to cardinals at the previous election for the pope in 2005 by some of his enemies. They now knew his side of the story from Sergio Rubin’s book, and they also knew the stories of his simplicity and the humility of his lifestyle in Buenos Aires.

And they knew that, like many of them, he’d had his run-ins with the Vatican, which was behaving like the master of the Church rather than its servant. They were faced with three problems: a Church tarnished by the pedophile priests and bishops covering the scandal up; a church lumbered with a self-serving and self-seeking Vatican bureaucracy, which

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 was beset by intrigue and infighting and arrogance and ambition; and a church, thirdly, which sought to control its people, priests, bishops, and cardinals, rather than working in a collegial way for spreading the mission of the Church. And the cardinals felt that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the man who had the inclination and the background and the skills to sort that out.

And I’ll hand over to John Allen now, who will tell you how he’s measuring up to that task.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We are really honored and privileged to have John Allen with us. He’s a prizewinning Associate Editor of The Boston Globe. He’s a Senior Vatican Analyst at CNN. He’s the author of many bestselling books on the Vatican and the Catholic Church. He’s got a recent book out now called The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know. Thank you, John, for joining us.

JOHN L. ALLEN, JR.: Picking up on what you just heard from Paul about Jesuit reactions, certainly what you described, Paul, tracks with everything I was hearing from Jesuits in the initial flush of reaction to Bergoglio.

I think the most comedic bit of subtext to the Francis papacy is something that I’d never thought I would live to see, which is a corporate conversion in the Society of Jesus, because today, Jesuits are tripping over themselves, of course, to be the authorized exegetes and apostles for the Francis papacy. I can tell you that it’s not where these guys started.

Paul gave you the biographical background of Bergoglio in Argentina. I’m going to make just a few thematic comments about the papacy. So I’m going to start with what I would consider to be Francis’ most important accomplishment at the one-year mark, then I’ll lay out for you three ways to get wrong, I think, what’s going on. And then I’ll lay out, just very briefly, some storylines to watch for 2014.

First, most important accomplishment. Travel with me now back in time to those days between the 11th of February, 2013, the day that Benedict’s resignation announcement was made — between the 11th of February and the 13th of March, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected to the papacy, and ask yourself, what were the dominant storylines

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 about the Catholic Church in that period of time? In other words, what were we talking about on air or in print?

What we were talking about was church in crisis. We were talking about an alleged gay mafia in the Vatican, the so-called gay lobby. We were talking about the Vatican leaks affair, this surreal meltdown in the Vatican that rolled out in 2011-2012, which, of course, reached its Hollywood-esque crescendo with the arrest of the Pope’s butler as the alleged mole at the heart of the affair.

We were doing crackdowns on nuns, and we were doing bruising political controversies and pedophile priests. Those were the dominant narratives about the Catholic Church at that moment in time. Now, clearly, those narratives have not gone away; those headaches are still around. But that is no longer the dominant global narrative about the Catholic Church. The dominant global narrative about the Catholic Church is: humble, simple people’s pope takes the world by storm. And if that’s not a revolution, at least at the level of perceptions, I’m not sure we’ve ever seen one. In other words, he has changed the story about the Catholic Church.

The highest priority of the Catholic Church, beginning with John Paul II, running through the Benedict years, and still today, is supposed to be what Catholics call the New Evangelization, which is this effort to kind of reintroduce Catholicism to an often skeptical, jaded, even sometimes hostile secular world.

And, for 25 years, I think people have been trying to figure out how to go about that. I think what we’ve seen in the last year from Pope Francis is the most successful example of the New Evangelization in action that one could possibly have imagined.

Tom Reese just did an essay saying that what Francis has done during his first year could be taught in business schools as a successful example of rebranding, and I think he’s absolutely right. That’s, in effect, what’s happened.

All right. Three bogus narratives about the Francis papacy. First is no doctrine, no dice; second is Benedict bad, Francis good; and the third would be all sizzle and no steak.

Let’s start with no doctrine, no dice. On the one-year anniversary the big question that many of us were wrestling with — and I know this because I was doing phone calls all the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 time, including some people in this room. I know what the big question was. The $64,000 question was is Francis going to change doctrine? Are we ever going to see doctrinal changes on stuff like abortion, gay marriage, et cetera, et cetera?

And the implicit assumption there was that if he’s not changing doctrine, then this is really kind of all cosmetic; that it’s not as big a deal as maybe we thought if there are not going to be doctrinal changes. I would suggest that this rests on a profound misreading of the reality of Catholic life. Because in the Catholic Church, yeah, there’s doctrine. There’s the official teaching of the Church, but there’s also pastoral application of doctrine; that is, how we apply that doctrine in the day-to-day life of the Church. And for most ordinary Catholics, it’s actually pastoral application that is much more fundamental in their experience of the Church than the official teaching.

So, famously, when Bergoglio was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he condemned priests who refused to baptize the children who were born out of wedlock because he felt that that was uncompassionate; it was a failure in mercy. That’s not a question of doctrine. Nobody’s talking about changing the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage, but we’re talking about how do we apply that teaching in the concrete pastoral decisions that people have to make every day? The Francis revolution is directed at pastoral application.

So, no, he is not going to change church teaching on — certainly not on the hot-button issues that we like to talk about: abortion, contraception, gay marriage. But take it from me, folks: the path to reform in the Catholic Church does not always run through the catechism. You can change the Catholic Church profoundly without changing a single comma in its official code of teaching.

So I think putting undue emphasis on whether Francis will or won’t make doctrinal changes is the wrong way to frame the importance of what’s happening. Basically, what he’s doing is creating a zone for the most merciful, compassionate, tolerant, possible application of official teaching, and that’s why the Catholic gut right now will tell you that this guy really is a change agent. Even though it has nothing to do with changing the official teaching.

Second, the Benedict bad, Francis good narrative. Words such as “disastrous” and “draconian” and so forth were used to characterize the Benedict years.

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Look, no doubt, there are significant stylistic or differences between Benedict and Francis, and for that matter, with John Paul. I sometimes say you can capture this in terms of musical genre. John Paul was heavy metal, Benedict is classical, and Francis is folk. Or put it this way. John Paul was Metallica, and Francis is Simon and Garfunkel. Or if you want a contemporary reference, he’s like Taylor Swift or something like that. Right? It’s softer, gentler, but they sell just as many records.

So no doubt, there are stylistic differences between these two guys, and no doubt there’s a difference in points of emphasis. Paul is absolutely right that Benedict — the watchword of his papacy was reason and faith, the notion that reason and faith need one another to be healthy, whereas Francis, although he’s obviously not opposed to reason, does have a much more, if you like, popular faith. It’s rooted in popular piety, the popular religious experience of Latin America, in particular.

So there are differences, but here are the three signal facts as to why the Benedict bad, Francis good narrative doesn’t work. One, nobody is less inclined to buy that narrative than Francis himself. There is obviously a relationship of deep mutual respect and affection between these two guys. This came out in the recent interview Francis did with Corriere Della Sera when he was asked about his relationship with Benedict, and what he said was, “One thing, I’ve asked Benedict to get out more.” He said, “I don’t want him under lockdown. I don’t want him living in a bunker.” And his line was, “Benedict is not a fossil,” packed away in a museum someplace, but he’s someone who still has contributions to make to the Church.

So point one here is that clearly these two men believe that they have far more in common than anything that would divide them. Point two is that many of the reforms for which Francis is now drawing credit actually began under Benedict XVI. The finance stuff — Francis just recently rolled out a kind of financial earthquake in the Vatican, and, believe me, folks, I know that appointing a new finance czar does not have the same sex appeal as kissing a guy with boils or bringing three homeless guys up for breakfast. It doesn’t have the same iconic value. But at the level of substance, there is nothing he’s done during his first year that was seen as a more significant blow with the Vatican’s old guard than that, because the one way to really rock the world of the old guard is to take away their power of the purse, and, in effect, that’s what he’s done.

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However, the cleanup of the Vatican Bank began under Benedict. This unprecedented decision, for the very first time, to open the Vatican to outside secular inspection in the form of MONEYVAL, which is the Council of Europe’s anti-money laundering agency, that decision was made under Benedict, to great internal resistance, by the way, because there were a lot of old guard types who would argue that over the centuries, the Vatican had paid in blood to protect itself, to protect its autonomy and its sovereignty, to keep these outside secular interlopers at bay, so the fact that Benedict rolled out the red carpet for them was, in its own way, quite revolutionary.

So the financial cleanup, the financial glasnost that Francis is getting credit for, began under Benedict, and, similarly, of course, just on Saturday, the Pope announced the first group of eight members for his new sex abuse commission, the Commission for the Protection of Minors. If you look at the people who are sitting on that commission, all of them — and they are all people who have been in the forefront of the Church’s efforts — they would be perceived as leaders of the Church’s reform wing on the sex abuse thing — they all rose to prominence as reformers during the Benedict years.

And it was the momentum that flowed first out of the Holy Office under then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and then the policies under Benedict, that gave the reformers the upper hand. They used to be the in-house opposition to the power structure which was in denial, and that was inverted during the Benedict years so that the reformers are now the status quo. They are now the establishment, and it’s the deniers that have been driven underground. And, again, that’s a process that began under Benedict. So that’s the second point, that, substantively speaking, the reforms that Francis is pursuing are reforms that began in the Benedict years.

And the third point, dare we not forget that Francis mania, the Francis revolution, would have been impossible in any event had it not been for that stunning decision on the 11th of February, 2013 by Benedict XVI to resign; in effect, unprecedented. Yes, there are a handful of popes that had to resign, but the circumstances were so wildly different as to make this basically sui generis; that is, basically unprecedented.

If you want the single most revolutionary act by a pope in the last 13 months, it’s not anything that Francis did. It was Benedict’s resignation that paved the way for all of this. So I would suggest to you Benedict bad, Francis good just doesn’t hold water.

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And the third narrative, all sizzle and no steak. And this narrative basically is to say that, yes, Francis is making magnificent, beguiling, impressive changes at the level of style and tone, but it’s basically all theater without any real substance. I will tell you that this for sure is not the case. Aside from what I said about pastoral application, let me just say a couple more things about this new finance structure that Francis has created, because I would suggest this is by far the most substantive structural institutional change, and it is a real earthquake.

Now, I know that when I start describing what this is about — it’s about quarterly reviews to make sure that spending is staying within budget. It’s about annual certified independent audits. It’s about two sets of eyes on everything. It’s about building a set of checks and balances. But the typical American reaction to that is it’s a complete no- brainer. It doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary. But, folks, I will tell you, in the world of the Vatican, this is an earthquake, because in the Vatican, each of these little departments — the technical term for it is a dicastery — but each one of these little outfits has been accustomed for centuries to being an independent little fiefdom, and in terms of how it spends money, they believed themselves to be accountable only to God and the pope, and in both cases, very nominally. So the notion of being held accountable for how much you spend and of there being consequences for being reckless is quite a revolution.

And, further, the real problem when it comes to Vatican finances is not these occasional spectacular cases of corruption which — of overt, explicit, self-conscious corruption. The good news is that sort of thing is relatively easy to fix. You just need vigilance and enforcement mechanisms, and you need to take them seriously. The real problem when it comes to dollars and cents in the Vatican is you’ve got to break the grip of the culture in which things that you and I would see — most ordinary people would see — as corrupt are not even perceived that way.

Case in point, you’ve got an allegedly competitive bidding procedure, but you end up steering the contract to your cousin. Many Italians of a certain generation— that’s what you do when you get into positions of power. You take care of your friends. You take care of your family.

If you had asked me in the abstract who was the one cardinal in the Catholic world that might actually be able to break the grip of that culture, I would have said to you, “It

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 probably would be Cardinal George Pell of Sydney in Australia,” and that is exactly the guy that Francis put in charge of this project. I wrote when he was appointed this was a guy with the mind of a theologian and the instincts of a linebacker. And the fact that Francis put him in this gig tells you everything you need to know about how serious he is.

Now, the whole story is not Pell. It’s a bigger structure than that. Francis abolished a council of 15 cardinals who used to oversee the Vatican finances. Now there’s a council of eight cardinals and seven laypeople — first time at such a senior level in the Vatican, by the way, that cardinals and laity have had full equality as members of a supervisory commission. They have equal voting rights.

And this is not an advisory committee. This is a decision-making committee, so it’s actual power being wielded in the Holy See by laity. That’s one piece of the puzzle. The Secretariat of the Economy, which is the outfit that Pell now runs — he’s basically the new finance minister. A finance czar is the second. Third, there’s now an independent auditor who is independent of these two outfits, who reports directly to the Pope, who is providing checks and balances on the work of these other two things.

Money management is a chronic problem at every level in the Church. Basically, this is intended to convert the Vatican from being an example of what not to do to becoming an example of best practices. And what this does, it hands a club to critics of the Church’s record on money at every level to go to their local bishop and say, “If the Pope is doing this, why aren’t you?” So there’s a kind of moral suasion going on there to promote the whole — to nudge the whole church in the direction of transparency and accountability.

And, third, it’s important because if this works right, then you should have no more Monsigno 500 euro cases; you should have no more Scarano cases, which means that bishops around the world won’t have to get out of bed every morning in a cold sweat wondering what the latest Vatican bomb to go off is going to be. My point, there is steak beneath the sizzle.

Finally, just some storylines to watch for in 2014. First of all, you probably know this Thursday, Obama is going to have his first meeting with Francis. It’s the standard drill for when the Pope encounters a head of state, which means that there will be a private one-

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 on-one between Obama and the Pope. I’m assuming that Peter Wells, Monsignor Peter Wells, who is the highest-ranking American in the Secretary of State, will be the translator.

Then afterwards, the president will meet with the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and that’s usually where the diplomatic heavy lifting gets done, so usually a conversation between the pope and the head of state is a broad, panoramic, getting- to-know-you session. The detail stuff typically comes up in the meeting with the Secretary of State. And in terms of what to watch for from that session, first, obviously, areas of agreement, so solidarity with the poor, protection of the environment.

In terms of points of conflict, look for any reference to religious freedom or religious liberty. That is a Vatican coded Catholic way of raising the issue of the contraception mandates and reminding the White House that they’ve got a problem with the local bishops and with people of faith in the country on that issue.

The other potential flashpoint would be Syria. You probably know that the Obama Administration and the Vatican under Pope Francis have a slightly different diagnosis of the Syrian conflict. Basically speaking, the White House wants regime change, and the Vatican is leery of applying pressure intentionally to try to bring down Assad, because what they hear from the local Christians in Syria, both at the top and bottom of the Church, is however bad Assad is, what comes next is likely to be worse. From their point of view, the choice is not between a police state and a thriving democracy. It’s between a police state and annihilation.

Bottom line, I would suggest that Obama needs this meeting a hell of a lot more than Francis does. Francis has got much better poll numbers in the United States right now than Obama does, and Obama has midterm elections. Popes don’t have to run for reelection. So, the political calculus would be if there are concessions to be made, it would be more in Obama’s interest to make them.

April 27th, canonizations of Pope John Paul II and John XXIII. Another flash of Francis’ maverick style, because this is the first time that two popes have been declared saints in the same ceremony, so it’s a historical first. It’s a clear political statement from Francis about unity in the Church because everybody knows, in terms of church politics, John XXIII is the hero of the Catholic left, John Paul II is the hero of the Catholic right, so by putting

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 these two figures together, it’s obvious Francis wants to make a statement that he wants left and right to act in concert rather than constantly be fighting with one another.

Then the trip to the Middle East, May 24, 25, 26, Francis is going to be in Amman, Jordan. Then he’s going to be in Bethlehem, which is in the Palestinian territories, and then he’s going to be in Jerusalem. The official purpose of the visit is to meet the patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, commemorating a historic meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964 in Jerusalem, which led to the repeal of the excommunications of 1054, and was seen as kind of a pivot point in the modern ecumenical movement. So this is another way Francis is confirming that he wants to be a pope of Christian unity, and he wants to begin that process with the Orthodox, because that’s the primordial schism.

So there’s that dimension to the trip, but, obviously, no world leader can go to the Middle East without there being political subtext. So Francis will meet Abbas when he’s in Palestine. He will meet Netanyahu when he’s in Israel. It’s going to be fascinating to see if he can spend some of this enormous reservoir of political capital he’s put in the bank to try to shame the Israelis and the Palestinians into talking to one another.

A further subtext to that visit, of course, is going to be the fade of Christianity in the Middle East. You all know the stories, that Christians a generation ago were 20 percent of the population of what we call the Holy Land; that is, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Today, they’re about 5 percent. The patriarch, the Latin Rite Patriarch of Jerusalem, says the danger is the Holy Land is going to become a Christian Disneyland; that is, it’ll have plenty of glittering attractions for people to visit, but there won’t be any actual flesh-and-blood Christians left in it. So, clearly, Francis is also going to want to try to give a shot in the arm to that struggling community and see if he can lend them some of his popularity and some of his acclaim to act as a kind of buffer against the pressures that face them.

Last thing in 2014 I’ll flag for you, the Synod of Bishops in October. This is a global meeting of Catholic bishops and other leaders in the Catholic Church that meets periodically in Rome to advise the pope on some important topic. This will be the first under Francis, and it’s going to be devoted to issues of the family.

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The Pope has changed the process of the synod to make it more conversational and less about speech-making. For this synod, he has also pointedly asked that the bishops’ conferences of the world send their elected presidents so that there’s an idea that the people who are going to be in the synod represent the consensus among the bishops in the parts of the world that they come from.

He’s also reconfigured the process, so this is now a play in two acts. There’s going to be a synod in 2014. Then people will go home and ponder what they heard, and they will come back in 2015 for another synod before they make final recommendations to the Pope. So he’s provided this window, this year-long window of time for grassroots consultation to the first round of results.

So procedurally, it clearly does reflect a pope who is committed to shared decision- making to authentic participation, to participation that’s more than notional.

Substantively, a lot of issues are going to be in the mix of this thing, but, obviously, the hot-button issue that a lot of people have their eyeballs on is the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics — that is, Catholics who divorce and remarry civilly without obtaining an annulment, which is a declaration from a church court that their first marriage was invalid — whether [they] are going to be able to participate in the sacraments; that is, whether they can come up for communion and the other sacraments of the Church. Under current church rules, they’re not supposed to.

My read is that most of the American cardinals are going to be against change; not all of them, most of them. The Europeans, I think, are going to be split about 50/50. The Africans are going to be largely against change; again, not all of them, but that would be the majority. Asians and Latin Americans would be more open to it.

So, you add all that up, I don’t think the synod is going to be able to reach an easy consensus on this question, so my own prediction is that they’re going to have a very interesting debate. They’ll come back in 2015, and at the end of it, my prediction is they will say, “Holy Father, we cannot reach consensus on this point, and, therefore, it’s up to you.” And so at the end of the day, I think the ball is going to be in Bergoglio’s court.

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At the moment, I would say those are your four major papal storylines for 2014, at least things to keep your eyeballs on, and that’s it.

NINA EASTON, Fortune: Paul, I wanted to ask you about the Pope’s economic views. It’s interesting to me that he became archbishop at a time when the Argentinean economy collapsed into this depression, throwing half the country into poverty, a quarter of the country out of work, and I wonder if that helped solidify his view about inequality and about free markets, first of all. And, secondly, would you label him as an adherent of liberation theology?

PAUL VALLELY: In 2001, Argentina underwent the biggest debt default of any nation in history, and it was absolutely cataclysmic, the effect it had on the economy. He definitely saw the working of the capitalist system in a more skeptical light after that. He’s very much in line with Catholic social teaching, which, starting from Pope Leo XIII in 1891, tried to find a middle way between capitalism and communism, and it’s had a few blind alleys on the way, but there is a standard tradition of Catholic social teaching, which takes a dim view of unbridled capitalism, what Pope John Paul called savage capitalism. So he’s pretty much in line with that. He’s not — previous popes have been called Marxists by The Wall Street Journal. It’s not unusual. But, certainly, what happened there solidified his view, and he felt very much that the Peronist governments were not on the side of the poor and were indulging themselves and were corrupt.

On liberation theology, the Argentineans say that they have a different liberation theology. They have a theology of the people rather than a theology of liberation. In the book, I catalog the changes that he made while he was archbishop and the way that he rehabilitated liberation theology. In Rome now, even the doctrinal watchdog that John mentioned has welcomed in liberation theology from the cold, and L’Osservatore Romano, the official voice of the Vatican, has said it’s time that it came out of the shadows. So it has been rehabilitated. Of course, the context has changed, so we’re not in a cold war anymore. It’s not seen as a kind of stalking horse for communism, so it doesn’t feel the same kind of threat that it did. So is he a liberation theologian? I think he’s a kind of liberation theologian.

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ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times: I would just ask both of you about things that you think might go wrong with this pontificate over the next few years. I think one of the interesting issues in Western Catholicism over the last 30 or 40 years has been, in certain ways, precisely the gap that has often opened up between what the catechism actually says and Catholic practice and so on in churches and so on. I think it’s an open question whether that can be deeply problematic in certain ways for the Church, that you can have a level of social change and practical change that isn’t reflected at the dogmatic level. That would be one place where I’d be curious for you to elaborate, but anything that makes you worried, doubtful, or pessimistic would be interesting.

PAUL VALLELY: Well, I go around, and I know John does as well, giving talks about the Pope, and the extraordinary mood in the audiences. There has been a revitalization and a sense of joy and a lifting of any sense of there are things we can’t talk about. All of that is gone. So, yeah, you’re right. There is a euphoria. The danger is that there will be disappointed expectations, and the process that John set out about, say, this totemic issue of communion for remarried Catholics, if that is not actually delivered in the way that people are projecting, then you could see a repetition of the Humanae Vitae situation, where the Church was led, and it was the Grand Old Duke of York. They marched him over the top of the hill, and they marched him down again. People were led to expect change, and it didn’t come, and that’s a real risk. Having said that, there are lots of different ways of managing these situations, and in the Spadaro interview, the Pope quotes John Paul II about seeing everything, turning a blind eye to a lot, and talking about a little. And I think we’re going to see the blind eye, that kind of don’t ask, don’t tell, as the Church’s position on contraception, which is widely ignored throughout the world. And I don’t sense any feeling within the Church that they want to actually prod the sleeping dog on that, so I think there will be some blind eyes turned.

On the issue of sex abuse, I was worried, when we had the Corriere Della Sera interview last week, that the Pope seemed to be reading from last year’s script, and he was saying, “Oh, the Church has done a lot,” which is true, “and nobody gives us any credit,” which is true, but just because it’s the truth doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to say. Put in PR terms, it was not the right thing to say. Having had that setback, he now has announced the membership of this commission, and it sends out lots of the right signals, so we just

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 have to hope that he achieves that kind of balance. As John says, he’s on a very difficult tightrope because he’s talking to lots of different constituencies at the same time.

JOHN ALLEN: Let me just tick off two or three things that I think could go wrong. One — women. He’s taken women priests and women cardinals off the table. He’s said no to both of those, but he has repeatedly said that “I want to boost the role of women in the Church.” Now, the first time he had a chance to do that was when he filled out the lineup card for this new Finance Council. Seven laity, not a single woman. Now, he got back in the game with this sex abuse commission, because of the eight members of that commission, four of them are women, but, as opposed to the Finance Council, which has actual decision-making power, the sex abuse commission is advisory. So I think he’s got to show us what those concrete, visible, meaningful leadership roles for women are going to look like, in ways that don’t require ordination to the priesthood. Right? Because, at a certain stage, this rhetoric turns stale. If you keep saying “I want to boost the roles of women in the Church,” but people don’t see you doing it, then at a certain stage, I think there’s going to be some backlash.

Second, on the subject of backlash, despite the fact that this pope’s poll numbers are terrific and all of that, the truth of it is he is not universally beloved. There are some circles inside and outside the Church that have reservations about him.

I think the more immediate form of backlash I would be worried about would be if we look at the American context. I think there are some self-identified conservative Catholics who feel that they have been carrying water for the Church for an awful long time, fighting its battles, often at personal costs, who just wonder about where this pope is taking things.

The third and final thing would be the future of Vatican reform on his watch. My concern is there are too many cooks in the kitchen and that relatively simple fixes might become unduly complicated and unduly ponderous, and in the end, this dies the death of a thousand cuts because there are simply too many blueprints. And what you end up with on the other end of it is a hodgepodge of competing reform agendas so the bureaucracy looks different, but it’s just as dysfunctional as it was at the beginning.

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PAUL VALLELY: On the conservative backlash, my reading of Bergoglio from Argentina is that he is a very, very sophisticated, very wily politician, and that he does know — he’s very aware of that. He sorted out exactly the same kind of problem the Vatican Bank had with a church bank there, where you had corrupt people fiddling things, and the cardinal’s credit card being paid by the bankers, and he’s dealt with that. He’s done this kind of stuff before.

KIRSTEN POWERS, USA Today, Fox News, The Daily Beast: John, I wanted to ask you when the papal conclave chose Pope Francis, what kind of pope were they expecting, and did they get what they expected?

And then I wanted to ask Paul — I was really intrigued by what you were talking about, about how humble the Pope is and how he has such a sense of a need for mercy, and I was wondering, was there some formative event that happened to him that made more like this, even though, of course, this is obviously what the Gospel teaches, but it is something we often don’t see in a lot of Christian leaders, this sense of real humility and talking about his simpleness. Is there something that happened along the way that really imprinted that on him?

JOHN ALLEN: What you’re basically asking, I guess, is the buyer’s remorse question and are they experiencing any buyer’s remorse? I’ve probably interviewed, on or off the record, let’s say, 40 cardinals, so we’re talking maybe a third.

So take this for what it’s worth, but — and, of course, that 40 is top-heavy with Italians and Americans, so this isn’t necessarily universal. But my read would be, when you ask them this question, “Is he what you expected?” They’re going to say, “In some ways, yes; in some ways, no.” The yes: they knew the rep on him being this humble, simple bishop of the villa, which is the Argentine word for a slum, the villa miseria. So they knew that. They knew he was a man of the Social Gospel. They knew about the personal simplicity, so that tracks.

Second, they had heard that he was a good manager, good governor. Much like Paul was saying, they didn’t know at the level of detail, but they knew there had been some problem when he was the Jesuit superior, and he seemed to have learned from that, and

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 the read was he had a good run as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, one of the world’s most complex archdiocese. It’s actually got a bigger human infrastructure than the Vatican does, in terms of the number of people who are on the payroll and so on. And their read was that he had done a good job running all of that.

In 2013, the voting issue was discontinuity. It was the most anti-establishment conclave of the last hundred years; not in the sense that they were voting against the teaching of Benedict, but they were voting against the business management. The feeling was that the Italian old guard that used to be able to make the trains run on time had just broken down and gone off the rails, and that’s how you got the Williamson scandal, and that’s how you got Vatileaks, and that’s how you got the bungled response to the sex abuse crisis, and all of that. And they wanted someone who was going to come in and clean house, and they believed Bergoglio could pull that off.

Now, the surprises would be, one, he’s turned out to be much more moderate than many of them thought he was. The book on him in Argentina was that he was basically a conservative. I think the overall moderate tenor of his papacy and moving the Church into the center is not something that many of them necessarily anticipated.

The other surprise— let me quote Tim Dolan of New York. When you ask Tim this question, he will say, “We knew we were electing a pope of the poor. We knew we were electing a good manager. We did not know we were electing a rock star.” So his success on the public stage, I think, has been surprising. And, frankly, they can be forgiven because I think this has been a surprise to virtually everyone.

I certainly know some cardinals who voted in that conclave who are a little concerned about what they would see as some of the loosey-goosey elements of the Pope’s rhetoric, who wish that he would be a little bit more careful. Some of them are a little concerned about the groups that seem most emboldened by this pope because they’re not necessarily the groups that they would see as the ones that they’re closest to. So around the edges, there would be some concern, but fundamentally, honest to God, I don’t pick up any real regret; that is, I don’t pick up any cardinal who would actually want to roll the clock back to March 12th, 2013. And the reason is, aside from the lofty thing that they believe this to be the action of the Spirit and the life of the Church and divine providence and so on, the more prosaic reason they don’t want to roll the clock back is because, to

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 be honest with you, having a popular pope makes their lives much easier. If a cardinal needs to get a favor from a legislature today, it is much easier to get it, because no politician in the world wants to be seen as on the wrong side of this pope.

When they go on TV, the questions are softer and friendlier. They’re not getting asked about pedophile priests. They’re not getting asked about crackdowns on nuns. They’re being asked, “Isn’t it great to have such a wonderful pope?” When they go to the Catholic grassroots, people aren’t mad anymore. They’re excited and they’re enthusiastic. The cardinals will tell you the number one thing that they hear when they go into parishes these days is “Thank you. Thank you for electing this guy.” It’s a completely different reaction.

PAUL VALLELY: On the humility, I think something did happen in Córdoba. We’re not sure what it was. He’s made this very oblique reference to it, saying it was a time of inner spiritual crisis. I think the other thing about the humility is that he sees it as a device to control the part of his personality which he felt failed previously, and he’s repeatedly talked about having been abrupt and authoritarian and making quick decisions.

WILL SALETAN, Slate: Paul, I just wanted to pick up, first of all, on what you were just saying to Kirsten’s question about humility. You used the phrase in your presentation “audacious humility,” which I thought was really interesting, and I guess my question here is how much of it is about the humility, and how much of it is about the audacity? Or to put it another way, how much of it is about, as you were just saying, a device to control himself, or perhaps —I think, John, you used the word “rebranding”? To what extent is it as an example to others? And if it’s an example to others, is it to the public? Is it to the Catholic laypeople? Is it to Mr. 500, people in the hierarchy of the Church?

The other question is I’m curious about what you guys were talking about divorce and remarriage and what might happen with that at the synod. I’d like to get a little bit of a sense of how you think this might play out with the issue of homosexuality. In Africa, you have a very deep-seated antipathy to homosexuality, perhaps more so than to divorce and remarriage.

PAUL VALLELY: I think he sees divorce and remarried communion as the low-hanging fruit. It’s the easiest thing to do. That’s why he’s tackled it first. And we’ve seen the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 process, the questionnaire, the bishops’ conference, the reconsultation, the coming back. It’s the process that’s important there, and he thinks this is the easiest thing to deal with. I think homosexuality is much more difficult, for a whole raft of theological reasons.

One of the interesting things about the Pope, a cardinal said to me, “He plays for the same team, but he kicks the ball in a different direction.” And we were talking last night at dinner about how he says things like — on contraception, adoption, same-sex marriage — “What do you think about that?” And he says, “I think we talk about it too much.” He doesn’t say, “Yeah, I’m in favor of it. I’m against it.” He says, “Let’s talk about something else.” So he’s changing the subject.

On gay adoption, he sees that as a human rights issue as well. He thinks that children have a right to a parent of each gender, and so he doesn’t see it from the point of view of the rights of the adults, rights to have a family. He sees it from the point of view of the child. So again, he’s coming at it from a different area.

On your other question about humility, it’s all very thought through. So if you look at, say, taking the subway, he takes the subway because it sends out the right signal, it keeps him in touch with people, but anybody who’s been to Buenos Aires will tell you it’s quicker than going in a chauffeur-driven car. And it’s the same with rejecting the Apostolic Palace to live in Casa Santa Marta. From his point of view, if he’s in Casa Santa Marta, he can meet people. There are no gatekeepers. There’s no one to stop him sitting down next to someone. So there again, you see he’s doing something which is symbolic, which sends out the right messages to everybody, but which has a very practical reason. So he’s a very clever, sophisticated operator, and his humility is extremely thought through.

JOHN ALLEN: On civil unions, Francis just addressed this in his interview with Corriere Della Sera. Francis said, marriage is between a man and a woman, but how the State regulates other relationships, things like inheritance and health insurance and all of that stuff, they’re — basically, what he said was that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And the takeaway from this was openness to civil unions.

Now, in places like Italy that might have some relevance. Frankly, in most parts of the West, though, I would suggest that the boat on civil unions has already sailed. That is to say I think the press in most parts of the West is full marriage equality or nothing. So the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 period in which civil unions might have worked as a compromise solution — that period is probably gone. I think it is interesting to know that Francis was open to it, and there are places where it will be relevant, but I don’t think it’s going to solve the political problem, say, in the United States or most parts of Western Europe.

As far as homosexuality goes, Paul is quite right. That’s a much more complicated theological discussion, but it’s also a much more complicated cultural discussion. You will find majorities, in Sub-Saharan Africa, that surpass 90 percent, opposed to the legalization of gay marriage. And in Asia and in most parts of Latin America, you’re talking 60, 70, 80 percent. Truth of it is, the Catholic Church has got 1.2 billion members. There are 67 million in the United States, which means that the American Catholic population is 6 percent of the global Catholic population.

Put another way, 94 percent of the Catholics in the world, in important respects, ain’t like us. And on this particular question, if you put yes or no to gay marriage up for a Catholic plus de sade, among those 1.2 billion Catholics, it would lose, and it would lose huge.

Now, where the Church is going to be in the future, who knows? But, for today, that’s the reality.

DAN HARRIS, ABC News: I’m interested in humility as a discipline. What do you think this pope has to teach ambitious people?

PAUL VALLELY: The ex-Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, calls humility the orphaned virtue of our age, and he sees humility as something which is essential to the business of living in community. And Pope Francis has said that it’s not possible to be a Christian in isolation. It’s about being in community. So humility is a key part of that. He’s sending out clear messages on that. I met someone who’s a trainee papal diplomat, and the Pope had been in to see them, and he’d given them a very clear indication of what kind of lives he expected from them. He said things like, “My heart sinks every time I see a priest driving the latest model of a car.”

He’s told the people responsible for the choice of bishops that he wants a shepherd who will smell of his sheep and who has the concerns of the flock; that when you pray, you’re

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 in there, fighting God for your people. It’s about servanthood, and humility is part of servanthood, and he’s pressing that on every front, so I think humility is absolutely key.

Another important symbolic thing he did was he’s abolished the title of monsignor in most cases. Monsignor, “my lord,” it comes from a kind of medieval view of papal monarchy.

MICHAEL PAULSON, The New York Times: You’ve talked a lot about what is surprising or not surprising about what Francis has done. I wonder if there are things that surprise you about the way we have responded to him; we being the media, Catholics, the global culture. Do you think that the receptivity to a rebranded Catholicism is startling or not? Does it say something about us that we’re open to seeing Catholicism in a different way than we did just a few moments ago?

And, secondly, if he were to drop dead or to retire, resign, what happens next?

PAUL VALLELY: If I can put my cynical journalist hat on, I think that one of the dynamics that governs journalism is novelty, and we’ve had that story. We need a new story. And so people are very receptive to the idea of a different story about the Pope. So as John has indicated, it could all slip back. There could be a honeymoon period, and when people say, “Well, he said he was going to do this, and he hasn’t done it” on a whole range of things, then you could have exactly that situation.

I think there will be enough progress in enough areas to stop that happening, but there will be areas, as John has said, like the role of women in the Church and the issue of how do you — or whether you — discipline bishops who cover up sex abuse. Those kinds of things are not — it’s not clear what he’s going to do on that yet, and when that happens, then we could see a backlash within the media as well.

The question of his successor, at the moment — I think a new pope could just go back to March the 12th, as John said, and he could move into the Apostolic Palace.

If he could perhaps change the way that bishops are appointed so they’re not appointed by Rome exclusively, but that there’s some kind of input locally from the diocese and some kind of recommendation from their fellow bishops in the national conferences and

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 that Rome is part of a process, rather than the complete arbiter of it, then there will be a change of culture.

JOHN ALLEN: I just did an interview with Cardinal Don Wuerl. I asked him, “Okay, on March 12th, 2013, would you have predicted that, within 72 hours, the new pope would become the most popular human being on the planet?” You know Wuerl’s answer? “No, no, no, and definitely no.” Well, that’s my answer too.

Am I surprised at how quickly Francis emerged as the new Mandela? Yeah. And does that say something about us? I agree with Paul. It says something about the media business that we had created a narrative about Benedict that was unrelievedly bleak, and so there was a novelty factor to creating a new narrative about the new pope that was completely positive.

I also think it probably says something about the culture, that there is a hunger for credible, moral leadership out there that somehow Francis responds to. It’s the perception of the personal credibility of the man, the kind of charismatic authority, to use the traditional word, as opposed to institutional authority, and that there is a desire for that out there that he taps into.

What would happen if he dropped dead? If you’re asking, would the College of Cardinals, if they had to meet for a conclave today, would they be going shopping for somebody like Bergoglio? If they had to come back together right now, I’m telling you the vast majority of them would be voting for continuity.

ROBERT DRAPER, The New York Times Magazine: [I want to ask you about] financial reform; not so much the content of it, but the means by which it’s been done and if there’s anything that we can learn, anything that we can glean from the means by which these were instituted, since, after all, they were presumably not done so out of consensus, but, rather, through a canny awareness of his own popularity, of timing, and of the maybe dogged authoritarian streak, perhaps, for which Bergoglio was known in Argentina. John had mentioned before that if there’s any real surprise, it’s been his success on stage, and I wondered if we should be so surprised; if there were, in fact, any clues back then that he had a sense of timing, a sense of theatre, that sort of thing.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

JOHN ALLEN: Well, first of all, on the finance stuff, bear in mind, this didn’t just spring fully formed out of the head of Bergoglio. This was actually worked out at the level of some detail during those general congregation meetings of cardinals before the conclave last March; that is, the need for comprehensive Vatican reform, beginning with the finances, was basically part of the mandate that emerged from that conclave, and even some of the details about what this new structure might look like; that is, the need for an independent auditor, the need for there being a centralized finance ministry, so that was, in that sense, a product of consensus among the cardinals. Bergoglio knows that he was elected on a reform mandate, and this was what these guys had in mind.

Despite his commitment to consulting widely and listening to people and being participatory, this is not a guy who is at all shy about pulling the trigger on a decision. And when he feels like he’s reached a point where he’s got all the information he needs, he’s willing to do it.

PAUL VALLELY: There were clues of what he was going to be like, and there were counterindications. The counterindications were if you look at him — go on YouTube. Look at him being interviewed as a witness at the ESMA trial. He was there as a witness. He was being asked about it. And when you look at his body language, you look at his answers, he looks like a cautious politician stonewalling, giving as little information as possible. He looks like a different kind of person than the person you see now.

In terms of his facing with the outside world —he didn’t give interviews. He avoided the press. Now we see this different person, this transformed person, open to the press, phoning people up. That feels very different.

Again, if you go on YouTube, and you look at him saying Mass for the children in the annual diocesan Mass, you’ll see that there are large clowns with stilts, walking across the alter, and that he’s talking to the kids like –in England, we could call a pantomime, where it’s call and response, and shouting back.

So that kind of populism was there, but it feels technical. It doesn’t feel exuberant, like it does now. He’s definitely personally been utterly invigorated, and the people who I spoke to in Buenos Aires who still got phone calls from him on a weekly basis say that there’s

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014 this fiery energy about him now. So, yes, in some ways, he’s recognizable, and there were some clues, but in other ways, he’s a different person.

ANNE THOMPSON, NBC News: This incredible global popularity that Pope Francis enjoys, has that strengthened his mandate for change? Can he leverage that in the Curia?

JOHN ALLEN: The Curia’s a complex bureaucracy. There’s a little bit of everything. There are a lot of people who work in that system who have been more frustrated with it than anyone else because they understand its dysfunctionality and who are anxious for the change. There are others who are more invested in the status quo who I don’t perceive them actively trying to stonewall.

I do perceive a little bit of that attitude of “We’ll just ride this out.” I think there are some who believe that this too shall pass.

The most important strength for his reform mandate is that he has one. In other words, more than two-thirds of the cardinals who elected him to the papacy did so on the basis that they expected him to make profound changes in the operation of the Vatican. So everyone inside the system knows that the College of Cardinals handed him a reform mandate.

And so, what you get is less like overt resistance. What you get now is people trying to become the architects of that reform. So everybody’s got their own blueprint. So the smart thing to do is to try to get on the train, rather than be left behind in the station.

But if the question is does the popularity help? Of course it helps. If the perception were that this pope were a disaster, that people didn’t like him, that you’ve got to be careful about where you put him on the road because you’re worried about blowback, then it would be much easier to say now is not the time to make significant internal changes.

ANNE THOMPSON: But, back when Benedict was elected, the thought was then that they were willing to go to a smaller, purer Church. Has that gone away now?

JOHN ALLEN: Well, and, first of all, I’m not confident that the vote for Benedict was explicitly a vote for a small, purer Church. However, is there a remnant crowd in

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

Catholicism that thinks it would be better to be smaller and to be more compact? Sure, that crowd is still there. And what are they making of all of this? I think there would be one wing of that remnant crowd that would say that this is a transitory phenomenon, and that once they understand that he’s not going to repeal our teaching on gay marriage and he’s not going to repeal our teaching on abortion and so on, that the world will fall out of love with him.

PAUL VALLELY: And I think to be fair to Benedict, when he talked about a smaller, purer Church, that was a kind of prediction, something he thought would come to pass, rather than something he was actually aiming for.

I think what strengthens the mandate in your question is that, with that huge crowd that John was talking about, Benedict would have gone out quarter of an hour, 20 minutes beforehand. Francis goes out an hour beforehand, and he spends an hour touring the crowd. And there’s a huge warmth and authenticity about him which people respond to. And when you shake his hand, for a few minutes, he looks in your eyes, and you are the person on the planet that he’s concerned with at that moment. And there’s an extraordinary softness and gentleness—this is some kind of embracing warmth. And people can just feel that.

NAPP NAZWORTH, The Christian Post: When you talk about his political instincts, does that include the media as well, when you look at the positive press coverage that you’re talking about? Is he media-savvy in the sense of understanding, when he gives an interview with a reporter, what the headline’s going to be?

JOHN ALLEN: My read would be yes. Bear in mind, the guy, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, for 15 years, in terms of sit-down, one-on-one interviews, gave fewer than five. He’s already given five as pope, and they’ve all been blockbusters. And I think if you look at them, he is very clear that there’s a kind of instinct about what the headline is going to be.

CLARE DUFFY, NBC News: Has there been any fallout from some of these blockbuster interviews, perhaps the Scalfari interview, of the wisdom of giving an interview to an 89- year-old who doesn’t take notes? That seems not terribly media-savvy.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

JOHN ALLEN: If you don’t know the story, one of the interviews that Francis has given was to an 89-year-old, non-believing, leftist journalist in Italy by the name of Eugenio Scalfari, founder of La Repubblica, which is like the left-wing paper of record in Italy. Scalfari did not tape-record it and did not take notes. Two days later, he goes back to his office and reconstructs this from memory. And this is where we get “God is not a Catholic.” So that sound bite. We get the leprosy of the Royal Court in the Vatican. The truth of it is it’s impossible to know where Scalfari ends and where Francis begins in that interview.

I asked a cardinal, “Well, what’s the deal with the Scalfari interview?” “I asked the Pope the same thing.” All right? He said, “I went to the Pope, and I said, ‘What’s the deal? Because we all know this is not right.'”

He said Francis’ answer was, “Yeah, yeah, I know it was kind of made up, but, you know, we have to be gentle with this guy. He’s kind of old.”

Bottom line, there is a strategy here, and the strategy is Francis has made the strategic choice that he is going to open himself up, including opening himself up to some improbable venues and in ways, in the short term, might lead to misunderstanding or mischaracterization or just silliness, but I think he has decided that it’s the price of doing business, because if he wants to lead a church in dialogue, a church that gets out of the sacristy and into the streets, then he has to be willing to pay that short-term price.

PAUL VALLELY: I think he’s quite canny in that he knows that he can float stuff, and he’s got deniability, as politicians would see it, because this stuff is all getting out there, and then he can say, “Well…” It’s part of this culture of allowing debate and encouraging debate in the Church.

DOYLE MCMANUS, Los Angeles Times: It seems to me you’ve been talking about two kinds of institutional reform. There’s the financial management reform, and then there’s the idea of reforming decision-making, including the appointment of bishops. That, if extended, is really a much deeper constitutional change, if you like, in the way the Church is running. How fast do you expect that to move, and is it possible that that issue could end up being the future crisis of this papacy?

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Pope Francis After One Year” John L. Allen, Jr. and Paul Vallely  March 2014

JOHN ALLEN: Well, there’s no doubt that appointment of bishops is the single most important thing any pope ever does to shape culture in the Catholic Church. And so in many ways, the success or failure of the Francis revolution will rest on his ability to be able to elevate like-minded bishops around the world. He clearly understands that. He has begun making some changes to steer the process in that direction.

You asked is this the level at which resistance to his agenda may manifest itself? Yes and no. I think if the definition of a Bergoglio bishop is a moderate, rather than a conservative, then obviously there will be some conservatives who are concerned with that, including some conservatives in the episcopacy. If the definition of a Bergoglio bishop, however, is somebody who is pastoral, believes in the Social Gospel, lives a simple life, and is close to the poor, there, I think you would get overwhelming support that those are good things.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Join me in thanking both of our presenters.

 END 

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]