by Jonathan Freedland
That Obama poster on the
wall, promising hope and change, is looking a little faded now. The
disappointments, whether over drone warfare or a botched rollout of healthcare
reform, have left the world's liberals and progressives searching for a
new pin-up to take the US president's place. As it happens, there's an obvious
candidate: the head of an organisation those same liberals and progressives
have long regarded as sexist, homophobic and, thanks to a series of child abuse
scandals, chillingly cruel. The obvious new hero of the left is the pope.
Only installed in March, Pope Francis has already become a
phenomenon. His is the most talked-about name on the internet in 2013, ranking ahead
of "Obamacare" and "NSA". In fourth place comes
Francis's Twitter handle, @Pontifex. In Italy, Francesco has fast become the
most popular name for new baby boys. Rome reports a surge in tourist numbers,
while church attendance is said to be up – both trends attributed to "the Francis effect".
His popularity is not hard
to fathom. The stories of his personal modesty have become the stuff of instant
legend. He carries his own suitcase. He refused the grandeur of the papal
palace, preferring to live in a simple hostel. When presented with the
traditional red shoes of the pontiff, he declined; instead he telephoned his
81-year-old cobbler in Buenos Aires and asked him to repair his old ones. On
Thursday, Francis visited the Italian president – arriving in a blue Ford Focus, with not a blaring siren to be
heard.
Some will dismiss these acts
as mere gestures, even publicity stunts. But they convey a powerful message,
one of almost elemental egalitarianism. He is in the business of scraping away
the trappings, the edifice of Vatican wealth accreted over centuries, and
returning the church to its core purpose, one Jesus himself might have
recognised. He says he wants to preside over "a poor church, for the
poor". It's not the institution that counts, it's the mission.
All this would warm the
heart of even the most fervent atheist, except Francis has gone much
further. It seems he wants to do more than simply stroke the brow of the weak.
He is taking on the system that has made them weak and keeps them that way.
"My thoughts turn to
all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on
profit at any cost," he
tweeted in May. A day earlier he denounced as
"slave labour" the conditions endured by Bangladeshi workers
killed in a building collapse. In September he said that God wanted men and
women to be at the heart of the world and yet we live in a global economic
order that worships "an idol called money".
There is no denying the
radicalism of this message, a frontal and sustained attack on what he calls
"unbridled capitalism", with its "throwaway"
attitude to everything from unwanted food to unwanted old people. His enemies
have certainly not missed it. If a man is to be judged by his opponents, note
that this week Sarah Palin denounced him as "kind of liberal" while
the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs has lamented that this pope lacks
the "sophisticated" approach to such matters of his
predecessors. Meanwhile, an Italian prosecutor has warned that Francis's campaign against corruption could put him in the
crosshairs of that country's second most powerful institution: the mafia.
As if this weren't enough to
have Francis's 76-year-old face on the walls of the world's student bedrooms,
he also seems set to lead a church campaign on the environment. He was
photographed this week with anti-fracking
activists, while his biographer, Paul Vallely, has revealed that the pope has made
contact with Leonardo Boff, an eco-theologian previously shunned by Rome and
sentenced to "obsequious silence" by the office formerly known as the
"Inquisition". An encyclical on care for the planet is said to be on
the way.
Many on the left will say
that's all very welcome, but meaningless until the pope puts his own house in
order. But here, too, the signs are encouraging. Or, more accurately, stunning.
Recently, Francis told an interviewer the church had become
"obsessed" with abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He no longer
wanted the Catholic hierarchy to be preoccupied with "small-minded
rules". Talking to reporters on a flight – an occurrence remarkable in
itself – he said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?"
His latest move is to send the world's Catholics a questionnaire, seeking their attitude
to those vexed questions of modern life. It's bound to reveal a flock whose
practices are, shall we say, at variance with Catholic teaching. In politics,
you'd say Francis was preparing the ground for reform.
Witness his reaction to a
letter – sent to "His Holiness Francis, Vatican City" – from a single
woman, pregnant by a married man who had since abandoned her. To her
astonishment, the pope telephoned her directly and told her that if, as she
feared, priests refused to baptise her baby,he would perform the ceremony himself. (Telephoning individuals
who write to him is a Francis habit.) Now contrast that with the past Catholic
approach to such "fallen women", dramatised so powerfully in the
current film Philomena. He is replacing brutality with empathy.
Of course, he is not
perfect. His record in Argentina during the era of dictatorship and "dirty
war" is far from clean. "He started off as a strict authoritarian,
reactionary figure," says Vallely.
But, aged 50, Francis underwent a
spiritual crisis from which, says his biographer, he emerged utterly
transformed. He ditched the trappings of high church office, went into the
slums and got his hands dirty.
Now inside the Vatican, he
faces a different challenge – to face down the conservatives of the curia and lock in his
reforms, so that they cannot be undone once he's gone. Given the guile of those
courtiers, that's quite a task: he'll need all the support he can get.
Some will say the world's
leftists and liberals shouldn't hanker for a pin-up, that the urge is infantile
and bound to end in disappointment. But the need is human and hardly confined
to the left: think of the Reagan and Thatcher posters that still adorn the
metaphorical walls of conservatives, three decades on. The pope may have no
army, no battalions or divisions, but he has a pulpit – and right now he is
using it to be the world's loudest and clearest voice against the
status quo. You don't have to be a believer to believe in that.
