The ten years of Pope Francis: from invoking the revolution to administering the government of the Church

Ten years of pontificate, time of balances. Although the decennial balances may sound frivolous for a thousand-year-old institution, for a Pope who loves to start “processes”, to sow plants whose fruits others will reap. Maybe. Measuring Francisco’s successes and failures with the yardstick of contingency is therefore daring. But since we live here and now, how to avoid it?

The question then is: How are the “processes” going? On the right track or dead ends? Do the new plants shed buds or did they get frost burned?

I leave to others the judgment on theological disputes and institutional reforms, internecine wars and severed heads, to say if we are facing a revolution or a great confusion. I limit myself to recording the smacks that fly and the scandals that break out. To observe the gap between promises and results, hopes and disappointments. To ask myself if the organization of the Church is compatible with modern fragmentation, its unity with plurality, its community with individuality.

In the midst of these dilemmas, the Pope reminds me of those fiery prophets who invoke the revolution and when they reach the government, it is their turn to administer. How many times does poetry turn into prose, dreams into nightmares, novelty into routine? That seems to me ten years later the balance of pontifical geopolitics.

A poster with the image of Francisco, in the Plaza San Pedro. AP Photo

The world according to Bergoglio

What is the Bergoglian vision of the world? The project to make it a reality? What stage is it in? Let’s start with the idea. In short, Bergoglio aspires to a post-Western and post-liberal world.

Because he believes that liberalism has led the West astray, severed its Christian roots, sacrificed popular spirituality to disenchantment and rationality. John Calvin’s fault first and John Locke later. The West, at most, needs a work of moral sanitation.

For the Holy See it is a new and radical vision: he is the first Pope to throw Europe, which was his cradle, outside of Christianity. What a blow! But for the Hispanic world it is an old and deep-rooted political myth. Myth expressed in Argentina by the third Peronist position.

Not because the Pope is such, I never tire of repeating it, but because Peronism embodied the national Catholic ambition to reunite catholicity against the Protestant heresy and its ideologies. First liberalism: he had destroyed Christian unity, corrupted the people, perverted their culture! Hence the hatred of the Anglo-Saxons, which Bergoglio hides little and badly.

How is this ancient imaginary of Francis translated today? Who embodies faith against secularism, the heart against reason, the people against the enlightened elites? Simple: the “peripheries”. The famous peripheries that, like Latin America, he points out as victims of Western ideological colonization, of liberal desacralization. The peripheries are, therefore, the ideal architrave of his post-Western order.

Pope Francis 10 years ago, in the Vatican. Photo Reuters

But how to do it? How to unite and emancipate them? Preserving, of course, their cultural identity and national sovereignty! That they also not give in to the consumerist and secularist temptation, to Western individualistic contamination!

The periphery”

The Pope is not omnipotent but his bow has many arrows, his keyboard many keys. This explains the map of his pastoral visits, frequent in Africa and Asia, rare in Europe. And the criterion of his curial and cardinal appointments, the thinning of the Western Churches and the strengthening of the peripheral ones. As well as an infinity of other gestures and facts.

It is not all. In accordance with these premises, Bergoglio trusted some great powers. In those that rise as a dam against the Western rationalist scourge. Both because they preserve a rich store of religious culture and popular devotion, and because they are to help liberate the spiritualist periphery from the materialistic West.

Hence the hopes pinned on Russia, the limitless patience with China. Latin American populisms have once again set the tone: haven’t the anti-liberal powers always cultivated to oppose a broad front to the liberal West?

Well, how have you been doing so far? What happens, ten years later, with Vatican geopolitics? By eye, if the liberal order cries, the post-liberal order despairs. The peripheries? Like the “people”, the other Bergoglian myth: a beautiful word to hear and a good one to sell, which hides a prosaic reality.

Once the romantic patina is removed, the idealistic veil drawn, the periphery often shows a gloomy face: religion is superstition, communitarianism is ferocious tribalism, solidarity is collusion, politics is corruption, the vote is clientele, the family is abuse. It is not better than the center, it is not a spiritual reserve. How many slaps did papal diplomacy receive, how many good intentions fell on deaf ears, how many vain peace mediations!

And the great anti-liberal powers? Worse than going at night. The expectations placed on Russia, the hopes of its Christian revival: shipwrecked in the aggression against Ukraine! A shock, a lethal blow to the papal “new order”. Meanwhile, nothing moved the atavistic Chinese union between state and religion.

Interreligious dialogue? Little more than cordial civilities. Deglobalization? Worse than globalization. Ecology? Human rights? Religious freedom? Does a liberal or a post-liberal order protect them more? The Western juridical-rational order that the Pope detests or the sacro-charismatic one that he celebrates? Perhaps after trying to throw him out the door, Bergoglio will not soon have to open the window to the West again.

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