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A Pope on the Frontier
A letter followed by a personal meeting with the atheist Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, and then the interview with the monthly magazine La Civiltà Cattolica show the world that Jorge Mario Bergoglio doesn’t fear talking with everyone–included nonbelievers–about anything. Where does his freedom originate? What does it bring to the Church?

by John Waters

Each of us possesses a unique genius, which, when applied to our work, passions, friendships, and life brings a newness that cannot be overlooked. This willingness to let go of form and protocol and be oneself  is often absent from the formal life of political leaders. Hence, they cease to truly lead and instead follow patterns already set down, leaving themselves outside. Imitating what is already established, they fail to connect with their fellows, who look for a hint of the human and find nothing.
We have been blessed in that each of the popes who has led the Church in living memory has been made of different material. Each, in his way, has been a leader of immense presence, providing the possibility for a relationship. Each was, first and foremost, a recognizable human being, who could not be mistaken for anyone else. Each carried forward the teaching of the Church, but each did this in a manner particular to himself. That is, each bore witness to the gaze and love of Christ through the medium of his own personality rather than arid sentences of sermons and speeches.
The shift from Pope Benedict XVI to Pope Francis was unexpected and dramatic but, six months later, we rediscover our equilibrium and have reason as much for gratitude as for astonishment. A strange miracle has occurred: we have lost nothing and gained enormously in circumstances where this hardly seemed possible.

The hundredfold. The farewell of Pope Benedict was painful to accept, and perhaps many of us were unsure whether whatever was happening would be anything but a loss.Yet we have gained the hundredfold. Pope Benedict remains and a new force has entered the Church, a hurricane of love that, every day, awakens us to a new promise of surprise. We need only contemplate the amazing figure of Pope Francis to understand the meaning of it all, to see the extraordinary unfolding of a process that has come to us through the prayer and listening of our beloved Pope Benedict.
Pope Francis has caused the world to stop in its tracks and look in his direction. Sometimes, this has resulted in superficial misunderstandings, and yet, underneath, there is a growing sense that here is a new kind of father, but still a father–who will tell us what is true.
In his unexpected and lengthy recent interview in La Civiltà Cattolica, the Holy Father created two distinct and largely unconnected kinds of excitement. One kind emanated from those who generally stand outside the Church, throwing insults through the doorway. Instead, many exterior bystanders have congratulated the Pope for what they insist are his doctrinal initiatives. A different excitement radiates from those on the inside, who are simply exhilarated by the impact of the personality of this man called Bergoglio.Those who love the Church know well that the ‘change’ being clamoured for in the world’s media is neither desirable nor necessary. What is required, as always, is an ear attuned to the heartbeat of the world in time.  There is no point of severance or breach between the two popes, but a continuum manifesting a dramatic but timely shift in approach. Benedict XVI had completed his great work, and this remains in the countless words he wrote and published as Pope. Now it is time to take these understandings to the world, in a way Pope Benedict – for all kinds of reasons, including his age and declining health – felt unable to do.
Francis presents his explications in the form of anecdote and analogy, making his meaning clear in a language of personal encounter and experience, which immediately penetrates the deep structural appetite for story that resides in every human heart.
The most exhilarating thing about this Pope is neither his radicalism nor his piety, but his insistence on emphasizing his existence as a man. This is visible many times in the interview, for example, when the Pope speaks about his own sinfulness, about the place of doubt in faith, about his time as a teacher when he sent his students’ stories to the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges for consideration, about his loves in art and music: Alessandro Manzoni, Mozart, Caravaggio, Dostoyevsky, Hölderlin, Bach, Wagner... Here is a man who insists we come to know him.

Healing the wounds. There are, then, no immediate doctrinal implications arising from the Pope’s interview, but many amazing possibilities for a different kind of relationship between the Pope and his people. The occasion of the misunderstandings, perhaps, is the Pope’s emphasis on what Giussani warned us of many years ago: that rules are a form of blasphemy unless Christ is made visible.  “I see clearly,” Pope Francis said, “that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and  about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.... And you have to start from the ground up.” The Pope, as he insists, says no more than the Catechism already tells us. It is not that he proposes to dispense with rules, but that he urges us to move past them to the embrace beyond, and in doing so alert the onlooker to the presence of something more exceptional than they had hitherto suspected or dreamed about. 
   God is real; he repeats: God is real. “In fact, there is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is sometimes end up giving birth within the Church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today. “God manifests Himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.” 

Opening the windows. The most striking words from the Pope’s interview for me are in his image of the field hospital, graphically depicting the newness he offers: “The frontiers are many. Let us think of the religious sisters living in hospitals. They live on the frontier. I am alive because of one of them. When I went through my lung disease at the hospital, the doctor gave me penicillin and streptomycin in certain doses. The sister who was on duty tripled my doses because she was daringly astute; she knew what to do because she was with ill people all day. The doctor, who really was a good one, lived in his laboratory; the sister lived on the frontier and was in dialogue with it every day. Domesticating the frontier means just talking from a remote location, locking yourself up in a laboratory. Laboratories are useful, but reflection for us must always start from experience.” Every day, like an unconventional nurse, Pope Francis goes around opening windows so that those outside can look upon the human heart of the institutional Church, which has become obscured by both occasional dogmatic moralism from inside and relentless hostility from outside. The healing air is already reaching our lungs.