Pick Up a Pontiff

There's a video circulating of Archbishop Bergoglio, as he once was, at a Children's Mass in 2011 at which - in the baffling way of these things - gigantic puppets act out Bible readings, doubtless completely terrifying any children who may have been present. Christian worship has a proud record of terrifying children, of course, but in such cases it doesn't actually appear to be the intention. Anyway, you could never, ever, picture Pope Emeritus Benedict taking part in such a liturgical excrescence, but various people I know are already grimacing at this and some of Pope Francis's sartorial decisions. 'Well' commented the Principal of my old theological college, 'That's wiped out the last eight years in the space of 24 hours'.

The Vatican bureaucracy was quite happy with Papa Benny reviving various arcane elements of the Papal wardrobe as it distracted him from making too much of a fuss about what they were up to, or weren't up to - mainly acting as a colossal brake on any alteration in their own position as the central bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church and thus making the whole thing work more effectively. Pope Francis certainly won't move on any of the issues that exercise Western liberals, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, but there is every indication that, given a few years of reasonable health, he won't let the comfortable monsignori in the Curia carry on in the way they have done. A massively centralised governmental system is one of the chief reasons why the Church has responded so incompetently to the child abuse crisis. Pope John Paul was hugely uninterested in the matter; Benedict would have wanted to tackle it but his focus lay elsewhere; Francis is a different matter. Reforming Rome may be 'the thing' he does.

Like it or not, the attitude of the Roman Pontiff makes a huge difference to virtually every other Christian. The great issue of the age for all Christian denominations isn't same-sex marriage, abortion, the position of women in society, or anything so specific; it is the matter of authority - where we think it derives from and what its scope is. Pope Benedict's great project of rediscovering the Roman Church's centre of balance, culturally and liturgically, naturally rested on the same authoritarian, centralised, backward-looking model of leadership he shared with John Paul II. Francis is no liberal, but he strikes a very contrasting figure from his predecessor: a pastor rather than an academic, he stands some chance of knowing more about real people in real circumstances, rather than viewing the world through the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar. And, conservative though he is, that contrast makes a lot of difference; merely by having a galvanising 'project' rather than a consolidating one, Francis may really stir things up.

That said, part of the fun of Papal elections is that you're often not sure what you've actually got. John XXIII was supposed just to keep the seat warm for Cardinal Montini and ended up summoning the Second Vatican Council; John Paul II was elected as a radical reformer and did none of the things his voters expected of him. Which expectations will Francis fail to fulfil?