A testimony of hope, some misunderstandings and clumsiness

Former correspondent of the France-Presse agency at the Vatican, having followed him in fairly numerous trips, I was very moved by his disappearance, and also of the beauty of his last gestures of hope during Holy Week.

He will remain very dear to my heart, he who had written a short letter to my sick brother to accompany him in his suffering. He who said at the end of each interview: “And don’t forget to pray for me”. And who had asked the crowd on Saint-Pierre square, the evening of his election.

This man did not place himself above the others, was inhabited by a great sense of his imperfection, his sin, his errors, his carried away or sometimes too confident and impulsive. He attached enormous importance to the mercy to which, he said, everyone was entitled. Nothing was more foreign to him than idealization, pumps, the cult of the personality from which he could not completely escape, including in his funeral. In this refusal of worldliness, he approached Benoît XVI.

François wanted to be buried the most simply in the world near her protector, the “Salus Populi Romani”, the Virgin Mary in the Roman basilica which bears her name. We will have observed that he will have talked a lot about him, in interview books, in rivers interviews: in my opinion, his concern was to explain well on what he was, what he thought, in order to avoid post-mortem all misunderstandings, clichés, distant images at the time of the balance sheet. First his Jesuit thought was complex and argued on the functioning of the world and society. Then, he felt this need to be well understood, having suffered in particular false campaigns when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires under the dictatorship.

Promoter of a “peopleology of the people”

Among the labels that the media like to stick to the popes, they are first of all those of “progressive” or “reactionary”. François did not like these reducing mirrors, he did not enter these boxes. He was not at all Marxing. But, promoter of a “theology of the people”, he was socially very committed, criticism of wild liberalism, deregulation and king’s money, great lawyer for dignity at work, and the need for workers to organize peacefully to defend their rights. That it was against abortion, euthanasia, GPA, and condemned them with very hard words do not make a reactionary.

Can a pope, who professes the sacred gift of life granted by God support these societal developments without saying a word? On the other hand, what has singularized him is his respect for the “different” – -human people, women who have used abortion, single mothers, etc. – excluded in the past by the church, and which he has fully welcomed. François, on the other hand, remained in tradition on the priesthood, celibacy, the sacraments, but he wanted synodality, the real participation of lay people and women, calling them to collaborate in equal and equal with the priests: this has constituted the launch of a revolution which will take time to anchor in habits and faces the fears of a burst of the church.

Proximity to the poor, immigrants

What touches me more than anything in this southern pope is his proximity- in language and gestures- with the poor, the sick, the immigrants, the streets of the street, the excluded, the victims of rape, the prisoners, and all his vigorous and impactful attacks against the “culture of waste”.

He will have brought the church closer to the world. He will have descended from pontifical pedestal, will have walked with the people of God, going to prisons and hospices, he will have cried and also laughs with the world to give him hope.

If there is one resemblance to one of her predecessors, it is with John XXIII that she seems to me the most obvious, this apparently man pope but firm in the face full of humor and kindness.

Keywords could also complete the portrait of François: “the self-referentiality” which he criticized strongly, a church turned towards itself and which would be afraid of the world. And, in the opposite direction, the mission, a typically Jesuit priority, which will make it go to the end of the world, sometimes in countries where Catholics are ultra-minority.

Another key word is the “clericalism” that he will have sometimes forfected in a harsh manner and which will have injured many priests. In the conclave, some opponents will register this fight to the negative of its assessment, judging that the Church is more divided than twelve years ago, which is not false.

It is not to make him insult to speak of his mistakes and his faults. He had to be aware of it. It is first of all, in my opinion, to have spoken too much, to have been carried away, with imprudence, naivety, sometimes in a hurtful manner, on news that he did not master well, to have sometimes procrastinated in the face of certain scandals of abuse by fear of slander – even if he led a fight in total determined against this scourge.

To have trusted some too much in the media that courted him, to have sometimes allowed himself to have by flattery of powerful. To have been too hard with some that he did not like, too conciliatory with others in whom he persisted in believing even if they did not deserve it. I am thinking of an overly low condemnation of the actions of Azerbaijan, in particular in Karabagh, very badly perceived by the Armenians.

But to have spoken almost every day on the phone with the parish priest of Gaza, Father Gabriel Romanelli, how not to be grateful to him? To have opened the jubilee year of mercy in the small cathedral of Bangui in the middle of the civil war, what a poignant encouragement to reconciliation!

If he was not always a fine strategist and diplomat, for all these tens of thousands of unknown people he received, kissed, listened to, consoled, respected, raised, encouraged in faith for twelve years, I salute a wonderful pastor. Thank you Pape Francis.