For a Times reporter who covered him, Francis was always a surprise
The Spanish Cardinal Bergoglio: From Joseph Ratzinger to the New Pope Benedict XVI, and through the Years of Faith and Mistrust
The Argentine cardinal was a Jesuit known for riding the bus and was one of the reasons church experts told me I needed to be filled to move the church forward. Joseph Ratzinger was chosen as Pope Benedict XVI by the college of cardinals.
When, eight years later, I reported on another conclave and again stood in St. Peter’s Square scrutinizing the color of smoke leaking out the Sistine Chapel (which signals that a new pope has been chosen), I thought the Argentine cardinal had become too old to be a top candidate.
Cardinal Bergoglio, the new pope of surprises, took the name Pope Francis, the first to do so in the history of the Catholic Church. Over the dozen years that I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death at 88, he kept the church he led, the world he cared about and the reporters who followed him on their toes. He drew attention to humanitarian issues that were off the global radar, in unconventional destinations such as Iraq and Mongolia.
One indelible image I recall was seeing him visibly moved, his voice tight, as he came face to face in Bangladesh with members of the Rohingya ethnic minority who had suffered enormous persecution. I learned that Francis cared about migrants and the war victims no matter their religion. For him the pain was real.
By creating a novel form of conflict, Francis helped to demystify his office’s authority and undermine its most imposing claims, by giving Catholics who had been accustomed to being on the same side as the Vatican suddenly parted from papal authority.
That infuriated them, and over the years the pressure, and noise, the conservative opposition produced on affiliated news outlets led some of them to suggest that the time of a schism, or formal break, with the church, was nigh.
I asked Francis about the unanswered questions and if he was concerned about the possibility of the American church breaking away from Rome.
On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the news media than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. He willingly compared notes with me on getting stuck in elevators after a week in which we had both gotten stuck in elevators. I saw him accept enough sweets to feed an army.
In the Vatican, he had a governing style that his critics thought was authoritarian and a way to circumvent the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.
I was amazed at how he went off- topic at the end of the meeting of the bishops last year, talking about the church being unfairly accused by the devil.
I heard that he was able to change because of the lessons he’d learned from his mistakes. When he believed his bishops over sexual abuse victims, he admitted the error of his ways and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He took important measures to improve safety in the church.
He succeeded in at least one way. For generations, modernizers lamented the outsize power of the papacy, the anachronism of a monarchical authority in a democratic age, the way the concept of papal infallibility froze Catholic debates even as the world rushed forward. In theory Francis shared those concerns, promising a more collegial and horizontally oriented church, more synodal, in the jargon of the Catholic bureaucracy. In practice he often used his power in the same way as his predecessors, to police and suppress deviations from his authority — except that this time the targets were dissenting conservatives and traditionalists instead of progressives and modernizers.
Pope Francis, who passed to his reward on the morning after Easter at age 88, was a version of the liberal pope that many Catholics had earnestly desired all through the long reign of John Paul II and the shorter one of Benedict XVI — a man whose worldview was shaped and defined by the Second Vatican Council and whose pontificate sought a renewal of its revolution, a further great modernization of the Catholic Church.
Former Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was elected Pope Francis, is the first pope from outside of Europe to be elected from Latin America. The 84-year-old was elected during the 2005 conclave where Benedict XVI’s name was removed from the ballot. Bergoglio was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina from 1986 to 1990 and served as Cardinal for six years before he was elected.