by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Francis: Old Age in Action
Jorge Luis Borges was “an agnostic who said the Our Father every night because he had made a promise to his mother.” So says Jorge Maria Bergoglio, who was a family friend of the great Argentine fabulist – and who is now better known by the name he took when he was elected pope.
That’s the most interesting thing I learned in James Carroll’s ample, artful, aptly timed profile of Francis in the current New Yorker.
I put off reading the profile for more than a week after it came out, partly out of envy (I wished I’d sought the assignment myself, so as to deepen my own reportage from the Vatican) and partly out of unease (I can’t forget the extreme, even if warranted, unpleasantness of Carroll’s piece about John Paul II and Christian-Jewish issues for the magazine in 1996).
Turns out there was nothing to be agitated about. Turns out that the Francis Effect (as it is called) is so powerful that it can ease the religious heartburn of even the most agitated representative of the Vatican II generation of American Catholics: James Carroll, I mean.
Among all the other blessings Francis is bringing us, there is this one: the extraordinary Catholics of my parents’ generation, who kept the faith while out in the cold for three decades, can feel, late in life, a homecoming in this pontificate.
And it turns out that all the attention paid to Francis left Carroll with few stones to turn. If you’ve been following Francis’ first months closely, the profile reads like a roundup of the stories that have attached themselves to the new pope: from his vexed history during the Dirty War in Argentina to his relatively passive (let’s say lax) approach to the matter of clerical sexual abuse – which is getting greater attention now, Carroll reports.
The attention is such that I’d forgotten (and Carroll hasn’t) that the Times appraised the new pope as “a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues.”
Next time, let’s all keep in mind how little we know about the cardinals, shall we?
"The Papacy presents the most remarkable spectacle in history of old age in action. Most of the pontiffs were elected at an age when a king would have been considered fit only for abdication, yet the invigorating effect of St Peter’s Chair is well known. "
That remark by the old-time travel writer and Vatican-watcher H.V. Morton (who wandered into an Atlantic piece of mine about the election of popes) says more about Francis than Carroll’s or anybody else’s musings.
Let the invigoration go on.