by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Francis’s First Day: A Letdown

     Monday afternoon the press center looked like the Superdome just before the onset of Hurricane Katrina.  Tuesday morning it looked like the proverbial clown convention – several hundred members of the Homeland Security Administration in bright blue shirts, all signing in and gaining clearance to be bused to Joint Base Andrews for Pope Francis’s arrival in the United States – “on American soil,” as the more hyperbole-prone commentators put it.

I am covering the visit for Vanity Fair via its website, following on my profile of Pope Francis in the current (October) issue of the magazine.   My first piece, up as the Pope arrived, proposes that Francis’s personal authenticity is what makes his visit significant – because “he comes at a time when American public life is notably lacking in authenticity.” With an eye on the packed schedule and the tight security, the piece goes on:

How, in such a setting, could anybody let his authentic self show? If anybody can, it is Francis—but I think it’s fair to say that unless he can find a way to break through the cordons and act spontaneously, the visit will be a letdown.

By that standard, Francis’s arrival at Joint Base Andrews was a letdown.  The Pope arrived.  He said some things to the President and some other people that weren’t transmitted by any of the several thousand microphones present.  He rode in the back of  a black Fiat to the nunciature, got out, and went inside – without stopping to greet the schoolchildren assembled to welcome him, as far as I could tell.

The best thing was the Fiat: small, stylish, storied (“Fix It Again, Tony”), still anomalous in the United States, and – not least – a car unlike all the others in the motorcade, which made it an obvious target for a would-be assassin, and so showed Francis’s indifference to the massive security operation enacted on his behalf.

“Fix it again, Francis.”   My coverage continues today on vanityfair.com.

Francis in Philly: It’s So Crowded, Nobody’s Going

     Fr. James Martin is generally so enthusiastic, so upbeat, so ready to see the bright side, that when he sees a problem, even a small problem, I take note even more than I usually do of his work.

And Fr. Martin, known as a Jesuit, is first of all a Philadelphian.

So when Fr. Martin returned from Philadelphia the other day with word that hotels in the city still have rooms for Pope Francis’s visit, and that people are so fearful of the vast crowds that, in the spirit of Yogi Berra – who said “The place is so crowded these days, nobody goes there” – they are staying home, I figured there must be something to it.

Is there?  We’ll know in ten days.  Or we won’t, because the people organizing the Congress of Families and the papal Mass on the Ben Franklin Parkway will catch Fr. Martin’s drift – surely they read his Facebook page, which is read by tens of thousands – and distribute some more tickets to boost the crowd.

But I think, on some level, there is something to it – something I tried to spell out in my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair.  It is this: Francis is not a man whose most authentic self is the self that is seen by huge crowds.

John Paul thrived on crowds.  Benedict was indifferent to them, even leery of them.   Francis (as we have seen) is perfectly capable in crowds – but he seems most himself when meeting people in twos and threes.   So it is that, in his pontificate, the weekly audiences and Angelus in Rome have become places for close encounters with him:

Francis comes to the window and waves, and we see him. Sure, we’re seeing the Pope, on high, an icon in extremest white. But in the mind’s eye we also see the ordinary pastor who embraced a man with boils in St. Peter’s Square; who put on a clown nose without worrying that it might diminish the dignity of the papal office. In spirit, Francis isn’t up there in the palace. He is down in the square with everybody else.

Surely some lucky people will have close encounters with Francis in Washington and New York and Philadelphia.  As for those who stay away, I suspect that this is one reason why: they don’t want the feeling of closeness to Francis – which is profound just now – to be amortized over a crowd.

The photograph shows Philadelphians gathered for a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II on the Ben Franklin Parkway in 1979.   Fr. Martin calls the event “one of my most vivid memories of adolescence.”

Pope Francis: The Mystery of Personality

     Flannery O'Connor said somewhere that the true subject of fiction is “the mystery of personality.”   It seems to me that “the mystery of personality” is the true subject of literary biography, too; and so, when, in the early stages of writing a group portrait of four American Catholic writers, I was asked to write about the papacy, I instinctively turned to the mystery of personality – considering the papal office by considering the character of the man who occupied it.  

Twelve years later, I still think it’s a sound approach, and it’s the approach I took in writing a profile of Pope Francis – “Our Man in the Vatican” – that’s out in the October Vanity Fair.  From the headline (chosen by the editors) onward, the profile focuses on the man now known simply as Francis, who makes his own bed and carries his own briefcase: 

Somehow he has stayed true to himself and to the core Catholic message and has kept free of the pomp of the papacy, the crush of celebrity, and the expectations of the global Church.  “He doesn’t `play’ the Pope,’ says Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.  “He is who he is.”

He is who he is: and and through the mystery of personality, who he is is shaping – changing – the Church.

Sounds obvious, but it’s not.  For half a century – as I spelled out in The Atlantic in 2004 – coverage of the papacy has focused on the sociology of the Vatican; the exoticism of the place, a foreign country after all; its monarchical trappings (those Swiss Guards); the long-running conflicts between Italians and internationalists, conservatives and progressives, Augustinians and Thomists, and so on; or the perpetual gap between the medium and the message –the everyday contradictions and hypocrisy of the place.  

To focus on the Vatican in one of these ways is to be an expert, or to sound like one.  But it is to miss much of the human story.  As I see it, the papacy in our time is better understood through attention to the character of popes in our time.  John Paul was essentially a performer, like a Shakespearean actor on a global stage.  Benedict was essentially a scholar, drawn to texts and their interpretation. And Francis is essentially a conversationalist – meeting people face to face, talking and listening.

That’s the Francis I set out to depict in the Vanity Fair profile, which I see as a piece of long-form, present-tense portraiture in line with dozens of long-form portraits the magazine has published over the decades, often accompanied by portrait photographs that are works of art in their own right.  

“Our Man in the Vatican” begins on page 268 and is up on vf.com.