by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

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.