Breda O’Brien: Pope Francis wants a church that gets its hands dirty

The Catholic Church must offer alternative values if it is to help teenagers grappling with anxiety and meaninglessness

Ten years have passed since Pope Francis stood stiffly and silently to attention on a Vatican balcony listening to the Argentinian national anthem. The problem was that millions of international viewers could not hear it, leading many to wonder what kind of stilted individual had been selected as pope.

He moved swiftly to let us know, carrying his own bags, not moving into the Vatican apartments and giving frank media interviews to unexpected people. He is a pope of firsts: the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from South America, the first to take the name Francis, and the first in living memory to have a former pope still very much alive.

Whatever Francis is, it is not stilted. He has an instinctual warmth at times, such as when he reached out to embrace Vinicio Riva in November 2013. Riva has neurofibromatosis which leaves his skin covered in benign tumours and itchy sores. Shortly after, he embraced an unidentified man with a severely disfigured face and has gone on hugging people with disabilities or disfiguring conditions ever since.

My own favourite image of him is not as a hugging pope but a tired old man with a dragging pain in his hip, standing alone in a rain-slicked St Peter’s Square in 2020 during the pandemic. No one other than the pope could have radiated that much courage and hope when the globe was plunged into crisis.

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Yet I am acutely aware that being a lone, heroic figure is not his intention at all. The keywords of his papacy have been solidarity and synodality.

Francis has decisively pivoted the attention of the Catholic Church away from Europe and towards Africa in particular. His visit to Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan earlier this year illustrates this.

Both countries are riven by violence and have been exploited by international business interests. He delivered a stern message to Europe and the US to stop ravaging these countries for their resources and to take seriously the devastation caused by climate change.

The church is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else. Some 19 per cent of all Catholics are in Africa. Africans have extraordinarily high rates of Mass attendance and vocations. They are firm supporters of climate justice and environmentalism. While the church in Europe is stagnant or declining, the church in Africa is young and vibrant.

Francis wants a church where laypeople and those who are ordained, or in religious life, work humbly together to journey towards God

Francis’s trip to South Sudan also focused on women, saying the future rests on respect for them. The UN estimates that four out of 10 women in South Sudan have been victims of one or more forms of assault. Francis endorsed the work done by women religious, which includes the mission of Irish Loreto sister Orla Treacy, who founded a girls’ boarding school to offer education to girls who otherwise might be married off at 15.

South Sudan is in the midst of a massive refugee crisis, another cause dear to Francis’s heart.

Francis wants a church of the poor, for people on the peripheries. On the trip to South Sudan, he said: “Our first duty is not to be a church that is perfectly organised – any company can do this – but a church that, in the name of Christ, stands in the midst of people’s troubled lives, a church that is willing to dirty its hands for people.”

The literal translation of synod is to journey together. Francis wants a church where laypeople and those who are ordained, or in religious life, work humbly together to journey towards God.

The last time I wrote about synodality, I was accused in the Letters page of undermining the creation of a People’s Church, of being “shameful in disloyalty” and attempting to oppose and undermine Francis.

Odd, given that I had spent a lot of time quoting the pope, and not selectively. So let me have another go.

In Austen Ivereigh’s book, Let Us Dream, written after unprecedented access to the pope, Francis says: “What is under discussion at synodal gatherings are not traditional truths of Christian doctrine. The synod is concerned mainly with how teaching can be lived and applied in the changing contexts of our time.”

I have never experienced anything except a post-Vatican II church and never wanted a reversion to a time before I was born.

Teenagers who allegedly have grown up as Catholics cannot recount a single parable taught by Jesus, have no idea that the Eucharist is anything except holy bread, and have absorbed the cultural consensus that the church is irrelevant if not downright repressive.

A church that is indistinguishable from contemporary mores in any meaningful way will do nothing to bring comfort, meaning and challenge to those teenagers as they grapple with chronic anxiety and frightening levels of meaninglessness.

Francis is as much my pope as John Paul and Benedict were. At times, I wince at some of his less-considered spontaneous statements and wish his attitude to the traditional Latin Mass (which I do not attend myself) were more nuanced. His desire for a renewed, invigorated church that gets its hands dirty and serves the poor, leaves me awed, inspired, and grateful. Ad multos annos, Pope Francis.