Powerless power

And so it came to pass that the man, who’d booked his return flight, stayed on and cancelled his home newspaper subscription. In between, Jorge Bergolio of Argentina, 77, emerged to the cry of Habemus Papam (“We have a Pope”).

He stunned Piazza San Pietro crowds by asking, as Pope Francis, for their blessing instead.  At that time, his letter of mandatory retirement, on reaching age 75, was on the papal desk.

In just nine months, Francis upended his church on issues from fixation on sexual morality to support for the poor. Time magazine picked him “Person of the Year. And across what seemed once an unbridgeable gap, so did “The Advocate”—the oldest US gay rights magazine.

“Along comes a man with no army or weapons,” Time said. (“How many divisions has the Pope?” the dictator Josef Stalin once scoffed.)  Yet, when he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes a Muslim woman’s feet, the image resonates beyond his 1.2 billion flock.

Change does not come easy to his church. It has been weakened by scandal, corruption, a shortage of priests and growing Pentecostals in South America. North Korea’s dictatorship suppresses any twinge of prayer. Catholics in China are pressured by a state that claims for Caesar what belongs to God.

“He lives in a spare hostel. He prays even while waiting for his dentist. He retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck. He probed the Vatican bank, curbed the Italian “mafia” in the Curia and fired a German bishop for ostentatious overspending.

And before Christmas, Francis yanked out conservative US Cardinal Raymond Burke from the key Congregation for Bishops, New York Times reported. He was replaced by Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, an ideological moderate with pastoral experience.

Burke insisted that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be barred from receiving communion, while Wuerl took an opposite tack. “That certainly is in line with the pope, who has said that communion is not a reward for being good,” observers said. “It is a sacrament of healing to help people.”

Burke’s preference for the long train of billowing red silk known as cappa magna, and other such vestments, has, however, made him seem out of step with Francis, Times added. Francis dons simple attire.

The new lineup at the Congregation for Bishops is critical, John Allen of National Catholic Reporter wrote. It shapes the criteria by which future church leaders will be chosen. Francis' appointments, so far, signal the kind of bishop he wants in the church: non-ideological pragmatists, close to ordinary people, and committed to the social Gospel.

During the John Paul II years, many observers thought the Vatican had turned a page in media savvy because the pope himself was such a beguiling figure. In fact, John Paul's charisma smudged the reality that the Vatican remained disorganized, a point revealed with crystal clarity under Benedict. The same thing could still happen under Francis.

The main thrust of Pope Francis' pontificate, so far, is he wants to see a less Vatican-centred Church, reports BBC’s David Willey. Its greatest concern should be for the poor and the marginalised, victims of an unjust global economic system that puts profit before people.

In addition, Pope Francis says that ties with Islam have taken on great importance for the Catholic Church because of the growing number of Muslim immigrants now residing in many traditionally Catholic countries.

“We Christians,” he says, “should embrace Muslims with affection and respect in the same way that we hope and ask to be respected in countries of Islamic tradition. In the same way that we hope and ask to be received and respected in countries of Islamic tradition.”

Now, he heads Vatican City “an institution with about enough followers to populate China—so steeped in order, so snarled by bureaucracy, so vast in its charities, so weighed down by scandals... that the gap between him and the poor seem unbridgeable,” Time said.. “Until the 266^th Pontiff walked off in those clunky shoes to pay his hotel bill... 

“This is a man who led, from the start, by invitation, by welcome, and by expressing above all, God’s mercy for everybody, including atheists,” John Carroll wrote for CBC. He “changing the way power is executed in the Church an initiated a process that reaches to the lay people around the world.”

He has raised hopes in every corner of the world that can never be fulfilled because they are irreconcilable. “The elderly traditionalist who pines for the old Latin Mass and the devout young woman who wishes she could be a priest. The ambitious monsignor in the Vatican Curia and the evangelizing deacon in a remote Filipino village, both have hopes,” Time said. “No Pope can make them happy all at once.”

How will the “Francis effect” impact the Philippines where eight out of ten are Catholics? Bishops of Lipa and Bacolod were so fixated on the RH bill, they that openly campaigned versus “Team Patay”—and were trounced. ” In contrast, Cardinal Luis Tagle, Cagayan de Oro archbishop Antonio Ledesma, among others, led by seeking out the poorest.

We shall see by 2016. That is when Francis flies to the Philippines to attend International Eucharistic Congress in Cebu.  “Asked whether all of the pope’s changes mattered”, Cardinal Wuerl smiled and said, “Don’t we have to give this pope time?”