The past 12 months was another year of struggle, hope, consolation and disappointment, just another year to build our lives. But 2013 was also a year in which our world began to move.
On Feb. 11, speaking in Latin, Pope Benedict XVI tendered his resignation. He was the first pope to voluntarily leave office since Celestine V in 1294 and the first living pope to leave office under any circumstances since Pope Gregory XII in 1415. On February 28 the 85-year-old Benedict made his last appearance on the balcony of his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
“I will continue to be close to you in prayer,” the exiting Pope told 144 cardinals already gathered in Rome to begin the process of selecting his successor. “Especially in the next days, that you may be fully docile to the action of the Holy Spirit in the election of the new pope.”
The eight years of Benedict’s papacy were never easy. He had set himself the hardest task imagin-able even before his election when he wrote Lenten meditations for the way of the cross in Rome in 2005.
“How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him,” he wrote, clearly disturbed by how often the Gospel was contradicted by clerical sex abuse.
Less than a month later the world’s cardinals gave him the clean-up job. After 24 years as the Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy under Pope John Paul II, then eight years overseeing the Church as Pope, Benedict had fought the fight and was tired. He put the interest of the Church he loved before any notion that he had to continue on for form’s sake. In the process the Pope many regarded as the most conservative and tradi-tion-oriented since Vatican I estab-lished a new precedent by retiring. The Church may never again experience a frail pope trying to reconcile longer life spans with the demands of a global Church.
This alone might have been enough revolution for a single year of Church history, but the 115 cardinal electors were just getting started. The Catholic Register was there in Rome when in just two days, on the fifth ballot, the cardinals chose the world’s first New World pope, first Jesuit pope, first pope from south of the equator, the first non-European pope since Pope Gregory III in 1272 and the first pope to dare call himself Francis.
Nobody saw it coming. Canada had been in a fever of speculation and expectation of a Canadian suc-ceeding Benedict. Cardinal Marc Ouellet topped many lists of papa-bility around the world. He wasn’t alone. The Italian bishops’ confer-ence sent out a premature press release congratulating Cardinal Angelo Scola on his election.
That wet and cool night, Francis immediately signalled a change of tone. Offered the red cape that popes have worn over centuries when they appeared before crowds, Pope Francis told the master of ceremonies, “No thank you, Monsignor. You put it on instead. Carnival time is over!”
But there was more than tone to that first appearance. Francis referred to himself as the “Bishop of Rome.” Every Church historian, ecclesiologist and ecumenist im-mediately took notice. By empha-sizing his role as one of the five ancient patriarchs, as a bishop among bishops, as a man called to serve a particular people in a particular territory, Francis was opening doors to a new kind of dialogue with Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Christians, He was inviting Catholics to re-imagine the ministry of the Pope. He was reinvigorating a Vatican II defini-tion of the Church as the “people of God.”
“How I would like a Church that is poor, and for the poor,” Francis told reporters at his first media audience.
As Pope, Francis turned down offers of new vehicles from the world’s luxury car makers. He is driven around Rome in a 20-year old Renault. The papal apartments were too big and too isolated for Francis. He chose to stay in St. Martha’s, the Vatican guest house, but only after he paid his own bill for his stay during the conclave. He chose to continue wearing the old iron pectoral cross he wore as archbishop of Buenos Aires, leaving the gold one to the side.
Pope Francis was elected to reform a Vatican bureaucracy that had embarrassed the Church too many times in recent years with plots, factions, damaging leaks and even allegations of a gay lobby. In Franciscan style, his first step toward that reform was a reform in itself. In April Pope Francis chose eight cardinals from around the world, men who had the respect of their fellow bishops and had worked with their own national conferences of bishops, to advise him on reforms to the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia.
The group has met with the Pope twice now and made it clear it would not limit its scope to polishing up Pope John Paul II’s Pastor Bonus. When the C-8 came together in October it began by discussing synodality. Immediate-ly Pope Francis was on his way to the offices of the Synod of Bishops to call the third extraordinary synod of bishops since Pope Paul VI re-established the synod as an advisory body in 1968.
Extraordinary synods are called extraordinary because they address urgent matters outside the usual schedule of synods. But this one, which will convene next October, promises to be even more extraordinary. Not only will it tackle difficult and sensitive questions about family life, divorce and sexuality, but the overture to the event is an unusually short document with 39 questions which bishops were urged to distribute as widely as possible.
Francis put the world on notice many times that he was not conducting business as usual, but perhaps the world began to believe him after an 80-minute chat with reporters on the plane ride home from World Youth Day in Rio. Despite telling reporters on the way to Rio he didn’t give interviews, on his way home he gave a doozy. Asked about a gay lobby in the Vatican, the Pope said:
“When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency (to homosexuality) is not the problem ... they’re our brothers.”
A Pope who doesn’t leap at the chance to judge, who seeks first the common humanity he shares even with those outside Catholic belief, was a very new idea to many people.
Like Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI before him, Pope Francis’ idea of morality goes way beyond the bedroom. When 13 African migrants were killed trying to reach Europe and a better life, Francis went to the Italian island of Lampedusa to condemn a world that “does not care about the many people fleeing slavery, hunger, fleeing in search of freedom. And how many of them die as happened yesterday! Today is a day of tears.”
That the poor suffer matters to Francis, morally. When the Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh in April, killing more than 1,000 workers and injuring more than 2,500, the Pope drew conclusions about the morality of global capitalism.
“This is called slave labour,” he said. “Today in the world this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us — the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity. How many brothers and sisters find themselves in this situation? Not paying fairly, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking at how to make a profit. That goes against God!”
If anyone thought his analysis of capitalism was just an emotional reaction to tragic events, the correction arrived with his apostolic exhortation on the new evangelization, Evangelii Gaudium.
“People continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Francis wrote. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
Papal teaching about economics is clearly intended to challenge us. We must not be content to live behind the wall of our own comfort and advantages. Francis’ teaching on the Church is not much different.
“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures,” he writes.
Pope Francis was the biggest story of the year, but not the only one that made headlines in The Register. The year began with old issues — stories that have been with us for years and some that never go away.
Chief Theresa Spence was already three weeks into a six-week hunger strike on New Year’s day and the Idle No More protest movement was demanding Canadians pay attention to the people they have signed treaties with over the last 400 years. Drought-stricken people were starving in North Africa but, realizing in 2012 a tragedy was unfolding, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace raised $2 million to get rural families through the dry season and help farmers replant crops.
In Syria, the chaos of civil war that has taken more than 100,000 lives evolved into sectarian bloodletting. By April militants had kidnapped Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Paul Yazigi, both of Aleppo. They’re still missing. Militants have now also taken 12 religious sisters who are still missing.
The Catholic Register travelled to the Turkey-Syria border in September to document the lives of Syrians on the run, unable to return home. Currently the United Nations High Commission for Refugees is following more than 2.3 million Syrians who either already are refugees or have been displaced and are in danger of becoming refugees. If nothing changes there will be more than four million refugees from a nation of 22 million by the end of 2014, said the UNHCR.
Catholics in Canada will provide new homes and new lives to a number of the most dire cases through refugee sponsorship. But the problem extends beyond Syria. The wider Christian communion with some of the most ancient churches of the Middle East is threatened. In Egypt, Syria and Iraq, 2013 witnessed new chapters in a collective madness in countries trying to fashion a new political order with bombs, snipers, kidnapping, mob violence and ethnic cleansing.
As Syria began to generate significant refugees of its own, Catholic parishes across Canada continued their wait for Iraqi refugees who had fled to Syria following the 2003 U.S. invasion. Nobody knows how long Syrian families camped out in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey will wait before meeting their Canadian sponsors.
Canadian compassion was also on display as 2013 entered its last months. One of the biggest and strongest typhoons ever recorded hit the Philippines the first week of November. Within a month Development and Peace had collected more than $1.5 million for victims of Typhoon Haiyan. Canada’s Catholic development and aid agency was immediately part of a worldwide Caritas Internationalis effort to plan for years of rebuilding and recovery. Ottawa’s initial plan to match charitable funds up to Dec. 9 was extended to Dec. 23.
Canadian Catholics also found the sacred value of life challenged at the end of our lifespans when Quebec introduced a bill that would reclassify euthanasia as medical end-of-life care. The controversial bill will come up for a vote in 2014 and, if it passes, will likely be challenged by the federal government. The federal government is also monitoring Quebec’s debate on its proposed Charter of Values that would limit religious freedom by forcing public employees on the job to stop wearing clothing or jewelry of a religious nature.
But the newsmaker of the year was Pope Francis. That this man can speak so directly, frankly, honestly to the world about things that matter, that he has so successfully inserted himself into the consciousness of the world, has become a wonder. Francis made the lives of Time magazine’s editors easy. Faced with choosing a person of the year they hardly had to make a choice at all.
“What makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the Church at all,” Howard Chua-Eoan and Elizabeth Dias wrote for Time. “People weary of the endless parsing of sexual ethics, the buck-passing infighting over lines of authority when all the while (to borrow from Milton), ‘the hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed.’ ”
While Time had an easy choice, there are hard challenges ahead. In 2014 will we be the Church Pope