Conservatives ‘don’t like this pope’By then, conservatives had turned away from Francis after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid. “We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into his papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist movement that was coddled under Benedict.Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and an accord with China over nominating bishops. The details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get.US Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”Burke waged his campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future. He twice joined conservative cardinals in asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues where the pope had showed a more progressive bent, including on same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several moves to shift power away from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.Reprimanding bureaucrats with ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful. When they didn’t, he expressed his displeasure.His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public reprimands of bureaucrats: Standing in the marbled Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace, Francis listed 15 ailments he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”Francis oversaw reforms of the scandal-marred Vatican bank, and took bold steps to wrestle bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency after suspicions were raised about the secretariat’s 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.The trial, though, became a reputational boomerang, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, turf battles among monsignors and the ways the pope had intervened in the case.While earning praise for trying to turn Vatican finances around, Francis angered US conservatives for his excoriation of global markets favoring the rich over the poor.Economic justice was an important theme for Francis, saying in his first meeting with journalists that he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”His first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” denounced trickle-down economics as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God.“Money must serve, not rule!” he said.He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”A childhood of prayer, soccer and operaJorge Mario Bergoglio was born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.He credited his grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Even as pope, he carried in his worn prayer book a Catholic creed she composed. Weekends in the Bergoglio home were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club.His love of soccer continued into adulthood, and he amassed a huge collection of jerseys as pope from visitors.He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession at his parish church, San Jose de Flores. “Something strange happened to me in that confession,” he recounted in a 2010 authorized biography. “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. … I realized that they were waiting for me.”He entered the diocesan seminary and in 1958 switched to the Jesuit order, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy, being on “the front lines of the church, grounded in obedience and discipline.”Around this time, he suffered severe pneumonia and the upper part of his right lung was removed. His frail health prevented his becoming a missionary as he had hoped, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and began teaching. In 1973, he became head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” at age 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he said.A clergyman amid dictatorshipHis six-year tenure as provincial coincided with the start of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a murderous campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.Like many, Bergoglio didn’t outwardly confront the junta, and he was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work. Bergoglio refused to counter that version for decades.Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount his extraordinary, behind-the-scene effort to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so that he could say Mass instead. Once inside the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, two of the few surviving prisoners.In 1986, Bergoglio went to Germany to research a never-finished thesis. Upon returning to Argentina, he essentially went into internal exile within the Jesuits, stationed in Cordoba during a period he called a time of “great interior crisis.”Out of favor with the more progressive leadership of Argentina’s Jesuits, Bergoglio was eventually rescued from obscurity by St. John Paul II, who in 1992 named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. Six years later, he became archbishop, and then cardinal in 2001.A humble man who denied himself the luxuries that previous archbishops enjoyed, Bergoglio rode the bus, cooked his own meals and regularly visited slums.He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.After becoming pope, accounts began emerging more widely of the many priests, seminarians and dissidents he saved in the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.“He made me wonder if he really understood the trouble he was getting into. If they grabbed us together, they would have marched us both off,” onetime radical Gonzalo Mosca told AP in 2014, recounting how Bergoglio let him stay at the seminary and bought his plane ticket to Brazil.It was a gesture typical of the pope.
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