The Guadalajara Reporter

Pope Francis is a complex, conservative man

For the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics – and for Latin America’s 483 million Catholics – Semana Santa (Holy Week) has been a surprising time of provocative and perhaps uncharted change.   The new pope is not only the first non-European to become heir to the throne of St. Peter in more than 1,000 years, he is the first pope from the Americas, the first pope from Latin America, and the first to take the name Francisco (Francis), after the humble, much revered Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order.

The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, though born in Buenos Aires, is a product of Italian parents who immigrated to Argentina, startled many Latin Americans into a simultaneous flow of tears, laughter, head-shaking and cheers.  Pope Francis I is a man, his relatives say, who has always been committed to the poor and has an apparently irrepressible warm sense of humor, who will soon be taking on the historically much feared – and today and often before – much criticized Roman Curia.  A phenomenon some times referred to as the Court of Rome (meaning not a Court of Law, but a Royal Court).  Actually it is an intricate, deeply politically shaped bureaucracy made up of a lot of men who today – and through history – are sure they are the Church’s aristocrats. As Catholicism became not merely a system of belief, but a world-wide influence, politically, intellectually and culturally, Catholics came to believe the Curia is what makes the Church tick. Presently many Catholics, and other observers, harbor the uncomfortable impression that “it very badly needs to be cleaned up,” wrote one Rome-based journalist the other day.  This is doubly so if Pope Francis insists on a “poor church, for the poor.”

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