The Pope opens a window in Rome
Pope Francis and the church's moment of reckoning
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected Pope on March 13, 2013, and takes the name Francis — the first pope to take the name of the saint from Assisi, the man who stripped naked in a courtyard and walked out into the world with nothing.
The choice of name is a statement before any words have been spoken.
Francis arrives on the balcony of St. Peter's without the traditional red mozzetta over his white cassock. He bows to the crowd before they bow to him. He asks them to pray for him before he prays for them. He takes the ordinary bus back to the guesthouse rather than the papal car.
These are gestures. They accumulate into something larger: a papacy that is consistently, deliberately reorienting the church's public identity toward the poor, the marginalized, the excluded — in deliberate echo of the man whose name he took.
His document Laudato Si on care for creation, his document Amoris Laetitia on family and pastoral accompaniment, his consistent focus on the church as a field hospital rather than a customs office — these are attempts to embody the aggiornamento that John XXIII called for, applied to the specific crises of the twenty-first century.
The church he leads is in crisis — the abuse scandal, the financial corruption, the demographic collapse in the West, the cultural marginalization in places that were once Christendom.
Francis does not pretend otherwise. He names the failures. He opens windows.
Whether the windows stay open after him remains to be seen.
“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.”
— Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 2013 AD
“Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn't leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?”
Francis prefers a bruised church that has been in the streets to a clean church that has been safely inside.
The church that goes nowhere gets hurt by nothing and helps no one. The church that goes — into the hard places, the messy places, the places where the lost actually are — comes back bruised, dirty, changed.
Jesus left the ninety-nine to go after the one. He came back with the one and the smell of the hillside on him.
The institutional church has spent much of its history trying to stay clean — to maintain the standard, protect the community, manage the brand. The shepherd leaves the flock to go after the lost one.
Where is the one that is lost in your world? And what is the bruising that going after them would cost you?