Pope Francis may be the progressive champion Catholic Church needs

I wasn’t sorry to see Pope Benedict XVI resign the papacy on February 28, 2013. But I doubt he left voluntarily. The Holy See — a small state in the belly of Italy — has a long history of high intrigue. Its sovereign territory is Vatican City — a much diminished real estate from its heyday. A history of coups and murders within the Holy See abounds. Dozens of popes have either been “martyred” or murdered by poisoning, strangulation, mutilation, or starvation. Some were forced to flee, resign, or abdicate. The papacy isn’t for the faint-hearted. The official story is Pope Benedict was the first to “voluntarily” resign since Pope Gregory XII in 1415. But I am glad Pope Francis succeeded him.

Pope Benedict, the rigid German conservative ideologue, succeeded the equally conservative but amiable Pope John Paul II upon the latter’s death in 2005. Pope John Paul’s world was completely distorted by his deep distaste of communism in his native Poland. He and Cardinal Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger, Pope Benedict’s pre-papal name, were identical ideological twins. Both were staunch biblical literalists who abhorred reform and tightly maintained the Church’s byzantine secrecy.

They opposed virtually every modern progressive movement including women’s rights, the indigenisation of the Church, gay rights, and the empowerment of the Church in the Global South — Latin America and Africa — which numerically dominates the faith. In a word, they wouldn’t countenance the deracialisation of power in the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger had a tricky biography before he joined the Church. He was a member of the Hitler Youth and a soldier in the Germany Nazi infantry. They say he deserted when his unit collapsed in the face of the Allied assault but was captured and held as prisoner of war by the Americans.

Methinks he actually fled to avoid capture by the Americans — whatever. But he didn’t seem to have learnt much from the evil of Nazism. That’s because his theological and doctrinal understanding of scripture seemed to lack compassion. It’s well documented that Pope Benedict either covered up, or refused to sanction, paedophile priests in the endemic sex abuse scandal that almost destroyed the Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict attacked and mocked progressive struggles for equality as the “dictatorship of relativism.” But yet he refused to see the logs in the Church’s eyes — paedophilia, exclusion of women, and the concentration of power in white European and North American hands. During his and the reign of Pope Pius, the Catholic Church became lethargic and an object of ridicule. It was out of touch with the youth, women, and the teeming masses in the Global South. Pope John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger vigorously rejected liberation theology, the Latin American interpretation of Christianity from the point of view of the poor. They put the Church in the hands of ideologues opposed to liberation theology. The Church lost its way.

Then on March 13, 2013 enters Pope Francis — the anti-Benedict. The man from Argentina was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires. He was the son of an Italian immigrant father and an Argentinian mother, also of Italian descent. He once worked as a bouncer before joining the seminary. He almost left the seminary because of a crush on a girl, but overcame the temptation.

As a priest, he was known for tending to the poor and his humble lifestyle. As bishop and cardinal, he spurned the trappings of money and opulence that come with the offices. He could be doctrinally conservative, but was known for his commitment to social justice. But his true progressive colours hadn’t come out.

Upon his installation, Pope Francis took the Church — and the world — by storm. This pope, the first from the Third World, became a rock star. He’s shown that he “gets it.”

He’s abandoned the ideological rigidity and conservatism of Pope Benedict. One of his first acts was to meet in the Vatican with Father Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian founder of liberation theology. He’s welcomed a greater role for women within the faith but he’s refused to meaningfully engage with those who have challenged the Church’s exclusion of women from the priesthood. He has been a real disappointment on the question of women’s ordination. But he has welcomed gays into the Church and famously asked “Who am I to judge?”

Papa Francesco has the potential to become a revolutionary if he can act more boldly. He’s decreed zero tolerance for paedophiles. He’s dismantling conservative power cartels within the Church. He’s demoted and removed from power the most rabid conservative cardinals. He is cleaning up the corrupt banking system in the Vatican. Doctrinally, Pope Francis is edging towards a post-colonial church — decentering the European grip and loosening the most hateful interpretations of scripture. He’s leading a “holy war” within the Vatican.