Sunday 1 January 2017 18.35 GMT Last modified on Sunday 1 January 2017 22.00 GMT View more sharing optionsShares246Comments150Pope Francis leads an organisation that fought against democracy, liberty, equality and feminism for nearly 200 years after the French revolution of 1789. It is a paradox that he is now heralded in some quarters as the global champion of all those causes, which everywhere seem under attack. The key to understanding this contradiction is that the pope is not himself a liberal. He is a conservative with a small c, mistrustful of all grand schemes of human betterment, whether socialist or libertarian, and he believes in sin and the devil – as do most of his 1.2 billion followers. If conservatism stands for anything more than the remorseless pursuit by the strong of their advantage over the weak, it is a profound suspicion of the human capacity to be good, a belief, as Milton put it, that we shall never cease “hammering from our flinty hearts the seeds and sparkles of new miseries for ourselves”. This isn’t the whole truth, but at a time when a world order seemingly based on rational self-interest is being consumed in greed and rage – including the “plague of terrorism” that Francis urged all to confront as it struck Turkey again – a little of Milton’s grim scepticism is salutary; even, almost, hopeful. [...]
With a passion perhaps possible only to a South American, he loathes the turbocharged US model of capitalism unleashed by Ronald Reagan: he entirely rejects the idea that greed restrained only by self-interest operating through a market will make the world just or good. His Catholicism is almost the polar opposite to the dominant strains of white American evangelical Christianity. He unequivocally opposes torture and the persecution of refugees, and even the death penalty, which are all causes dear to religious Republicans. More Americans support torture as an instrument of government policy than do the inhabitants of Iraq, Sudan or Afghanistan. With a series of dramatic gestures – visiting refugee camps; taking migrants into the Vatican; publicly washing the feet of a Muslim woman – the pope has demonstrated that he wants his church to stand alongside refugees and migrants. As archbishop of Buenos Aires he would visit the slums – and take a bus to get there. [...]
He has been denounced for this by the reactionaries within the church as a heretic, a destructive progressive, and a man whose policies must lead to a historic schism and break with tradition. At the same time he has greatly disappointed progressives who had hoped for some shift in substance on the full acceptance of gay people and on the role of women in the church’s hierarchy.
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