Pope Francis, a paradox at the origin of the pontificate

There is a paradox at the origin of the Francis pontificate. Francis’s reign originated precisely from those who, today, contest him and even out-and-out fight him, and find themselves marginalized and even expelled.

In short, Pope Francis’s pontificate was born from a kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy,” from the idea of a misfortune that one would like to avoid and that is generated at the very moment one tries to prevent it. This paradox has a corollary, which is rather worrying: after the self-fulfilling prophecy, nothing can be the same as before because everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Take, for example, the sad case of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

Now declared a schismatic, he said he was “honored” by the proceedings begun against him by the former Holy Office, refused anyway to appear before a tribunal that he said had already decided the sentence, said he did not recognize the authority of that tribunal nor Pope Francis. Yet, it is possible that Archbishop Viganò himself created one of the triggers that led to the pontificate of Pope Francis.

Forced to leave the Governatorate of the Vatican City State and appointed nuncio to the United States, Viganò expected he would one day be called to lead.

Viganò, you see, was at the origin of what would come to be called the “Vatileaks” Scandal. Documents from Viganò filtered out of the Vatican and into the wild, as it were, sparking the controversy. Those documents denounced a lack of transparency in certain expenditures of Vatican City’s administration, and also irrational losses in money.

Viganò touted himself—he believed himself to be, with good reason—as a champion of transparency and a crusader against corruption. He noted how his exit from the Governatorate would be considered a defeat of his work up to that point.

Benedict XVI decided to send him to the United States, but not as punishment. Benedict sent Viganò stateside to give him a prestigious assignment that would get him out of a curial environment that considered him toxic and from which he would probably be crushed.

Viganò, however, did not interpret it that way.

Viganò considered the Secretariat of State and its corrupt mechanism responsible for the problem. Arriving in the United States, he did not fail to be esteemed, especially in the more conservative circles in which he felt most comfortable and among the cardinals. To all, Viganò spoke of the problems of the Roman Curia, and in particular, the risk of an overly cumbersome Secretariat of State, the real obstacle to any reform.

This description of events was decisive when the U.S. cardinals who arrived in Rome for the Conclave had to vote for Benedict XVI’s successor. Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s candidacy had already made inroads. The so-called “Team Bergoglio” (Copyright Austen Ivereigh) supported the nomination of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as it had already done in the 2005 Conclave.

The Latin American Pope was presented as a candidate of the old Curia—indeed, Pope Francis often spoke of the “old style of the Curia” in his first speeches—but also as a necessary break from previous pontificates. The idea was that Benedict XVI had been forced to resign precisely because of the ineptitude of his collaborators.

The Secretariat of State, in particular, was targeted by a media campaign that cannot fail to surprise today. Even during Benedict XVI’s pontificate, there were reports of groups of cardinals personally going to the Pope to ask for the head of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. The request was unsuccessful.

Pope Francis, in response, has cut both the personal secretariat—the two secretaries have already changed several times, with neither of them decisive in setting the pontiff’s agenda—and the Secretariat of State, which has lost a lot of centrality in the Roman Curia and has lost above all the personal administration of its assets. No entity in the Vatican is independent anymore. The result is the bureaucratization of all decisions.

In practice, to solve the problem of total centralization, critics of the previous government created the opposite “monster,” which is “total bureaucratization.” It was logical for Pope Francis to do this. But it is also logical that this movement, initiated in total good faith, is challenging to rebalance.

Not only.,

The self-fulfilling prophecy has also created a pontificate that has been fearless in addressing governance issues in a particularly pragmatic way.

In particular, Pope Francis has profoundly changed the profile of the College of Cardinals. Today, perhaps no cardinal would go into a Conclave with the idea that they must make a clean break from the past regarding Church governance. But that is because very few cardinals are interested in Church governance.

So far, Pope Francis has created 142 cardinals, profoundly changing the face of the College of Cardinals. Above all, Pope Francis has favored “peripheral” churches without overly or always rewarding so-called cardinalatial sees. He has also decided to give only some headsof-dicastery a red hat.

Thus, there is a risk that there will be too few dicastery heads in an upcoming consistory.

At the moment, the only dicastery heads who are not yet cardinals are the Pro-Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, Archbishop Fisichella, and the Prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, Archbishop Iannone. Nor is Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, a cardinal, but since he is a layman, he is excluded from the Pope’s possible choices.

There is frequent talk of a new papal consistory by the end of the year. The choices could, once again, surprise. The presence of Europeans, and in particular Italians, has thinned. However, Pope Francis could still look at the criteria of representation, giving a purple to Australia, which has had none since the death of Cardinal Pell, or Peru and Ecuador in South America, not to mention Africa, which will lose as many as three cardinal electors (Pengo, Oudereaogo, and Sarah) in the next 12 months.

Not only would very few of the cardinal electors raise the issue of governance, but the few who would do so are destined not to be heard. If governance was decisive in the 2013 Conclave, it will not be decisive in the next Conclave.

It’s hard to say what will be the decisive issue, though.

Pope Francis leaves behind, after all, a weakened Holy See and a general call for a change in the mindset of the Church so that it goes to the peripheries. On the governance side, he has placed lay heads of dicasteries and a few women (almost always religious) at the top, talking a lot about the role of women.

Neither will be discussed in an upcoming Conclave.

Perhaps there will be talk about how to deal, on the one hand, with the synodal thrust that wants a new Church and a renewal in its doctrine (see the German Synod) and, on the other hand, with the traditionalist movement that Pope Francis has increasingly put on the sidelines.

After all, a self-fulfilling prophecy has affected the conservative world more than anyone else.

Worried about governance, they did not think that the new government might also want to centralize everything from decisions to the life of the Church. Any different point of view becomes, thus, “schismatic,” And that leads to overreaction and actual schism.

But, after all, the Church was already living in a practical schism. The Viganò paradox only made it more evident.