The Francis of the Media and the Real Francis
ROME
Chiesa
Farther and farther apart from each other. The public narrative continues to depict the pope as a revolutionary. But the facts prove the contrary
by Sandro Magister
ROME, May 15, 2015 – When it comes to Pope Francis, there are now two of these who are ever more distant from each other: the Francis of the media and the real one.
The first is exceedingly well-known and has been making the news since his first appearance on the loggia of the basilica of Saint Peter’s.
It is the narrative of the pope who revolutionizes the Church, who lays down the keys of binding and loosing, who does not condemn but only forgives, or rather who does not even judge any more, who washes the feet of the female Muslim inmate and the transexual, who abandons the palace to plunge into the peripheries, who opens the workshop on everything, on the divorced and remarried as on the Vatican’s finances, who closes the checkpoints of dogma and throws open the doors of mercy. A pope who is a friend of the world, who is already being praised for his upcoming encyclical on “sustainable development” even before seeing what will be written there.
In effect there is a great deal, in the words and actions of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that lends itself to this narrative.
The Francis of the media is also to some extent a creation of his own, and brilliantly so, in the span of one morning miraculously overturning the image of the Catholic Church from opulent and decadent to “poor and for the poor.”
Chiesa
Farther and farther apart from each other. The public narrative continues to depict the pope as a revolutionary. But the facts prove the contrary
by Sandro Magister
ROME, May 15, 2015 – When it comes to Pope Francis, there are now two of these who are ever more distant from each other: the Francis of the media and the real one.
The first is exceedingly well-known and has been making the news since his first appearance on the loggia of the basilica of Saint Peter’s.
It is the narrative of the pope who revolutionizes the Church, who lays down the keys of binding and loosing, who does not condemn but only forgives, or rather who does not even judge any more, who washes the feet of the female Muslim inmate and the transexual, who abandons the palace to plunge into the peripheries, who opens the workshop on everything, on the divorced and remarried as on the Vatican’s finances, who closes the checkpoints of dogma and throws open the doors of mercy. A pope who is a friend of the world, who is already being praised for his upcoming encyclical on “sustainable development” even before seeing what will be written there.
In effect there is a great deal, in the words and actions of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that lends itself to this narrative.
The Francis of the media is also to some extent a creation of his own, and brilliantly so, in the span of one morning miraculously overturning the image of the Catholic Church from opulent and decadent to “poor and for the poor.”
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