The Pope and Pachamama

Steve Bannon​ doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either. And Brian Burch, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have been helped by the fact that he had also been backed by Viktor Orbán, and by Cardinal George Pell of Australia, who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2018 (the conviction was overturned on appeal two years later).

Among the revellers at the ball was Alexander Tschugguel, a Catholic convert from Austria who delighted conservatives five years ago when he stole some statues of Pachamama, a fertility goddess, from the Church of Santa Maria del Carmelo in Rome. Francis had gladly accepted them during a meeting with Amazonian leaders, and Tschugguel was outraged at what he saw as idol worship, so he broke into the chapel at dawn, pocketed the statues and tossed them into the Tiber. Francis asked for forgiveness from those who were offended and the statues were recovered.

The abiding spirit in this conclave, clearly, was Pachamama herself. She must be pleased to have a Peruvian citizen running things in Rome. What will she want in return? It might be enough for her to know that Pope Leo, thus far in his life, has been skilled at placing himself in the middle whenever there are warring factions. He can’t be called conservative and he can’t be called too liberal. Francis, the dead pope, will be smiling in heaven. He liked the idea of being neither one thing nor another. But on one issue, Leo is clear. He is not a supporter of the Trump regime or of the large body of rich and conservative American Catholics who wish to make themselves heard. Trump and Vance may publicly welcome him now, but the warmth will not last.

In the week before Francis died, there had been concern in the Vatican about the impending visit of Vance, who had converted to Catholicism in 2019. In an encounter with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, Vance had shown himself to be aggressive and combative, a populist politician in search of a cause. How interesting it might be for him, then, were he looking for a second target, to begin a campaign against the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, to establish himself as a leader of a more traditional Catholicism, someone longing for the Latin Mass and for a time when rules were rules, a time when the most the poor could expect from the Church was its pity and its charity.

Vance had already suggested that the Catholic Church in America was interested in settling migrants for material gain. On Face the Nation, in his first interview as vice president, he said: ‘I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognise that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?’ Cardinal Timothy Dolan, normally a cheerleader for Trump (he delivered the traditional prayer at both inaugurations), called Vance’s remarks ‘just scurrilous’ and ‘very nasty’.

Trump had fired the first shot in a battle between the White House and the Vatican by nominating Burch, the president of the right-wing advocacy group CatholicVote, as his ambassador. On 20 December, the National Catholic Reporter wrote: ‘Trump’s choice of Burch to represent him here in Rome is certain to raise eyebrows inside the Vatican, as he has long expressed criticism of the Francis papacy.’ When Francis decided, in 2023, to allow priests to bless individuals in same-sex unions, Burch had attacked him for creating ‘confusion’ within the Church. He predicted that the pope would not be in office much longer and said that the next pope must ‘clarify’ the confusion of the Francis era. He also criticised Francis’s governance for what he described as a ‘pattern of vindictiveness’.

Francis retaliated on 6 January by appointing Robert McElroy as cardinal archbishop of Washington DC. In 2015, when McElroy, who supported Francis’s stance against injustice and social inequality, was appointed bishop of San Diego, he spoke out against homelessness and expressed his support for immigration reform. While his fellow American bishops were preaching against abortion and euthanasia, he insisted that they also oppose ‘poverty and the degradation of the earth’. When Trump visited California in 2019 to inspect a site for the border wall he wished to build, McElroy said: ‘It is a sad day for our country when we trade the majestic, hope-filled symbolism of the Statue of Liberty for an ineffective and grotesque wall, which both displays and inflames the ethnic and cultural divisions that have long been the underside of our national history.’

In February, a month before he was installed in Washington, McElroy led a protest march in San Diego against Trump’s immigration policies, made up mainly of Latino members of his congregation. In the sermon he gave on his actual installation, however, he was careful to make no direct reference to the White House. Instead, he spoke in high-minded tones about matters of faith, especially the Resurrection. His task that day was not to confront Trump – he had done that with this march – but to make it clear that he operated from an unassailable position. Who can argue with the Resurrection?

Vance was visiting Rome before the new US ambassador to the Vatican had been ratified by the Senate. He could easily, if the mood took him, find a willing camera somewhere in front of St Peter’s and call on the Church to keep its nose out of American politics, to concentrate instead on cleaning up its own doctrinal house. It wasn’t hard to imagine Vance, in that week, as Trump’s continued outrages dominated every news cycle, telling the pope and his cardinals that their views on immigrants and asylum seekers would not have any influence in Washington, in spite of the new cardinal. He could add that many Catholics were tired of fudge and prevarication. They wanted clarity. He was here, he might say, to offer his leadership to Catholics alienated from the Church by the weakness of Pope Francis.

The problem was not merely that the pope was dying and that this was hardly the moment to launch an assault on him. The Vatican was ready to make clear that while its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and its foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, would meet the vice president, they wished to distance themselves from his views. What followed, according to the official Vatican statement, was ‘an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees and prisoners’. This was the narrative reported by most journalists, who ignored the statement from the vice president’s office claiming that he and the cardinal had discussed ‘their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world and President Trump’s commitment to restoring world peace’.

But what to do with Vance before he went on his way? He and Francis had already had an open argument. Vance had spoken in January of ordo amoris, or a ‘hierarchy of obligations’, stating in a social media post that his ‘moral duties’ to his children were greater than those to ‘a stranger who lives thousands of miles away’. In a direct rebuke, Francis replied: ‘Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan”, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.’ In Chicago, a little-known recently appointed cardinal retweeted another attack on Vance’s statement: ‘J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’ That cardinal was Robert Prevost.

Since the pope was ill, he had every excuse not to see Vance. While it’s tempting to claim that the sight of Vance, all humble and obsequious, might have hastened Francis’s demise, it would be more plausible to suppose that seeing Vance for a few minutes, and hearing his expressions of gratitude, allowed the pope to die slightly more content. The footage of Vance being received by the ailing and unsmiling pope, with Vance looking like an attack Chihuahua who had lost the will to live, must have given the pontiff and his followers some comfort. The meeting ended with a gift of Easter eggs for the three Vance children and Vance saying that he would pray for the pope. Vance’s prayers go far. Attentive readers will know that the last time Vance’s prayers were reported, they had been to seek the ‘victory’ of US military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. He did this in a Signal chat with other members of the Trump administration on 15 March, a chat that was shared with the editor of the Atlantic magazine.

But even if Vance went away with his tail between his legs just as Francis ascended to heaven, his antics make clear how deeply divided American Catholicism is. By concentrating on the plight of immigrants and by openly opposing the Trump regime, the Church has, for the main part, embraced the poor. The problem is that many American Catholics are not poor; they include six members of the Supreme Court – all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also shows how little Catholics in America have in common with one another. These justices may agree on the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth and the Assumption, on transubstantiation and the divinity of Jesus, but hardly on abortion law, the death penalty and the right to shoot up a school.

In an interview on his way to Francis’s funeral, Trump boasted that he received 56 per cent of the Catholic vote at the last election. Which he did, a 9 per cent increase on 2020. He later retweeted an AI-generated picture of himself dressed as the pope, as though wearing a funny costume and peculiar hat were a kind of joke.

On Good Friday​ 1985 I took part in a procession organised by the local Catholic priest through the streets of the small town of Promissão in the Mato Grosso in Brazil. We were led by a man in bare feet carrying a heavy wooden cross. While this man wasn’t actually wearing a crown of thorns, there was a feeling that it wouldn’t be long before his tormentors, wherever they were, would add this to his woes. He stumbled and paused and stumbled again. I would not have been surprised had his afflicted mother appeared at any moment from one of the houses that we passed. A few times, I noticed someone standing sulkily in a driveway and then going inside as the procession went by or someone looking furtively from a window. No one from any of the houses on the one long middle-class boulevard came out to bless themselves as the procession passed.

The priest explained that many of these people had turned away from the Catholic Church and had joined one of the evangelical churches that did not specialise in preaching the gospel of the poor. Those in the procession, he said, were day workers or the unemployed or their families. The procession connected the Way of the Cross with the plight of the poor in Brazil. By embracing the poor in these towns and villages, the Church had managed to alienate the middle class and the rich. More than a fifth of Brazilians now identify as evangelical while around half are Catholic. Evangelical churches are growing in number, from fewer than a thousand in 1970 to more than a hundred thousand now. Within a few years, it is likely that the number of evangelical Christians in Brazil will match the number of Catholics.

On that Good Friday in 1985 I sensed a palpable hostility from those who did not join the procession. The disdain bordered on snobbery. A decade earlier, in 1973, in Argentina, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio became, at 36, the youngest provincial in the history of the Jesuits, he resisted any temptation to make the Jesuits in Argentina and Uruguay a mission to the poor.* ‘He tried to make us more like a religious order,’ one of his students recalled, ‘wearing surplices and singing the office.’ The teachings were ‘all St Thomas Aquinas and the old Church Fathers’. As provincial, Bergoglio encouraged Jesuit priests when they visited poor areas to talk about religion rather than social conditions and to have nothing to do with unions or co-operatives. In 1977, when an English Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston, was sent to Argentina to report on the order there, he wrote that he was appalled that ‘our institute in Buenos Aires was able to function freely because it never criticised or opposed the government.’ According to Austen Ivereigh, Bergoglio’s biographer, ‘he berated Bergoglio … for being “out of step with our other social institutes in the continent”.’ Bergoglio was replaced as provincial in 1979, becoming rector of the Jesuit seminary.

Bergoglio had a reputation for being humourless and inflexible. In 1998, when he was appointed archbishop of Buenos Aires, he became less humourless – at least some of the time – but more inflexible. He didn’t live in a palace, he travelled by bus and showed his humility by washing people’s feet. He also began to preach to the Argentine government about the way it should run the country. After the election of Néstor Kirchner in 2003 and throughout the succeeding presidency of Cristina Fernández, Kirchner’s wife, he preached against their policies in their presence until they stopped attending his sermons. It is hard to think of any elected government in a democracy in recent years that suffered such a relentless and energetic attack by a prince of the Catholic Church. At the same time, Bergoglio avoided the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who continued to protest the disappearance of their children during the Dirty War. They in turn did not trust him. He had not supported the trial of the generals after the dictatorship fell.

Why was he elected pope? Did his nonchalance on the legacy of the disappearances win him support from fellow cardinals? Or was his willingness to attack a government on questions of public morality and economic strategy one of the reasons they voted for him? Was it because of his public humility, his readiness to kiss feet and live modestly and wait for a bus as though he were a member of the public? Is it possible that the cardinals who voted in 2013 – cardinals appointed by John Paul II and Benedict – presumed that they were getting chalk when they opted for Bergoglio (who was runner-up when Benedict was elected in 2005) and instead, all the way from Argentina, came cheese? How strange that a most rigid and solemn cardinal became a most relaxed and light-hearted pope. One explanation might be Bergoglio’s Jesuit formation. Even though he distanced himself from the order after 1990, what he had learned from them, Paul Vallely writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013), ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline: ‘His will must seek to impose on a personality which has its share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering behaviour.’

He also seemed relaxed about certain doctrinal matters. It didn’t seem to bother him whether divorced and remarried Catholics received communion. And he famously asked about homosexuality: ‘Who am I to judge?’ Although he didn’t support the idea of women priests, he appointed a woman earlier this year to a powerful position in the Vatican. Sister Raffaella Petrini is president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, effectively the governor of the Vatican state, the first woman to hold such a position. The six ordinary members of the commission are senior cardinals. The meetings must be something to behold.

Bergoglio’s stance on many political matters – from climate change to the war in Ukraine – was close to that of the EU. Indeed, there were moments in his pontificate when it seemed that the Vatican resembled the EU at prayer, but rather more eloquent and unbuttoned. On matters to do with women and gay people, the Vatican hasn’t a clue what to do except from time to time recognise that women are part of God’s will and we, poor gay people, are special and should be loved when we are not being told – one of Benedict’s epithets – that we are ‘intrinsically disordered’.

If Francis’s power depended merely on his charm and his ambiguity, how was it that a mild form of mayhem didn’t take hold during his pontificate? The answer is that he controlled the Vatican with diehard Jesuit steel. He missed nothing. His decision to move, on election, into spartan quarters in Casa Santa Marta rather than the sumptuous papal apartments, created an aura of sanctity and humility around him. But it also meant that, in the more informal setting of Santa Marta, no one could be sure who was coming to see Francis and what news he was receiving. People could slip in and out. It soon emerged that Francis was getting all the news, as he had done in Argentina. He did not tolerate dissent. He made sure that any group returning to the Latin Mass and other pre-Vatican II systems of worship was investigated and put on notice. Since he had spent his life in Argentina, Francis had no set of close associates among the cardinals or the Curia. He made this remoteness a form of strength. He owed nothing to anybody.

The Church​ needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change. The new pope needs to oversee this mixture of change and no-change without looking foolish or weak. It may help that Leo is young – if 69 can be considered young – and that he is a tennis player. If, after a tough game of singles on a bright May Roman morning, he were to ask me – I am also 69 – for advice, I would quietly let him know how he might handle three pressing matters.

The first is the Latin Mass. It is all very well and it sounds good, especially Sursum corda. But it is code. Those who profess to want its return want many other things too; they are fiercely conservative and must be kept down. The rule is: don’t preach against the Latin Mass or make any quotable statements about it. Just have those people who want it back watched carefully, reported on. If they are priests, you can have them removed to windswept and remote parishes. There are many ways of letting them know you are on their case. That is what Francis did. Follow Francis also on the question of divorced people taking communion but, unlike him, say nothing on the matter. It is only a burning issue for those who want to stop any form of change. Let the German cardinals argue about it. If a divorced person wants communion, they will surely know to go to a church around the corner and join the line. On the question of gay Catholics, you must also be quiet. Just say nothing. Please realise that your smallest remark suggesting that gay people are not as good as you and your fellow cardinals will make gay people in many places laugh out loud, but it will be heard with less mirth in places where gay people fear for their lives. It is essential that you do not appoint bishops and cardinals in Africa who preach against gay people.

Above all, you must listen to Pachamama. She is in Rome still, having bathed in the waters of the Tiber. She is always ready to be consulted. She will advise you to smile, tell us about hope, speak Italian and Spanish, and insist that God loves us. That should be enough for the moment.