Earlier this month, we marked ten years since Pope Francis assumed the Chair of Peter. It’s been a tumultuous decade, and as Austen Ivereigh, one of Pope Francis’s most enthusiastic champions, has argued in our pages, synodality is key to understanding it.
Yet sometimes words have their limits. And so much ink has been spilled on this Papacy that a true picture can be all but impossible to discern. So it is to pictures and images that my mind turns. And when I reflect on this papacy, it is images I reflect on to try to make sense of it. So below are three of the most striking images of the Pope Francis era that perhaps help us see where the Church might go next.
Since he was 15, Vinicio Riva has suffered from neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes painful growths and tumours throughout the body.
In 2013 he travelled to St Peter’s Square in Vatican City to see Pope Francis speak. The Pope approached Riva and kissed and hugged him, placing his hand on Riva’s head.
“I feel stronger and happier,” Riva said. “I feel I can move ahead because the Lord is protecting me.”
The photo immediately went viral around the world. A symbol of a more caring Church, it was also a profound gesture of pastoral outreach and love to a man harshly treated by the world. Fr James Martin once told me he thought it was one of the most important moments of this papacy.
The pandemic increasingly seems like a dream. Yet in March 2020 it was all too real. Italy had been hit first and hard and the images streaming out of hospitals were terrifying and confusing. The line between this world and the next seemed thin. The image of the Pope, frail and alone, praying in St Peter’s Square, as the rain poured down and sirens blared, was a point of hope in the darkest of days.
I’ve rarely been more grateful to be a Catholic. For people around the world of all faiths and none it was a transcendent moment, a moment when the relevance and power of Faith has never seemed clearer. Most remarkable of all, of course, is that that was the day that Covid deaths in Italy started to decline.
The full truth of the case of Fr Marko Rupnik, (pictured here with the Pope) the celebrated Jesuit mosaic artist, is yet to emerge. But we do know he committed a large number of horrific sexual crimes while a priest, particularly against women religious. There remain serious questions about the way the Jesuits treated him and whether or not that was influenced by his friendship with the Pope. While Pope Francis is not to blame for every misstep and hesitation in the Church’s long history of failing to deal with abuse, the fact this issue remains so live, and that lessons still seem not to be heeded, threatens to cast a shadow over this pontificate.
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And if any of the above sparked a stray thought, hit reply. I’d love to hear from you.
God Bless, Ian
