Time’s “Person of the Year”
The Pope has been named 2013 Person of the Year by Time magazine. In the short time since his enthronement, Bergoglio has become the darling of the press and is a huge media celebrity. Many world leaders would give much to have such popularity and therefore seek to be associated with him in some way. President Obama is reported to have returned a draft speech to his speech writer with the instruction: “Add a reference to the Pope”.
In its adulatory piece, Time says, “What makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church at all”. The managing editor of Time said in an interview that the Pope was chosen for “pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets” and “committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgement with mercy”. No doubt the last phrase is a reference to the Pope’s question, “Who am I to judge?” when speaking about homosexuals, and to his frequent remarks about mercy with regard to the immoral.
But as Time rightly says, “Behind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny operator. He makes masterly use of twenty-first century tools to perform his first century office.” His press officer is Greg Burke, Senior Communications Advisor to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, who has had vast media experience. He is an exceptionally zealous Roman Catholic, a member of the shadowy Roman Catholic group Opus Dei. He is credited with greatly enhancing the image of the papacy by the adept way he operates the Vatican public relations machine. “I know what journalists are looking for and what they need,” Burke told reporters, “and I know how things will play out in the media.”
There is more than a grain of truth in the Time statement that the Pope’s humble acts, such as washing prisoners’ feet, are “conscious and skillful evocations of moments in the ministry of Jesus”. Such acts are certainly effective in falsely projecting Bergoglio as a genuine servant of Christ – and millions assume that he is exactly that.
Having been evidently an able administrator while Cardinal in Argentina, the Pope’s aim now is to resolve problems in the Roman Curia. Therefore contracts have been awarded to such global consultants as McKinsey & Company and KPMG to appraise the practices of certain Vatican departments and to devise reforms.
However, many Roman Catholics not only want the corruption in their Church to be cleaned up; they also want it to adopt a more permissive stance on such issues as divorce, contraception and abortion. Many have interpreted the Pope’s sympathetic statements about such matters as condoning what his Church has condemned. But for all his apparent softening of dogma, the change is one of style, not of substance. He himself said in an interview, “When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the Church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the Church.”
As surely as he will remain a loyal son of his mother Church in these matters, so will he also in those other matters which sharply divide his heretical Church from the true Church of Christ. And he will continue blasphemously to impugn Christ’s honour as its glorious Head. Let no one be deceived: the Papacy is a leopard that has not changed its spots – and it neither will nor can do so. Were it so, then would they “also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”. But “their heart is fully set in them to evil”. NMR