Jorge Bergoglio begins his papacy as Francis I facing the challenge of a Catholic Church caught up in a burdensome contradiction with modern society, because of its negative attitude to sexuality and women.

“There would be much more common sense, efficiency and tenderness in the church, rather than that immense wave of paedophilia and paederasty in the hierarchy and the Catholic schools” if the Catholic Church had incorporated women into the priesthood and the different leadership roles in the institution, said João Tavares, a married former priest living in São Luis, in northeastern Brazil.

Women, who are “the real pillar of Christian communities,” can no longer remain without equal rights within the church, “as if they were second-class human beings,” he said in an interview with IPS.

As well as being excluded from the hierarchy, a woman cannot even become the partner of a priest without invalidating his ministry, unless they both live a secret, hypocritical life. In practice, women are depicted by the church as a contagious source of sin.

The Catholic Church is characterised by androcentrism, excluding women from its decisions and the performance of its celebrations, although they are the majority of the faithful and the greatest “consumers of spiritual goods,” complained Regina Jurkewicz, one of the coordinators of Católicas pelo Direito de Decidir (CDD – a partner of the U.S.-based Catholics for Choice) in Brazil.

The church’s discrimination against women contrasts with other faiths, such as Afro-Brazilian religions which have male and female priests and priestesses, or Buddhists, who admit women monks, or Anglicans who have women bishops, Jurkewicz, who holds a doctorate in sociology of religion, told IPS.

The clash with reality is even more marked because Catholicism predominates in some regions where women have made great progress in terms of their rights.

CDD is a Latin American network formed in 1996 in association with Catholics for Choice. “We fight for changes in the cultural patterns that restrict the autonomy of persons in our societies, especially women,” the network says on its web page.

The Brazilian branch emerged in 1993, and one of its founders was Jurkewicz, who was active in social pastoral work from a young age. In the early 1990s she encountered feminist ideas and joined other activists in discussing the role of women in the Catholic Church.

The conferences organised by the United Nations in the 1990s, including the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, were important for the development of concepts like sexual and reproductive rights, in spite of opposition from the Vatican, Jurkewicz said.

With “such blinkered sexual morality and such blindness to reality,” the Catholic Church remains a hurdle to progress on these rights and is sliding backwards, she said. The hierarchy continues to reject condom use, contraceptives, abortion, same-sex couples and married priests.

“One consequence of Rome’s imposition of this line is loss of the faithful. Brazil, and other Latin American nations, can no longer call themselves ‘Catholic countries,’ when new religions are springing up like mushrooms,” she said.

The decline in the number of Catholics must have been one of the factors that led to the election of Bergoglio of Argentina, the first Latin American pope, Jurkewicz said.

But in spite of the strides made by evangelical faiths, the region still has a Catholic majority. And unlike in Europe, there is a high level of participation by young people – a decisive factor for the future of the church.

But it is difficult to maintain youth participation levels when running counter to public opinion. A survey carried out by the Datafolha Institute on Mar. 20-21 found that 93 percent of Catholic respondents were in favour of condom use, 64 percent thought that women should be able to celebrate mass, and 51 percent approved of priests marrying and having families.

The poll also found slightly lower percentages saying the new pope should lead the Catholic Church down these paths favoured by the majority. For instance, 58 percent of those surveyed wanted the Vatican to support women in the priesthood, and 48 percent wanted official support for married priests, while 41 percent were against.

Furthermore, 87 percent of respondents from the general population, and 86 percent of Catholics, believed that some priests were involved in paedophilia and sexual abuse.

But the obligation of priestly celibacy “was never a dogma and has no natural, biblical, philosophical or theological foundation; it was a sorry invention of the Catholic Church hierarchy,” said Tavares, in charge of communications for the Movimento Nacional das Famílias dos Padres Casados (MFPC – National Movement of Families of Married Priests).

Questions of “organisation and power,” because it’s harder to control priests who have wives and children, and of economics, because of savings on family support, are behind the rule of celibacy adopted in the 11th century, according to Tavares, who was married in 1979 to Sofía, a philosopher and theologian.

“I loved the priesthood very much,” he said, but he left it after years of reflection, dissatisfied with the “humanly impoverished life” and the mentality of a Church that “instead of being light, salt and leaven for the world preferred power, vanity, great cathedrals and the domination of consciences.”

He joined the Movement of Married Priests, which he presided from 2000 to 2002, in a search for shared values. An estimated 5,000 priests in Brazil have got married, like Tavares, who has two daughters and a granddaughter.

The new pope has already made “captivating, engaging gestures,” such as the choice of his name, his simple lifestyle and his vow of poverty, said Tavares. But, he added, Francis has declared his opposition to abortion and same-sex unions, “so not much can be hoped for on these fronts. Only time will tell if there will be any changes,” he said.

But there is “a certain fear of, or even aversion to, sexuality in the Western Catholic hierarchy,” which from its origins has been associated with “Platonism, in which the body is evil and the soul, trapped within it, longs to be freed,” he said. He also alleged that the last two popes had tried to cover up “the tsunami of homosexuality and paedophilia.”

Pope Francis, as a South American, might want to pay attention to “those two serious and urgent problems,” celibacy and the exclusion of women, said Tavares.

Born in Portugal, the former priest has lived since 1967 in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão, first as a missionary in rural areas and later as a professor of philosophy at a public university in the state capital, São Luis.

Jurkewicz, however, said that only a “conversion” like that undergone by Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a conservative turned progressive archbishop in El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 for his actions on behalf of the poor and human rights, could move Francis to promote major changes in the Church.

Indigenous women fetching water from a well near San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

The new pope’s choice of the name Francis, to honour the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals and the environment, has awakened the hopes of ecologists and others who are concerned about rampant consumerism and the deterioration of the planet.

In 1979, then Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) the patron saint of ecologists. In his first mass as pope, on Mar. 19, Jorge Bergoglio said: “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.”

”It’s excellent that a world leader is taking up this issue as a priority,” Diego Moreno, director of the Fundación Vida Silvestre, Argentina’s main wildlife advocacy organisation, told IPS. “With the Church’s ability to reach people, the fact that the environment is part of the pope’s discourse is very important, because it will get more people involved.”

In Latin America and Africa, “environmental problems are closely linked to poverty, with the poor living in areas that are the most vulnerable to climate change and the degradation of the soil,” he said.

But there are also other areas in which the pope “could turn out to be an ally,” Moreno added. For example, excessive consumption – “verging on squander” – has a huge impact on natural resources, he said.

Both environmentalists and bishops in Latin America criticise consumerism and urge people to follow a simpler lifestyle.

The pope’s homily was in line with the recommendations set forth in the final document of the 5th General Conference of the Council of Latin American Bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007.

Bergoglio, who was an Argentine cardinal before he was elected pope on Mar. 13, presided over the committee that drew up the final conclusions.

The document criticises the extractive industries and agribusiness for failing to respect the economic, social and environmental rights of local communities, and questions the introduction of genetically modified organisms because they do not contribute to the fight against hunger or to sustainable rural development.

The final document also stressed the region’s rich flora and faun and social diversity, defended traditional indigenous know-how that has been “illicitly appropriated” by the pharmaceutical industry, and called for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest as part of “the inheritance we received, for free, to protect.”

The call for the preservation of the environment “is a little-known aspect” of the Aparecida final document, Pablo Canziani, a doctor in physical sciences who is in charge of the environmental area of the department of laypersons in the Argentine bishops’ conference, told IPS.

Environmental issues were not traditionally a concern of the Catholic Church, until they took on importance because of their links with human development, said Canziani, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“It is the poor who suffer the most from climate change, desertification, or the waste of food,” said the scientist, who has served as an adviser to several Vatican delegations to United Nations conferences on poverty, the environment and food.

In Aparecida, the bishops stressed that in Latin America and the Caribbean, nature “is fragile and defenceless in the face of the economic and technological powers.” And they said “the interests of economic groups that irrationally destroy the sources of life” should not be predominant over natural resources.

The final document also called for educating people to live a simple, austere lifestyle based on solidarity, for expanding the pastoral presence in communities threatened by activities that destroy the environment, and for seeking “an alternative development model, based on an ethics that includes ecology.”

John Paul II (1978-2005) was the first to put these issues on the Church agenda, said Luis Scozzina, a priest who is the director of the Franciscan Centre of Studies and Regional Development.

The Centre was created in Argentina’s Catholic University “to contribute to information and research on questions related to the environment,” its web site says.

“Protecting creation” is one of the central focuses of Franciscans, Scozzina told IPS. And he said Bergoglio is “the most Franciscan Jesuit we have ever known,” because besides his intellectual leanings, characteristic of the Jesuits, he leads an austere lifestyle with close ties to the poor, as Franciscans do.

“Francis will put the ecological crisis high up on the agenda. He already indicated that in his mass, when he spoke of protecting three dimensions: ourselves, one another, and creation. By ‘one another’ he meant the poor, who are hurt the most by the consequences of environmental deterioration.”

Father Scozzina added that “even the most optimistic warn that we are moving towards steady destruction, and in response to that, we in the Church are calling for an ethics of austerity, a change in lifestyle that leaves behind this frenzied consumption.”

In Aparecida, he noted, the bishops signalled the need for a change in the production model. “In Latin America, this merits reflection. Are we going to continue with the model of extraction of our natural resources?” he said.

What is the interest of some groups in raising the question of Pope Francis’s past rather than discussing the serious crisis in the Church? asks Leonardo Boff. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, a leading exponent of liberation theology, the progressive current in the Latin American Catholic Church, does not believe reports that depict the new Pope Francis as collaborating with Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.

In this interview with IPS, Boff acknowledged that it was a “controversial issue,” and that there were contradictory accounts. But he said he believed prominent human rights defenders in Argentina who denied that Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, elected pope by the Vatican, had any ties with Argentina’s military regime.

Boff, a key figure in liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s with a focus on social justice and the poor, said he was looking towards the future with hope and that he was confident that Francis would honour his Jesuit faith and would take a “vigorous and radical” stance against the epidemic of paedophilia and corruption plaguing the Church.

Q: How do you interpret the “decentralisation” that the selection of a Latin American pope implies?

A: The central Church, that is, the Vatican and the European churches, felt humiliated and ashamed by the scandals created within their own walls. So they chose someone from outside, with a different approach and a different style of leading the Church.

Sixty percent of all priests live in the Third World. It was time for those churches to be heard better. They are no longer churches that mirror Europe but are now churches that are a source, with their own face and their own forms of organisation, generally in community networks.

For me, the name Francis is more than a name – it’s a reflection of a poor Church with close ties to the people, evangelical, a lover and protector of nature, which has been devastated. Saint Francis is the archetype of this kind of Church. Pope Francis is inaugurating a Church of the third millennium, far removed from the palaces and with a deep connection to people and their cultures.

Q: To what do you attribute the choice of Bergoglio, instead of Brazilian Cardinal Odilo Scherer?

A: Scherer was the candidate of the Vatican, where he worked and made a lot of friends. But he publicly defended the curia, and the Vatican Bank, which was criticised by many, including many cardinals. That unleashed a public debate, which hurt him. Besides, he would not have been good for the Church at this juncture. He is conservative and authoritarian. He would have been a Benedict XVII.

Q: In Argentina, the election of Bergoglio was criticised because of his supposed complicity in the abduction of two Jesuit priests during the dictatorship.

A: I know that in general the Argentine church was not very prophetic in denouncing state terrorism. Despite that, there were bishops like (Enrique) Angelleli, who died in a shady manner, (Jorge) Novak, (Jaime) De Nevares and Jerónimo Podestá, among others, who were openly critical.

But with regard to Bergoglio, I prefer to believe Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner, and a former member of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Graciela Fernández Meijide), who say that allegation is slanderous. They didn’t find a single mention of Bergoglio’s name on documents or legal accusations.

On the contrary, he saved many people by hiding them in the Colegio Máximo de San
Miguel (Argentina’s main Jesuit training centre). Besides, it runs against his known character – he is strong but also tender, and poor, and he continuously speaks out against social injustice in Argentina and for the need for justice, not philanthropy.

But in the end, what matters isn’t Bergoglio and his past, but Francis and his future.

Q: Why did you omit any reference to this issue in your initial remarks?

A: It’s a controversial issue and you have to be familiar with it. The versions are contradictory. I don’t talk about things that I am not fully clear about. And I have to wonder: what is the interest of some groups in raising this question rather than discussing the serious crisis in the Church…?

Perhaps – I’ll concede this much – he could have been more prophetic, like Bishop Hélder Câmara and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns were in Brazil. But here, the state is secular and separate from the church. In Argentina, Catholicism is the state religion, which hindered but didn’t impede resistance and denunciations by the Church.

Q: Omission isn’t a sin?

A: It isn’t a question of responding whether it is a sin or not…The question is political and for me it’s about what side the person is on – are they on the side of the poor, of those who suffer terrible inequalities? Or of the status quo that wants unlimited growth and a culture of consumption?

Bergoglio took the side of the victims and is constantly calling for social justice. If we don’t understand that, we are getting away from the main point.

Q: You attributed his choice of the name Francis to the “demoralisation” of a “Church in ruins” as a result of various scandals. How should that name be expressed in practice?

A: He has given signs of a different kind of papacy, without symbols of power or privileges. A pope who pays his own hotel bills, drives in a simple car to pray at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and secretly visits his friend, Cardinal Jorge Mejía, who is ill in Rome…these are gestures that the people understand.

I am sure that with regard to the paedophiles and the financial crimes, he will be more Jesuit than Franciscan, vigorous and radical, because things cannot go on the way they are now in the Church.

Q: The new pope believed he saw the hand of the devil in questions like the decriminalisation of abortion and the legalisation of homosexual marriage in Argentina, and he has confronted the government because of this. Should we expect a pope who is more or equally conservative on these questions of doctrine?

A: These questions are banned by the Vatican. No one could distance himself from the official position. I hope that Francis, as pope, will start a lengthy discussion of all of these issues, because they are a part of the real life of the people and of the new culture that is emerging, especially the question of celibacy and sexual morality.

That doesn’t mean the Church has to renounce its most deeply-held positions, but that it should debate things within a context of democracy, and should respect what is decided in a democratic fashion. The good thing about democracy is that it impedes top-down decisions from being imposed and allows different opinions to be heard, even if they do not win out in the end.

Excerpt:

Argentine archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was selected as pope at a time when the Roman Catholic Church in this South American country is facing a rebellion by priests and laypersons who reject the role of the church leadership during the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the lack of reparations for past omissions and complicities.

The accusations against Bergoglio for his alleged ties to the dictatorship, which made headlines around the world when his appointment as pope was announced by the Vatican, are just the tip of the iceberg of a controversy that has raged for decades without a solution and which is coming to light as the regime’s human rights violators have been brought to trial since the amnesty laws were scrapped.

Groups like Curas en la Opción por los Pobres (Priests with an Option for the Poor), Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio (Christians for the Third Millennium) or Colectivo Teología de la Liberación (Liberation Theology Collective) have voiced increasingly harsh criticism against the Argentine bishops’ conference’s shortcomings in terms of self-criticism, in spite of an apology and pledge to investigate issued a few months ago.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 2008. Credit: 3.0 CC BY-SA

“It’s good that this debate is happening, that we work to clarify what happened, so that the truth will come to light. That would be very healthy,” Claudia Touris, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires and the coordinator of Relig-Ar Grupo de Trabajo en Religión y Sociedad de Argentina (Relig-Ar: Working Group on Religion and Society in Contemporary Argentina), told IPS.

The debate that has divided Catholics in Argentina broke out as a result of a statement issued in November 2012 by the Argentine bishops’ conference, in which they apologise “to those we let down or failed to support as we should have” during the dictatorship.

They also promised to carry out “a more thorough study,” to find out the truth.

The statement was issued as a “Letter to the People of God” and was titled “Faith in Jesus Christ leads us to truth, justice and peace.” It condemns the crimes committed as a result of “state terrorism” but adds that “We also know of the death and devastation caused by the violence of the guerrillas”.

Opponents of the regime criticise that interpretation.

Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio described the statement as falling short because it denies the connivance between some prelates and the dictatorship. According to the group, made up of laypersons, those who served as military chaplains should be demanded to provide information, and “scandalous situations that confuse and weaken the faithful should be brought to an end.”

For their part, Curas en Opción por los Pobres said they were “scandalised by so many stances running counter to the Gospels” and by the fact that priest Christian von Wernich, who was sentenced for human rights violations, “was not expelled from the priesthood,” and unrepentant former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, found guilty of crimes against humanity, continues to receive communion.

On the eve of Bergoglio’s appointment as pope, Curas en Opción por los Pobres, priests who live and work in Argentina’s slums, loudly protested because the bishops had taken reprisals against one of the priests who had criticised the statement released by the bishops’ conference.

Bishop Francisco Polti of the northern province of Santiago del Estero transferred Father Roberto Burell, one of the signatories of the letter that the Curas en Opción por los Pobres sent to the bishops, from his parish.

“We aren’t going to call you ‘estimados’ (esteemed – the formal form of address in a letter in Spanish) because we do not esteem cowards,” says the letter sent by the priests.

The priests also told the bishops that when they are no longer bishops “only the powerful will be sorry, because the poor, the peasants and indigenous people will celebrate.”

That was the climate among Catholics in Argentina when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected Wednesday Mar. 13 as the first pope from Latin America.

Touris said the bishops’ conference statement was considered overly timid by many Catholics, although it was a fairly novel call for those who have information on forced disappearances or the theft of the children of political prisoners – two human rights abuses widely committed by the dictatorship – to come forward.

“We’ll have to see if this continues, and if it goes deeper,” she added.

She said there was no single, unanimous Church position with respect to the regime, which is why some bishops were ideologically in line with the military and helped “sweep out alleged communist infiltrators,” while other priests and bishops supported the victims of persecuation.

As examples of the former, Touris mentioned Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, army vicar Victorio Bonamín, and archbishops Adolfo Tortolo and Antonio Plaza – all of whom are dead – who witnesses said they had seen in clandestine detention centres.

But, Touris said, there were also bishops who stood alongside the victims of the regime, such as Jaime de Nevares, Jorge Novak or Miguel Hesayne, as well as dozens of priests, nuns, seminary students and laypersons who were kidnapped, “disappeared”, murdered, or forced to flee into exile.

Two bishops are considered martyrs for their opposition to the regime.

The first is Enrique Angelelli of the diocese of the northern province of La Rioja, who was killed in 1976 in a purported car accident which is suspected to have been a murder. The other is Carlos Ponce de León, bishop of the Buenos Aires district of San Nicolás, who also died in a suspicious car crash in 1977.

At the time, Bergoglio was the Jesuit Provincial (elected leader of the order). Two Jesuit priests who worked in poor neighbourhoods were abducted. Some accuse the new pope of turning them over, but others say that on the contrary, his influence saved them.

Touris said the superior general of the Society of Jesus was Spanish priest Pedro Arrupe, who urged the priests to assume a political and social commitment. As a result, more Jesuits were persecuted, tortured and forcibly disappeared in Latin America in the 1970s than priests from any other order.

In Argentina, under Bergoglio’s leadership, the order assumed a more traditional position, the professor noted. He urged the more socially committed priests to abandon their social activism in order to avoid repression, as he himself stated in his defence.

Argentine human rights activist and 1980 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an active believer, said this week that “the Catholic Church did not take a homogeneous stance” with respect to the regime, and “there were bishops who were complicit in the dictatorship…but not Bergoglio.”

“I believe he lacked the courage to support our struggle for human rights at the most difficult times,” Esquivel said in a statement issued by his organisation, Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service) in Argentina.

The selection of a Latin American pope, who is known for his austere lifestyle and his work with the poor, has created a stir among Catholics in the region, who are confident that Pope Francis will help bolster the Vatican’s tarnished reputation.

To the surprise even of Argentine cardinals, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, was elected the new pontiff Wednesday, and his first actions as he greeted crowds of faithful from the balcony over St. Peter’s Square thrilled those clamouring for a leader to demonstrate a clear preferential option for the poor.

Sources consulted by IPS say Pope Francis is conservative in doctrine, but his lifestyle, they all agree, testifies to his unassuming modesty and closeness to the poor, the homeless, the sick, the elderly, prisoners, immigrants, victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour, and to parish priests.

Pope Francis on his first appearance in St. Peter’s Square. Credit: The Vatican

The hope is that his personal qualities will help to restore the credibility of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, rocked by paedophilia and corruption scandals. For deeper changes, those in the know recommend waiting for the first appointments to his entourage and his future designations of cardinals.

“The bishops of northwest Argentina were all very happy,” Pedro Olmedo, the bishop of Humahuaca in the province of Jujuy, who was meeting with about ten other bishops of the region, the poorest in the country, when the news broke, told IPS. “There were tears, because we know him well, he always helped us and was there for us.

“Having a Latin American pope has been an aspiration of the region for many years. The Vatican has opened itself to a church from the New World, in a choice made by cardinals, the majority of whom are European. I hope this will give the Vatican a Latin American imprint, even in its structures,” said Olmedo.

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, a founder of Liberation Theology, a social justice-oriented current that stresses a ”preferential option for the poor” and has been heavily criticised by the Vatican, was also optimistic about Pope Francis’s first gestures of humility, beginning with his selection of the name of Francis of Assisi, the 12th century friar who devoted his life completely to the poor.

At the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held in May 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil, Bergoglio was elected by the bishops to draft the concluding document. It sets out the regional church’s position on a wide array of issues.

The document recognises the Church’s concern that in Latin America, home to 43 percent of the world’s Catholics, the growth of new members is lower than the rate of population growth. And it expresses regret for “the weakness of our option for the poor.

“The preferential option for the poor is one of the most characteristic facets of the Latin American and Caribbean Church,” says the text, which also laments “the significant number of Catholics who leave the Church in order to join other religious groups.”

Bergoglio appears to have lived in accordance with this commitment. He gave up the archbishop’s palace and chauffeur-driven car, to live in a room adjacent to the Cathedral in Buenos Aires. He travelled by bus or metro, cooked his own meals and avoided social events and the press.

Those close to him say he visited HIV/AIDS patients at the Muñiz Hospital for infectious diseases. He was also a frequent visitor to homeless shelters and soup kitchens, personally cared for elderly and ailing priests, and could be seen at bus stops when he went home in the early hours of the morning.

Organisations working against labour and sexual exploitation in Buenos Aires counted him as an ally. He often visited victims of trafficking, was moved by their testimonies and denounced those responsible for these forms of slavery in his homilies.

He would often visit penitentiaries, another issue raised in the concluding document from Aparecida, which calls for strengthening pastoral work in prisons.

The greatest stain on Bergoglio’s past is his alleged complicity with the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, when he was the provincial superior of the Jesuit order. He was accused of failing to protect priests and catechists who were subsequently abducted, and in some cases were forcibly disappeared.

He was called to testify as a witness in a case investigating these crimes, and in another investigation of the illegal appropriation of the young daughter of disappeared parents. Bergoglio stated he only found out about the theft of the babies of political prisoners after the end of the dictatorship.

Argentine theologian María Alicia Brunero, a retired university professor who has written several books on ethics, told IPS that “the important thing about the designation is not so much that it has fallen on an Argentine or a Latin American, but on someone from the periphery, outside of Europe.

“The cardinals are hoping for solutions to arrive from outside, from someone with a different profile, who is less contaminated and removed from the Vatican’s pomp and bureaucracy, and in that sense Bergoglio fulfils the expectations, because he is an austere man, who travels on buses and is close to the people,” she said.

Brunero, who knows Bergoglio personally, said that he is also someone who “knows how to command and delegate,” and that “he is not exempt from the aspiration to power, which is not necessarily a bad thing. He knows how to build networks and does it well, without trampling on anyone,” she said.

“He gives me hope,” she said.

On the other hand, no great changes in doctrine can be expected from him, Brunero said. As archbishop, he was an uncompromising critic of Argentina’s law on same-sex marriages and of any attempt to decriminalise abortion.

But she did predict he might bring a breath of fresh air to other issues.

“Ninety percent of theologians believe that women can exercise the priesthood, and the majority also want priests to be able to marry. It is possible that steps in this direction may be taken during his papacy,” she said.

Brunero said the priesthood is the Church institution facing the deepest crisis at present. Half of the priests ordained in recent years have left the priesthood, not because of loss of faith, but “because they fell in love, or came into conflict with Church structures because of its rigidity on the issue,” she said.

She pointed out that the first Vatican Council, in 1869, focused on the figure of the pope. The second, in 1959, focused on the bishops. “Perhaps there will now be a third council focused on priests,” she said.

In contrast with the conservatism of his other positions, in Buenos Aires Bergoglio reprimanded priests who refused to baptise the children of single mothers. He also accepted non-Catholic godparents for baptism candidates, Gustavo Vera, an activist for the rights of victims of labour and sex trafficking, told IPS.

The pope is open to inter-faith dialogue, and has had frequent contacts with representatives of the Jewish religion in Argentina.