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Francis, the Perfect 19th-Century Pope
Pope Francis looking out from the Speaker’s Balcony in the Capitol in Washington on Thursday.Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Washington — AFTER attending a canonization Mass at Catholic University with the pope who rails against the excesses of capitalism, I walked off campus to a festival of capitalism.
Vendors were hawking pope bracelets, buttons and T-shirts.
Excited by seeing the humble black Fiat in person and infused with Papa’s warning against the numbing effects of the “culture of prosperity,” I resisted all sales pitches. Until I got to the last guy.
He was selling blue-and-white T-shirts for $10 with the declaration “Coolest Pope Ever.”
Francis is undeniably cool. He once worked as a nightclub bouncer in Buenos Aires. He got a serenade to “Frank, baby,” from his fan Stephen Colbert. He spurred nuns to have a tailgating party at Catholic U. before his Mass, inspired the Internet to erupt in photos of dogs sporting miters and persuaded a blubbering John Boehner that he would never have a day that good again.
Though Friday was dry, Francis got a rainbow before his triumphant tour of Central Park. And he felicitously leaves the country before the super blood moon Monday morning — considered by some Christians to be a sign of the apocalypse.
Cleaving closer to the teachings of Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, Francis rejected the fancy red slippers of predecessors in favor of plain black shoes. He scorned the papal palace for a suite in the Vatican guesthouse. He ended the fixation on divisive social issues and refocused the church on healing social justice and the Golden Rule.
On Friday, Rolling Stone premiered a single called “Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!,” from the coming pop-rock album Francis is dropping in November, sort of a “Shake It Off” for apathy and selfishness.
Yet his very coolness is what makes his reign so hazardous. Watching the rapturous crowds and gushing TV anchors on his American odyssey, we see “the Francis Effect.” His magnetic, magnanimous personality is making the church, so stained by the vile sex abuse scandal, more attractive to people — even though the Vatican stubbornly clings to its archaic practice of treating women as a lower caste.
Pope Francis would be the perfect pontiff — if he lived in the 19th century. But how, in 2015, can he continue to condone the idea that women should have no voice in church decisions?
In a scandal that cascaded for decades with abuses and cover-ups, the church was revealed to be monstrously warped in its attitudes about sex and its sense of right and wrong.
Yet shortly after he was elected, Francis flatly rejected the idea that the institution could benefit from opening itself to the hearts and minds of women. Asked about the issue of female priests, he replied, “The church has spoken and says no,” adding, “That door is closed.”
Francis preaches against the elites while keeping the church an elite boys’ club.
As he arrived to say Mass on an altar designed by students outside the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the pope was surrounded by hundreds of white-robed male bishops, male priests and a sea of seminarians as he nonsensically canonized Father Junípero Serra, a missionary agent for the Spanish empire in California, a man who flogged Native Americans who broke the rules of Catholic teachings.