He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.
Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior. He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.
On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop. He was conservative, eh?
But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing. "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself. It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking. It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.
And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.
So I committed myself to reserving judgment. Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.
In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different. His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.
At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play. Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call. In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed. Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness. He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock. Love for neighbor. Care for the poor and the stranger. A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.
This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls. Not that Francis was "progressive." He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.
Francis did his job ably, and with integrity. He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally. As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.
Euge, serve bone et fidelis.
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