On Tuesday, Jorge Mario Bergoglio turned 88. And the Pope, who has been in office for almost twelve years, has been behaving like a grandfather for a long time. An Italian comedian called him “world grandpa” in the summer. Francis is definitely a family man – probably one of the reasons why he lives in the Santa Marta guesthouse.
Speeches with anecdotes and admonitions
Almost every time he meets young people, he uses the image of the tree of generations to remind them not to forget their roots. “The elders are the roots, you are the branches. Without roots you cannot bud and bloom,” he says again and again, almost word for word.
He does this especially when he deviates from the manuscript and starts chatting in a good mood. Unlike his predecessors, he did this from the start and does it more and more as he gets older; Last Sunday in Corsica in two of his three languages - with anecdotes and admonitions that Vatican observers now know by heart. This is also why the schedule for the day trip to the French Mediterranean island fell a little behind schedule.
“A Grace of God”
But also because the Popemobile stopped several times and for longer on the streets of Ajaccio, which were filled with onlookers and believers, so that the Pope could bless, kiss and stroke the heads of dozens of babies and small children that were handed to him. Accompanied by sweets and rosaries for parents. For some, the image of an older cleric loving small children now has something ambivalent and questionable about it. Probably not in Ajaccio. For the parents and relatives of the little ones, it was an honor and an appreciation. Which Francis confirmed in his sermon – contrary to the manuscript.
“Congratulations! I have never seen so many children as here! This is a grace from God!” he said. “Dear brothers and sisters, have children, have children who will be your joy and comfort in the future,” he told young couples. The crowd responded with laughter – especially since the Italian “fate figli!” (makes children!) is more direct than the German “gets children!”
Still visibly impressed by the encounters, the Pope asked the accompanying journalists on the return flight: “Did you see how many children were there? I was happy to see a people making children. That is the future.” Which brings up one of his frequently mentioned concerns: Europe’s demographic winter.
Focus on popular religion
The main theme of the Corsica trip was popular religiosity. Francis maintains an ideal of it, even if he clearly stated the dangers of pure folklore, superstition or exclusive club preoccupation. Christian faith is not abstract thinking. It is essentially “expressed in the culture, history and languages of a people” and is “passed on through symbols, customs, rites and traditions of a living community”.
For Francis, vibrant popular piety is a necessary corrective to both ossified traditionalism and intellectually aloof theology. At the same time, the “Teologia Popular”, with which Francis grew up, offers low-threshold forms, below the official church liturgy, to include, involve and bless those who are far removed from all arts. An aspect that Cardinal Victor Fernández, head of the Vatican religious authority, once emphasized to justify the declaration “Fiducia supplicans” to bless homosexual couples.
In Latin America, brotherhoods (of men and women) also play an important role in the Romance region of Europe. They organize processes and devotions, take care of social and charitable tasks and enrich local life culturally. At the mass on Ajaccio's Place d'Austerlitz they were visible everywhere in their robes and cloaks, built with the traditional polyphonic singing of their island, liturgical songs such as Kyrie or Agnus Dei.
The pope emphasized several times that such lively, diverse popular piety can be easily reconciled with a flexible, “healthy secularism” that preserves the rights of the respective spheres. Even a secular state needs a “constructive citizenship of Christians”.
People arise through commitment
His understanding of “people” is also important for Francis’ idea of popular piety. Accordingly, a people is more than the sum of self-conscious individuals. His talk about the people serves as a reminder of “social phenomena that structure majorities (…) megatrends and communal aspirations (…) common goals, beyond differences,” as he writes in his encyclical “Fratelli tutti.” It's “very difficult to plan something big long-term if you don't make it a collective dream,” he adds.
For Francis, said Cardinal Matteo Zuppi in an op-ed for the newspaper Il Repubblica on Monday, “peoples are not nations in the sense of political-cultural 'inventions' that nationalists create – claiming that they are eternal – for different purposes “Playing peoples off against each other or dividing them internally into a 'true' people (us, the patriots) and those who are not worthy of belonging (them, the anti-patriots).
For Francis, peoples have a historical identity. “The people are created in a process through commitment to a common goal or project that goes beyond personal interests and desires” and spans multiple generations.
For Francis, building common belonging to a people is slow and laborious work; one must want to integrate and learn to do so, also in order to “develop a culture of encounter in a pluriform harmony”. “The use of this word is, in short, one way – certainly not the only way – of declining the word 'next'.”
“A crisis of solidarity”
Zuppi further emphasizes that Francis is the first pope to be confronted with the phenomenon of a global crisis of the new democracy. He sees the reason for this in an erosion of the people and elites. “As far as the elites are concerned, it is difficult to imagine today,” writes Zuppi, “that – to use the words of Pius XII. to speak – there are men and women who are 'spiritually high and of firm character' and see themselves as representatives of the whole people.” (The “choice of the lesser evil”, which Francis spoke of with a view to the duel between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris spoke, so it doesn't just apply in the USA.)
But the crisis of democracy is also a crisis of the peoples, Zuppi continued: “One of solidarity that creates stable bonds, of the awareness of a common fate, of the will to build a common crisis for future generations in which the weakest. “be given special consideration”.
Which brings us back to the papal appeals to children, the elderly, the poor and migrants. Francis – whose spontaneous global political statements often have to be recaptured by his diplomatic apparatus – sees himself as an advocate for the people. Which is why, at the Angelus on Sunday in Corsica, he asked the Mother of God for support for “the Russian people”, not just for the Ukrainian people.
Holy year 2025
For Francis, a simple, free people rich in cultural and religious traditions and in solidarity is a buffer against the ideologies and corrective of those in power. Just as within the church the “holy people of God” is a corrective against clericalism and excessive hierarchy; There, however, not in a democratic church, but rather a synodal church.
It remains to be seen to what extent the now 88-year-old “grandfather” and “pastor of the people” on the Chair of Peter can convey this in his further pontificate. “What else can he say that’s new?” many people ask themselves. And so Francis' well-known, mostly important appeals will be heard even more often in the upcoming Holy Year of 2025, when millions more come to Rome.
