By William Oddie
Pope Francis arrives in St Peter's Square for his inauguration Mass (AP) |
I came upon the following passage in the course of a web search
yesterday: “On 28 May 1995 the lead article in the Sunday Telegraph’s
Review section was headlined ‘A Saint among journalists?’ The article
was prompted by a letter from Argentina signed by politicians, diplomats
and an archbishop and addressed to Cardinal Hume of Westminster. The
letter called for the ‘initiation of the formal procedures towards the
eventual canonisation of Gilbert Keith Chesterton’.”
I had been told that Pope Francis was an admirer of Chesterton and
was googling around trying to see if there was anything out there that
might confirm it. I suddenly realised that it was I myself who over 15
years ago had written that Sunday Telegraph article. Suddenly I
wondered: who was the archbishop who had signed the letter? Not a
certain Archbishop Bergoglio, by any chance? If so, my own ambition that
procedures towards Chesterton’s canonisation should indeed be
initiated had just taken a major step towards being realised. But no:
Pope Francis became archbishop only in 1998. But he was in 1995 a close
colleague of his predecessor, as an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires:
did he too sign the letter?
The web yielded just one nugget of possibly accurate information, and
if anyone can verify it, it would be of considerable interest to me.
It’s a little circuitous; according to the Italian Chesterton Society, the Societa Chestertoniana Italiana: “Pare che Papa Francesco sia socio della Società Chestertoniana Argentina”: “It seems that Pope Francis is a member of the Argentine Chesterton Society.”
Unfortunately, that society’s website says nothing of this, but it
looks to me as though it hasn’t been touched for some time, and may be
moribund (it happens).
It wouldn’t, however, surprise me at all if the claim were true. The
obvious link could be Chesterton’s great work on St Francis. I thought
immediately of one passage which seemed to be directly relevant to the
Pope’s clear determination not to be steered spiritually off course by
the power and dignity of his new position. It begins with a discussion
of why St Francis called his followers friars (which Chesterton
translates as “Little Brothers”) rather than monks:
“Presumably he was already resolved… that they should take the three
vows of poverty, chastity and obedience which had always been the mark
of a monk. But it would seem that he was not so much afraid of the idea
of a monk as of the idea of an abbot. He was afraid that the great
spiritual magistracies which had given even to their holiest possessors
at least a sort of impersonal and corporate pride, would import an
element of pomposity that would spoil his extremely and almost
extravagantly simple version of the life of humility. But the supreme
difference was concerned, of course, with the idea that [his] monks were
to become migratory and almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were
to mingle with the world; and to this the more old-fashioned monk would
naturally reply by asking how they were to mingle with the world
without becoming entangled with the world. It was a much more real
question than a loose religiosity is likely to realise; but St. Francis
had his answer to it, of his own individual sort; and the interest of
the problem is in that highly individual answer.”
Monastic humility, says Chesterton, in this new Franciscan version,
is to be attained by mingling with the world: St Francis, too,
doubtless, would have taken public transport rather than the official
limos which would no doubt today be offered, and he certainly lived
simply (as did Archbishop Bergoglio) rather than in the luxury he could
have had.
Another Franciscan parallel is in the new Holy Father’s emphasis on
our responsibility to protect the Creation. Indeed, he specifically
invoked St Francis’s teaching at this point in his very touching
inauguration homily: “The vocation of being a “protector”… is not just
something involving us Christians alone,” he said; it also has a prior
dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting
all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis
tells us and as St Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each
of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It
means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every
person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often
the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our
families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as
parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time,
protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which
we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness. In the end,
everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are
responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!”
When the Pope placed his remarks on Creation in the context of “what
St Francis showed us”, he was pointing towards something very profound.
God is love: and in his love he created everything that is, ex nihilo,
out of nothing. That, Chesterton tells us, was at the heart of Francis’s
own love of the created world: “When we say that a poet praises the
whole creation,” he expounds, “we commonly mean only that he praises the
whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the
sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from
nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that
archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his
archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment
when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the
beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not
only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was
made.”
It would not surprise me at all if it were in fact true that Pope Francis is “socio della Società Chestertoniana Argentina”
(if anyone reading this can confirm it I would be greatly interested to
know); but I would be even less surprised if it were somehow to be
confirmed that Chesterton’s book on St Francis were indeed well-known to
Pope Francis. It is, after all, widely accepted as being one of the
most profound books on St Francis — whose very name he has taken as his
own pontifical name — ever written: why would it not be?
1 comment:
This article is very intriguing. To think that Pope Francis might be a Chestertonian is very comforting and profound. G. K. Chesterton is a shining light who provides great insight into how society might be reformed to serve both God and us. Chesterton would have a wonderful influence on our new Pope as he undertakes to rebuild the Church.
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