Does the election of Pope Francis signal a great change ahead?

    In April, The Wall Street Journal featured an article written by Stacy Meichtry and Alessandra Galloni entitled “Fifteen Days in Rome: How The Pope Was Picked.”
    Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio arrived in Rome on Feb. 27, after a 13-hour flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was a “beloved figure” back home, known especially for his work in the city’s slums, the article said. But in Rome, he was only one of 115 cardinals converging on Vatican City who would elect a new pope.
    Pope Benedict XVI officially stepped down Feb. 28. He was the first pope to do so willingly since Pope Celestine V left the papacy on Dec. 13, 1294.
    Now that the Catholic Church was in need of a new leader, there was a great deal of speculation about who the next pope would be. A news service article from Vatican City listed twelve “papabili,” (or likely prospects) to keep an eye on during the voting process. Cardinal Bergoglio was not on that list.
Out of left field
    Most insiders never seriously considered him to be a contender. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was already 76 and the cardinals were said to be looking for a younger candidate.
    How did this unknown cardinal from South America break through the ranks to gain the endorsement of such a sharply divided College of Cardinals?
    According to the article, the tide began to turn in his favor March 7, the day he delivered a speech to the assembled cardinals. Each cardinal is allowed to speak to the entire college before the voting session. Many cardinals focused on specific issues such as evangelization and church finances.
    “Cardinal Bergoglio, however, wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: the long-term future of the church and its recent history of failure,” The Wall Street Journal said.
    “The leaders of the Catholic Church, our very selves, Cardinal Bergoglio warned, had become too focused on its inner life,” Meichtry and Galloni wrote. “’When the church is self-referential,’ he said, ‘inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the “mysterium lunae” and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness.’”
    Wow. Think about that sentence. He went on to say, according to the article, that the church needed to “shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Vatican City walls, to the outside.”
    More than 50 years ago, Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens was chosen by Pope John XIII to help him design the agenda of the Second Vatican Council. Together they wrote the council agenda amid flurries of controversy and concluded that the council had two goals, namely, to reform the church “at the interior” and “at the exterior.”
    The writers wrote that when he became Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Bergoglio said, “The core mission of the church is not self-examination, rather it is getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socio-economic injustice.”
    Before the start of the conclave, a new narrative was beginning to take hold among the cardinals, and Cardinal Bergoglio now was a contender. The rest is history.
    Father John Catoir is a columnist with Catholic News Service.