Bianna Golodryga talks with David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture, about the life and legacy of Pope Francis in this interview.
“You have to remember back in 2013 when Benedict the 16th resigned, almost under a cloud of scandal, the Vatican had all of these financial and sexual scandals over headlines in the papers. They wanted somebody to clean up the Roman Curia, so they elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a tough Argentine Jesuit, to do that. But he came in and said, ‘We can’t just reform the Curia. We have to reform the whole church. We have to reform ourselves.’ A very Ignatian message. He was a Jesuit. He was the first Jesuit to become elected Pope as well.”
“He’s also been a great champion of politics. He likes what he calls a better kind of politics, getting in there and really horse trading. He likes to tell politicians it’s a kind of a martyrdom to be a politician. He said, ‘You have to get your hands dirty.’ He said, but that’s why you go to confession at the end of the day. There needs to be horse trading, we need to work for the common good. That was his his message, his thrust, that’s the Catholic belief, not tribalism, not individualism, not libertarianism, working for the common good. And he was very outspoken about a need to end the ongoing wars that have been raging, whether that be in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, sadly, he did not live to see the day when any of these major conflicts would come to an end. He was also criticized by some who thought that he didn’t condemn Russia’s aggression and invasion strongly enough, or Vladimir Putin strongly enough.”
“We know that he met with families of hostages from Israel on Oct. 7, and also families of civilians who had been killed in the war in Gaza. Talk about his legacy as attempting to make peace in so many wars. Yeah, it was a complicated legacy, as you say, because we’re in a zero sum world where someone has to win and someone has to lose. There can be no cohabitation, no kind of getting along. And that’s what he he was after. He wanted people to make peace among themselves. He saw both sides of a conflict. He wanted peace. He wanted an end to the suffering. He wanted an end to war.”
