Monday, 6th October 2014
By Lakshman I.Keerthisinghe LLB, LLM.MPhil, Attorney-at-Law
Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.
- Pope Francis
President Mahinda Rajapaksa visited the Vatican during the first week of October for an audience with Pope Francis. Presidential Spokesman said the President officially extended an invitation to the Pope to visit Sri Lanka during his audience with the Holy Father. The Catholic Church has already confirmed the visit of Pope Francis to Sri Lanka in January next year. His Holiness will also preside over the canonization of Blessed Joseph Vaz, the Apostle of Sri Lanka, as the first Saint of Sri Lanka. Pope Paul VI and Pope Saint John Paul II visited Sri Lanka in 1970 and 1995.
Pope Francis was born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio on the 17th of December 1936. As the Pope of the Catholic Church, he is Bishop of Rome and absolute Sovereign of the Vatican City State. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bergoglio worked briefly as a chemical technician before beginning seminary studies. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1969 and from 1973 to 1979 was Argentina's Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus. He became the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and was created a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II.
Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on February 28, 2013, a papal enclave elected Bergoglio as his successor on March 13, 2013. He chose Francis as his papal name in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere and the first non-European pope since the Syrian Gregory III in 741, 1,272 years earlier.
Throughout his public life, both as an individual and as a religious leader, Pope Francis has been noted for his humility, his concern for the poor and his commitment to dialogue as a way to build bridges between people of all backgrounds, beliefs and faiths. He is known for having a simpler and less formal approach to the papacy, most notably by choosing to reside in the Donus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse rather than the papal apartments of the Apostelic Palace used by his predecessors. In addition, due to both his Jesuit and Ignatian aesthetic, he is known for favouring simpler vestments void of ornamentation, including refusing the traditional papal mozzetta cape upon his election, choosing silver instead of gold for his piscatory ring, and keeping the same pectoral cross he had when he was cardinal.
Major initiatives
The Pontiff has affirmed the Catholic doctrine on abortion, artificial contraception, and homosexuality. Whilst maintaining the Church’s teachings against homosexual acts, he has said that gay people should not be marginalized. As a cardinal, he opposed same-sex marriage in Argentina. In addition, he maintains that he is a “son of the Church” regarding loyalty to Church doctrine, and has spoken against abortion as “horrific”, suggested that women be valued not clericalized. Summarily Pope Francis reiterates that “It is absurd to say you follow Jesus Christ but reject the Church.”
He was the eldest of five children of Mario José Bergoglio, an Italian immigrant accountant, born in Portacomaro, Province of Astiin, Italy's Ptedmont region, and his wife Regina María Sívori, a housewife born in Buenos Aires to a family of northern Italian (Piedmontese-Genoese) origin. Mario José's family left Italy in 1929, to escape the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. His daughter María Elena confirmed that their emigration was not caused by economic reasons. She is the Pope's only living sibling.
His brother Alberto died in June 2010. Shortly after midnight, early in the morning of Tuesday, August 19, 2014, Alberto's son and Pope Francis's nephew, Emanuel Horacio Bergoglio, 35, was seriously injured when his car slammed into the back of a truck carrying grains. Emanuel's wife, Valeria Carmona, 39, and her two young sons (Pope Francis's great-nephews), Antonio Bergoglio, eight months, and Joseph Bergoglio, 2 years old, were killed.
The Vatican press office, in a statement, said that the Pope was asking for prayers for his deceased relatives, and he received condolences from Argentina's President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, through the Foreign Ministry and the Cabinet.
Bergoglio was named Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 and ordained on June 27, 1992 as Titular Bishop of Auca, with CardinalAntonio Quarracino, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, serving as principal consecrator. On June 3, 1997, Bergoglio was appointed Coadjutor Archbishop of Buenos Aires with right of automatic succession. He chose as his episcopal motto Miserando atque eligendo. It is drawn from Bede’s homily on Matthew 9:9–13: “because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him”.
Upon Quarracino's death on February 28, 1998, Bergoglio became Metropolitan Archbishop of Buenos Aires. In that role, Bergoglio created new parishes and restructured the archdiocese administrative offices, led pro-life initiatives, and created a commission on divorces. One of Bergoglio's major initiatives as archbishop was to increase the Church's presence in the slums of Buenos Aires.
Under his leadership, the number of priests assigned to work in the slums doubled. Early in his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio sold off the Archdiocese's shares in multiple banks and turned its accounts into those of a normal customer in international banks. The shares in banks had led the local church to a high leniency towards high spending, and the archdiocese was nearing bankruptcy as a result. As a normal customer of the bank, the church was forced into a higher fiscal discipline. Bergoglio made it his custom to celebrate the Holy Thurtsday ritual washing of feet in places such as jails, hospitals, retirement homes or slums. On November 8, 2005, Bergoglio was elected president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference for a three-year term (2005–08). He was reelected to another three-year term on November 11, 2008.
He remained a member of that Commission's permanent governing body, president of its committee for the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, and a member of its liturgy committee for the care of shrines. While head of the Argentine Catholic bishops’ conference, Bergoglio issued a collective apology for his church's failure to protect people from the Junta during the Dirty War. When he turned 75 in December 2011, Bergoglio submitted his resignation as Archbishop of Buenos Aires to Pope Benedict XVI as required by Canon Law. Still, as he had no coadjutor archbishop, he stayed in office, waiting for an eventual replacement appointed by the Vatican.
Cardinal Bergoglio became known for personal humility, doctrinal conservatism and a commitment to social justice. A simple lifestyle contributed to his reputation for humility. He lived in a small apartment, rather than in the elegant bishop's residence in the suburb of Olivos. He took public transportation and cooked his own meals. He limited his time in Rome to “lightning visits”. On the death of Pope John Paul II, Bergoglio attended his funeral and was considered one of the papabile for succession to the papacy. He participated as a cardinal elector in the 2005 papal conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.
In 2006, Bergoglio publicly opposed an attempt by the Argentine government to legalize some cases of abortion. In 2007, after the government intervened to allow an abortion for a mentally handicapped woman who had been raped, Bergoglio compared the abortion with a death penalty over the unborn child. The Kirchner administration said in response that the social concerns of the Church were correct, but that relating them to abortion and euthanasia would be unjustified. When Bergoglio was elected Pope, the initial reactions were mixed. Most of the Argentine society cheered it. The president took more than an hour to congratulate him, and only did so in a passing-by reference inside a routine speech. However, as the Pope was a huge positive image in his country, Cristina Kirchner made a Copernican shift in her relation with him, and fully embraced the Francis phenomenon. On the day before his inauguration as pope, Bergoglio, now Francis, had a private meeting with Kirchner. They exchanged gifts and lunched together. This was the new pope's first meeting with a head of state, and there was speculation that the two were mending their relations.
Promoted interfaith ceremonies
Bergoglio has written about his commitment to open and respectful interfaith dialogue as a way for all parties engaged in that dialogue to learn from one another. Bergoglio said: ‘Dialogue is born from an attitude of respect for the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It assumes that there is room in the heart for the person’s point of view, opinion, and proposal. To dialogue entails a cordial reception, not a prior condemnation. In order to dialogue it is necessary to know how to lower the defenses, open the doors of the house, and offer human warmth.’
Religious leaders in Buenos Aires have mentioned that Bergoglio promoted interfaith ceremonies. For example, in November 2012 he brought leaders of the Jewish, Muslim, evangelical, and Orthodox Christian faiths together to pray for a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflicts. Rabbi Avruj praised Bergoglio's interest in interfaith dialogue, and his commitment to mend religious divisions.
Shortly after his election, the pope called for more inter-religious dialogue as a way of “building bridges” and establishing “true links of friendship between all people”. He added that it was crucial “to intensify outreach to nonbelievers, so that the differences which divide and hurt us may never prevail”. He said that his title of “pontiff” means “builder of bridges”, and that it was his wish that “the dialogue between us should help to build bridges connecting all people, in such a way that everyone can see in the other not an enemy, not a rival, but a brother or sister to be welcomed and embraced.”
Leaders of the Islamic community in Buenos Aires welcomed the news of Bergoglio's election as pope, noting that he “always showed himself as a friend of the Islamic community”, and a person whose position is “pro-dialogue”. They praised Bergoglio's close ties with the Islamic community and noted his comments when Pope Benedict's 2006 Regensberg lecture was interpreted by many as denigrating Islam. According to them, Bergoglio immediately distanced himself from Benedict's language and said that statements that create outrage within the Islamic community “will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last 20 years.”
Bergoglio visited both a mosque and an Islamic school in Argentina, visits that Sheik Mohsen Ali, the Director for the Diffusion of Islam, called actions that strengthened the relationship between the Catholic and Islamic communities. Dr. Sumer Noufouri, Secretary General of the Islamic Center of the Argentine Republic (CIRA), added that Bergoglio's past actions make his election as pope a cause within the Islamic community of “joy and expectation of strengthening dialogue between religions”. Noufouri said that the relationship between CIRA and Bergoglio over the course of a decade had helped to build up Christian-Muslim dialogue in a way that was “really significant in the history of monotheistic relations in Argentina”. Shortly after his election, in a meeting with ambassadors from the 180 countries accredited with the Holy See, Pope Francis called for more inter-religious dialogue — “particularly with Islam”. He also expressed gratitude that “so many civil and religious leaders from the Islamic world” had attended his installation Mass.
Speaking to journalists and media employees on March 16, 2013, Pope Francis said he would bless them silently, “Given that many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church, and others are not believers”. In his papal address on March 20, he said the “attempt to eliminate God and the Divine from the horizon of humanity” resulted in violence, but described as well his feelings about nonbelievers: “[W]e also sense our closeness to all those men and women who, although not identifying themselves as followers of any religious tradition, are nonetheless searching for truth, goodness and beauty, the truth, goodness and beauty of God. They are our valued allies in the commitment to defending human dignity, in building a peaceful coexistence between peoples and in safeguarding and caring for creation.”
In September 2013 Francis wrote an open letter to the founder of La Repubblica newspaper, Eugenio Scalfari, stating that non-believers would be forgiven by God if they followed their conscience. Responding to a list of questions published in the paper by Scalfari, who is not a Roman Catholic, Francis wrote: "You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don't believe and who don't seek the faith. I start by saying-and this is the fundamental thing-that God's mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience. Sin, even for those who have no faith, exists when people disobey their conscience."
Elected at the age of 76, Francis is reported to be in good health, and his doctors have stated that his missing lung tissue, removed in his youth, does not have a significant impact on his health.
The only concern would be decreased respiratory reserve if he had a respiratory infection. As pope, his manner is less formal than that of his predecessors: a style that news coverage has referred to as "no frills," noting that it is "his common touch and accessibility that is proving the greatest inspiration."
For example, on the night of his election, he took the bus back to his hotel with the cardinals, rather than be driven in the papal car.
His motto, Miserando atque eligendo, is about Jesus' mercy towards sinners. The phrase is taken from a homily of St. Bede, who commented that Jesus "saw the tax collector and, because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, he said to him: 'Follow me'" The motto is a reference to the moment when he found his vocation to the priesthood, at the age of 17. He started a day of student celebrations by going to confession.
In conclusion it must be stated that not only the Roman Catholics but Sri Lankans of all faiths respect the Holy Father for his humility and kindness to all humanity especially the poor and eagerly await His Holiness's visit to our motherland, which will undoubtedly be blessed by the impending visit.
From: Daily News. http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/sri-lanka-awaits-holy-father
