SR Jorge Bergoglio, chairman of the board of the biggest corporation in the world, was born in December 1936. By comparison with his predecessors, he is therefore young.
His corporation owns trillions of dollars of real estate in Latin America, the Philippines, and most of all, in Europe. The value of the paintings in the room where he was elected was surely vastly higher then the combined value of all the paintings in the rest of the world.
Michelangelo spent seven years on his back at the ceiling of this room painting the most sublime picture of history: God creating the first man. And this God is the same God Muslims, Christians and Jews recognise as the one God.
Sr Jorge Bergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis, the first Pope, also a member of the Society of Jesus, the always brilliant Jesuits, has just made his first historic decision. As in all corporations, it comes as a severe demotion to an insubordinate American vice-president of the corporation.
Until last weekend, Cardinal Burke, a 66-year-old American, was “Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura”. Now, by some miracle, he has become the Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
This is something like the executive vice-president of the corporation being demoted to do something not much higher than a janitor.
This is a tipping point for the Roman Catholic Church. For at least 40 years, the Conservatives have held sway. There is a particular irony here. In 1870, the year of German unification and French defeat at German hands, the Vatican reaffirmed the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope. In matters of Scripture, interpretation of the wishes of Jesus Christ and so forth, it means the Pope cannot make a mistake, by definition.
So Pope Francis — though I seriously doubt he believes a word of this — is infallible, and Cardinal Burke has bit the dust.
Sr Bergoglio, now only 76, has sent a brutal warning to the princes of the church — get in line, or get out. As the Pope said, God is not afraid of new things.
This should be joyful news to the more than one billion baptised Catholics in the world. Pope Francis wants deep reforms, so that annulment of marriages can be quicker and cheaper, so that the divorced can take holy Communion and so that people in same-sex marriages can do likewise. As the Pope himself incredibly commented, who am I to judge?
If ever there has been a tipping point in religious history of a particular confession, this is the one.
Wait, and wait more. Pope Francis will continue to wash the feet of the poor and even of prisoners in jail.
This revolution is coming a little late. It has been an open secret throughout the Catholic Church that abuse of youngsters by priests and even bishops has been rampant. In America, the church made a class settlement of RM15 billion to settle all claims. Small wonder; as a teenager, some of my acquaintances joked about becoming priests to avoid women and to be in the company of men.
But they weren’t joking. Thousands of pages have just been published in Chicago detailing the sexual activity of some priests, involving every level of forbidden behaviour. It was all covered up by their bishops, who simply moved them to a new diocese where they could begin anew.
And, why indeed did Herr Ratzinger abdicate as Pope Benedict? He, of the RM2,000 Ferragamo shoes, may have been the worst sinner of all. His fingerprints are all over the cover-ups as complaints began mounting. Why cover up unless you too have a dirty little or big secret?
The revelations are going to be a tsunami, unless Pope Francis can get ahead of it. The torrent of complaints have just started in the biggest Catholic countries — the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, Spain and Holy Saints, Italy.
Bergoglio will settle. But his highest work will be in convincing the billion faithful that all this has ended.
Sadly, he said “the door (of women priests) is closed”. My guess is that within five years, he must open it. For if abusive priests are expunged and young men can’t aspire to the priesthood for execrable reasons, what is the recruiting ground for the Roman Church?
It is ironic that this year, 800-year-old papers written within the Church of St Francis himself and with his fingerprints all over it have been found and can be viewed in New York later this year.
Can there be any doubt that Mr Bergoglio is the most important person in the world?