How Francis changed the church

David Willey, who spent decades reporting from Rome for the BBC, reflects on the transformation of the Vatican under Francis – the eighth pope of our former correspondent’s lifetime.

I have suddenly realised with something of shock that I am already not only four years older than the late Pope Francis, but that my own life now extends through no fewer than eight successive papal reigns.

During my professional lifetime I have managed to meet, report on and follow the lives of five of them.

So I have a fairly panoramic view of the Church leadership of the past century.

The age of Pius XI (1857-1939), during which I was born, already seems wreathed in remote history, compared with the modern Vatican, which communicates through its own video service and website, and runs public debates on how to deal with the longevity problems of an ever more ageing priesthood.

It also aids media savvy outlets like the BBC in documenting the historic events through which we are currently passing during the so-called Vacancy of the Holy See, accurately and extensively.

On my first ever visit to the Vatican when I was a student, I remember glimpsing Pope Pius XII being carried aloft inside Saint Peter’s on his gestatorial chair flanked by elaborately costumed flunkies bearing ostrich plumes.

It resembled a scene from one of Verdi’s operas.

Then when I started my apprenticeship in international journalism in Rome with Reuters News Agency back in the 1950s, I also remember we depended upon a corrupt Vatican official to get the text of an important papal speech ahead of delivery.

It was my job to take the bus down to the cafe opposite the main workers’ entrance to Vatican City at eight in the morning one Easter Sunday to surreptitiously pick up a document that he had smuggled out.

Now after following three different popes on their journeys around the world as a member of the Vatican’s travelling press corps, and witnessing the changes in Catholic mentality inspired by Pope Francis, I see a very different Vatican.

The crowds of pilgrims and tourists are back here, for this is currently a Jubilee year, celebrated by the Catholic Church once every 25 years.

Michelangelo’s awesome frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are still stunning first-time visitors, but the papal crown has long been put aside and the Pope moves among adoring crowds on a popemobile, or a small family car, not a sedan chair.

Dogma is out, empathy is in, and Francis’s question about an errant bishop: “Who am I to judge?”, still tingles in my mind.

He once used an unexpectedly shocking simile to denounce what he termed “hypocritical clericalism”.

“An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity is this,” he said. “Look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front.

But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.”

One of the cardinals touted as a possible successor to Pope Francis is a modest Italian priest I used to meet in the Rome streets of Trastevere, where he was once of the founder members of a small Catholic community devoted equally to helping poor people and dabbling in high diplomacy on an international level.

Yet after domination by Italians and cardinals of other European nations for generations, and the first ever pope from Latin America, the Vatican leadership is now genuinely open to other continents.

There is a very really possibility of the next pope coming from Asia or Africa.

Much will depend upon the personal contacts that develop among the cardinals themselves, both electors and those over the age of 80 who have lost the right to vote, arriving in Rome from around the world during the coming days. Many of them come from countries that have never before had a ranking church leader.

The daily confidential pow wow that precedes the actual conclave will enable many of them to meet for the first time and decide to what extent they want to restore the past or look to the future.