Pope Francis has brought a refreshing face of humility to the Catholic Church: On Holy Thursday he washed the feet of two females—a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic—both prisoners at a juvenile detention center in Rome.
The Pope is the first Francis, borrowing his name from Saint Francis of Assisi, who was renowned for his work with the poor. Among the first changes since he secured the abdicated crown of Pope Benedict XVI, was to include women in a ceremony that harkens back to the Last Supper when Christ washed the feet of his disciples. Traditionally the Pope washes the feet of a dozen priests, but Pope Francis chose prisoners instead.
Marcelo González, a respected reporter among traditionalist Catholics, blogged about the ceremony calling Pope Francis “a sworn enemy of the Traditional Mass. He has only allowed imitations of it in the hands of declared enemies of the ancient liturgy.”
Francis’ lack of ceremonious pomp runs parallel to his sermon, which preaches the sacrilege of economic injustice. At his inauguration on March 16 the Pope said, “How I would like a church that is poor and is for the poor.”
As the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina Francis doubled the number of “shantytown priests”—priests assigned to serve impoverished areas with high unemployment, crime and drug addiction—and has supported church-sponsored ventures like textile cooperatives to help the unemployed.
This tradition of service in desperate areas has earned the Jesuits, an order of Catholics to which Francis belongs, the nickname “God’s Marines.” The Society of Jesus was founded in 1534 by the Spanish knight Ignatius of Loyola, who had a religious epiphany after being wounded in battle.
He’s from the global South; he champions the poor; so what?
A sanctified fuss surrounds Pope Francis’ heritage. As the Argentine-born son of an Italian immigrant railway worker, Francis is a hybrid: racially European and culturally Argentinian.
“Growing up living in an American culture where we are all immigrants, it’s reassuring to have a Pope with the same background, it’s a church of immigrants, of the poor,” said Jeff Bialik, executive director of Catholic Charities Organization in San Francisco.
Francis’ election shows compromise through the Catholic Church’s acknowledgement that 40 percent of their prayers come from South America and 14 percent from Africa according the Vatican.
Renewing the Catholic Church
With the power to appoint bishops, the Pope may fill the ranks with more like-minded advocates of the poor. His acts of humility are influencing his flock of 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. At the Sylmar Juvenile Hall in the San Fernando Valley a priest imitated the Pope by washing a dozen young prisoners’ feet.
With membership waning in the secular West, the inauguration of a new Pope so close to Easter inspires a sense of renewal among Catholics. Pope Francis is revitalizing a movement that Pope John Paul II coined the “New Evangelization,” which seeks to counter a secular West by encouraging people to renew their relationship with Christ and the Church.
Bialik said the new Pope will help “the New Evangelization, bringing more Catholics and younger people into the Church.”