11 dec

Pope Francis is the Time man of the year. It seems like he’s opening up the catholic church a little bit.

Popes and St Francis, it is a fascinating story. St Francis had three main principles, or rules he adhered to: Obedience, Chastity and Poverty. He’s known for poverty, he battled with chastity – probably did like women way too much for his own liking, acted like the addicted smoker who gave up smoking and became the biggest opponent of it – and then there was Obedience.

Poverty he kind of liked, chastity he dealt with, but obedience he really struggled with.

St Francis lived in a time when the pope was finally able to get a little more grip on the catholic world. There were four Lateran Councils in the years of St Francis’ life, in which the pope become more and more powerful.

St Francis was of course a challenger of the current order. With his radical lifestyle he was confronting everyone. And he was human. He was looking for his voice to be heard, for people to follow him. But that’s about it. It seems like it was never his intention to become the success story that he did become. He was overwhelmed by it and wasn’t really sure what to do with this whole mass of people who wanted to follow his footsteps.

This insecurity was reinforced by a pope (in fact two of them) that wanted to be sure that the Franciscans became a contained organ within the larger body of Catholicism. St Francis was struggling. He wanted to preach humbleness (poverty), he wanted to sing songs, he wanted to talk to birds, but he definitely didn’t want to be the leader of a new gang of monks and even more definitely, he didn’t want to deal with the pope and the Vatican hierarchy about the way he was coping with these followers.

St. Francis ‘solved’ this problem by advocating ‘Obedience’. In this way he made the things that he didn’t want to deal with somebodies else’s responsibility – which is as human as it gets I suppose.

Because of this attitude he was more than happy, after having struggled for almost twenty years with his growing popularity, to hand over ‘power’ within the Franciscan order (not officially an order yet, but close to it) to some of his followers. This was in 1220. In the last years of his life (St. Francis died in 1226) he focused first on rewriting a Rule for the Franciscans. His concept was immediately rewritten by the pope. Obedience became more important than poverty, in the rewritten version. St Francis accepted it. And then basically became a recluse, his deteriorating health probably forced him.

But St Francis might have given in to the pope. That was not true for some of his disciples. There was a long struggle within his order of people that followed his word – he rationally accepted the rewritten rule – or those that wanted to follow his heart, the original rule. It was a battle between the dogmatists (the heart) and the realists (the brain). The support of the Vatican was with the realists, so they won.

Of Chastity, Poverty and Obedience, the last one became the most important within the order. But that is not the same as what became the most endearing quality of St Francis. I am looking around the churches, the gift shops, the books written about him and the most striking quality, it seems to me, is humbleness. Humbleness towards the enormous force of nature and the enormous force of God, I suppose. That is endearing. And joy, that too. Joyful humbleness, that characterizes St Francis.

That is also something the current pope understands, it seems. Interesting choice, as man of the year. Maybe a little early, just like Obama got the Nobel Peace prize before he had really accomplished anything. But then, promise is worth a whole lot. Hopefully pope Francis has a little more time and support to live up to that promise than Obama has had.