LIMA, Peru — Since his surprise election as pope by an enclave of cardinals nearly five years ago, Pope Francis has been on a one-man campaign to shake up the Catholic Church, going out of his way to replace the ostentatious rituals and moralizing of some of his predecessors with an image of humility and compassion.
He has vowed “zero tolerance” for the long-running sore of clerical pedophilia, insisted that he is not qualified to judge the gay community, expressed his “closeness” to non-believers “searching for truth, goodness and beauty” in their own way, and washed the feet of convicts and the homeless.
Yet once he touches down here on Jan. 18 for the second leg of his Latin American tour, Francisco — as he is commonly referred to in Latin America — may also be getting an insight into the resistance from within the Church establishment to his reforming agenda, and the behind-the-scenes power struggles between traditional and progressive wings of the clergy.
READ: [Orthodoxism Is Declining in the Overall Christian Population]
If visiting Chile — where Francis’ personal popularity has taken a huge hit for his alleged mishandling of the Rev. Fernando Karadima sex abuse case — on the first leg of this tour was tough, then Peru, where the pope’s itinerary includes a trip to the Amazon to meet indigenous communities, also presents its own challenges.
One of the pontiff’s hosts here will be Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the ultraconservative archbishop of Lima, who appears to represent everything that the pope is trying to change within the Church. Although he has avoided openly questioning Francis, Cipriani’s public positions, and in particular his tone, on a host of issues places him starkly at odds with the pontiff.
Down the years, the archbishop has lambasted single mothers and even human rights activists, while calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage “tragic.” Cipriani has opposed abortion for rape victims by claiming that it was not proven that such pregnancies were unwanted, and questioned a monthly state pension of around $40 to some of Peru’s poorest citizens on the grounds that it could deter thrift.
He has also long been openly sympathetic to Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s autocratic hard right former president — many here call him a dictator — who was just pardoned, and released from jail, for crimes including stealing millions of dollars in public money and using death squads to target left-wing subversives.
The archbishop has even proven himself to be out of touch with technology, and particularly the younger generations, once launching an attack on the messaging app WhatsApp for its supposedly harmful social impacts. “How many families break up through WhatsApp?” he asked. “You will say ‘don’t exaggerate,’ that I am a retrograde … well, someone has to tell the truth.”
“The pope is very concerned for the poor. They are his priority. That is not something we see from Cipriani,” says Ernesto Cavassa, a Jesuit priest and theologist who is rector at Lima’s Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University, a leading Catholic school here.
Although he is not formally the head of the Church within Peru, Cipriani is the most high-profile cleric here and arguably the most influential in this deeply Catholic nation. He also has played an instrumental role in the handling of the Peruvian Church’s best known pedophilia case, in a lay Catholic boy’s association called Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana.
Sodalicio was set up to inculcate youngsters from the Peruvian elite with a particularly conservative strain of Catholicism, shaping them to then champion those values as adults. However, in recent years allegations have emerged that Sodalicio was a hotbed of pedophilia, including from the group’s founder, Luis Fernando Figari.
Cipriani initially ignored the scandal and then decried Sodalicio’s critics as “false moralists who want to mistreat the Church.” The Vatican eventually ordered Figari to live a Spartan life of penitence in Rome — a move that was heavily criticized for putting him beyond the reach of Peruvian prosecutors. But then last week, it took direct control of the organization in an apparent attempt to pre-empt controversy during the pope’s visit here.
MORE: [Married Priests and Female Deacons? The Pope’s Politics in Latin America]
Although the Vatican’s move came years too late for many, Francis does get a partial defense from one unlikely quarter, Pao Ugaz, an investigative journalist who co-authored the book ” Half Monks, Half Soldiers.” Featuring survivors’ testimonies, the book’s publication first broke the Sodalicio scandal.
“The Vatican is set up so that the pope reigns but doesn’t govern,” she says when asked who is to blame for the years of delay in adequately handling the Sodalicio scandal. “Francisco is much more political [than previous pontiffs] and he has more leverage but there is still a lot of resistance and it remains to be seen who will prevail.”
Others in Latin America, however, are less quick to give the pontiff a pass. Juan Enrique Pi, who heads the Iguales foundation in Chile, a LGBT activist group, believes that Francis and ecclesiastical traditionalists such as Cipriani have more in common than many believe.
“The church hierarchy in Chile has not changed a bit,” Larrain says. “It continues to be extremely conservative, and also to have a political agenda, speaking out in national debates against the recognition of the rights of lesbians, gays and trans people.”
“In that sense Francisco has not changed a thing. He has not done enough. His own agenda is contradictory. One day he says ‘who am I to judge?’ [homosexuals] and the next he is suggesting there is something intrinsically wrong with gay people.”
Cavassa, the Jesuit academic, says that on fundamental theological issues such as the right to life, including abortion, Francis is actually in agreement with Cipriani, and is something of a traditionalist, although his conciliatory messaging is in stark contrast to Cipriani’s often strident sermonizing.
“It’s a strong message [from Francis]. We are not used to it because for the last 30 or 35 years the church has had a different approach but it is not really new,” Cavassa says. “Of course, all of this is not readily accepted both within the church and outside it. There is resistance but Cipriani will receive the pope in the best way possible. They have focuses that are very different, but these differences are over specific, concrete things.”
But how those differences play out could yet prove critical for the future of the Church in Latin America, which, on current trends could one day cease to be the bastion of global Catholicism that it has been until now.
According to a study by Chilean pollsters Latinobarometro, the number of Latin Americans describing themselves as Catholic fell from 80 percent in 1996 to 59 percent last year. That is thanks both to evangelicals making inroads into the Church’s flocks and to many Latin Americans simply moving away from religion altogether.
The Latinobarometro study even found that one country, Honduras, now appears to be the first country in Latin America where Catholics are outnumbered by other religions, with 39 percent describing themselves as evangelicals compared to 37 percent as Catholic.
With large and growing numbers of even devout Latin Americans ignoring the Church’s teachings on a range of issues, particularly regarding sex and reproduction, Catholicism’s future in the region could yet depend on Francis’ ability to overcome clerical resistance from to his reforming drive.
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Pope’s Peru Visit May Offer Clues to Chances for Church Reform originally appeared on usnews.com
