John Cornwell - Church, Interrupted: Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis

Also by John Cornwell

NONFICTION

Earth to Earth

A Thief in the Night

Hiding Places of God

Natures Imagination

The Power to Harm

Hitlers Pope

Breaking Faith

A Pontiff in Winter

Seminary Boy

Newmans Unquiet Grave

The Dark Box

FICTION

The Spoiled Priest

Seven Other Demons

Strange Gods

Copyright 2021 by John Cornwell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cornwell, John, 1940 author.

Title: Church, interrupted : havoc & hope : the tender revolt of Pope

Francis / John Cornwell.

Description: San Francisco, California : Chronicle Prism, [2021] | Includes

bibliographical references. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2020042851 | ISBN 9781797202013 (hardcover) | ISBN

9781797203614 (paperback) | ISBN 9781797202020 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Francis, Pope, 1936 | Church renewalCatholic

ChurchHistory21st century. | Catholic ChurchHistory21st century.

Classification: LCC BX1378.7 .C67 2021 | DDC 282dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042851

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For Beatrix,
Veronica, and Giselle

Hoping against hope! Today, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others.

pope francis at mass, march 19, 2013

A nyone reporting critically on the papacy and state of the Catholic Church, however objective their intent, risks being caught in the crossfire between Catholic factions. Some years ago, I was offered an explanation for these internecine quarrels while interviewing the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, once thought of as a future pope. He said:

We are not all contemporaries in a biographical sense... some are in the 1990s, some Catholics are still mentally in the 1960s and some in the 1940s, and some even in the nineteenth century; its inevitable that there will be clashes of mentalities.

Here at the outset, I offer a brief account of where Im coming from, mentally and autobiographically.

Irish on my mothers side, English on my fathers, I belong to generations raised before the Second Vatican Council, that historic reforming meeting of the worlds bishops in the early 1960s. The supply of priests, so plentiful in those days, relied on encouragement of vocations among boys barely out of childhood. The practice went back four hundred years to another attempt at the Churchs reform, the Council of Trent. Large numbers of prepubescent boys were routinely packed off to junior seminaries for priestly formation lasting up to twelve or more years. Premature recruitment for such a drastic vocation, involving a perpetual vow of celibacy, could be absurdly casual.

At twelve years of age, in a holy Joe phase, I was an altar server, and I loved the dressing up, the parading around amidst billowing incense: High Mass, funerals, weddings, street processions. One morning, after serving his Mass, our Irish parish priest in Londons East End asked what I hoped to be when I grew up. I suspect he already knew the answer. An interview with our local bishop followed, and I was accepted as a candidate for the priesthood, to the pride of my devout mother and the puzzlement of my agnostic fatherwho thought I was more in need of fresh air and football.

Aged thirteen, I was dispatched 150 miles from home to spend five years in a junior seminary, a monastic hilltop Gothic building in the Peak District. It was a cloistered life. We received an excellent classical education, taught by young priests who were stern disciplinarians. We were in and out of church all day long, and fresh air was provided in the form of cross-country runs.

At eighteen, I graduated to the senior seminary, a rambling, damp, red-brick building surrounded by screens of trees, close to the city of Birmingham. We were obliged to dress in soutanes and Roman collars, clerics in the making. Our studies in philosophy and theology were increasingly abstract, dogmatic, and defensive. The Church was supreme in its truth and holiness, triumphant: the one path to salvation. All other Christian denominations, all other faiths, were wrong: The Jews had hard hearts; the Protestants were culpably ignorant; Muslims were bloodthirsty infidels. We were reminded daily of the special status of our priesthood in prospect, a profound transformation that would descend on us with the oils of ordination.

Yet despite the long hours in prayer, the beautiful liturgical round, the friendship in community, I felt increasingly imprisoned and rebellious. To relieve my misery, I would escape in secrecy to the cinema down in the city, hiding my Roman collar with a scarf. I made little progress in the spiritual life; I was not becoming a better person. I had doubts, starting with the real presence in the Eucharist, and ending with the entire story of original sin and redemption. I slipped away one morning without farewells and without regrets. I was convinced that I would not look back.

At university, basking in unfamiliar freedoms, I became an agnostic. Yet in G. K. Chestertons novel The Innocence of Father Brown, the hero priest speaks of the unseen hook and an invisible line long enough to let one wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring [one] back with a twitch upon the thread. It took twenty years to feel that twitch. The faith of my wife and children was a factor: Their Catholic Christianity bore witness to something deeply missing in my life. I began to explore the power of Christian community and imagination rather than logical proofs and apologetic arguments. Christianity was what you did rather than a set of ideas in your head. There was no return to the Church of certitudes, ultimate truths, and righteousness.

The journey was slow, with bouts of skepticism and irritation. I went to Mass on Christmas Day to hear the choir sing Happy birthday, dear Jesus at the consecration. Where was the solemnity of the ancient liturgy? I had yet to catch up with the significance of the Second Vatican Council, its benefits and its difficulties.

Meanwhile, I was a journalist on a national newspaper. On assignment in Rome I was invited, by a chance meeting with a Vatican official, to investigate how the smiling pope, John Paul I, met his death after barely a month in 1978. Was he poisoned by prelates in the Vatican, as the late David Yallop claimed in his world bestseller In Gods Name? I interviewed Yallops chief homicide suspect, Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank; the papal doctor and embalmers; and many others within the Vatican; I met with John Paul II, who blessed my investigation. Yallops accusations were based entirely on circumstantial evidence that proved to be flimsy or inaccurate. My subsequent book, A Thief in the Night,