“Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (left) greeted crowds in Rome’s St Peter’s Square today after his election as the Catholic Church’s new Pope, Francis,” the BBC reports. “The 76-year-old from Buenos Aires is the first Latin American and the first Jesuit to be pontiff.”
The new pope should be “a charismatic, missionary culture warrior, challenging the world’s democracies to rebuild their moral foundations,” writes a leading observer.
“As an advocate for religious freedom in full and religious freedom for all, the new pope can help to strengthen civil society and its free institutions, which are both elementary schools of democracy and barriers against the encroachment of the Leviathan state,” says George Weigel, author of Evangelical Catholicism and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy:
When conceived in strictly functional terms, democracy demeans itself, and the gears of democratic politics too often freeze, as we have seen in venues ranging from the U.S. Congress to the Greek parliament. Democracy is more than the institutions of democracy; it takes a certain kind of people, living certain virtues, to make democracy work.
Weigel appreciates that the church faces similar challenges to those facing an earlier generation and the need to “forge a new Catholic encounter” with the realities of modern political and economic life, notes Julianne Dolan of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.:
Weigel notes that Vatican II was built upon changes set in motion under the papacy of Leo XIII (1878-1903). Leo took over a church truly under siege—the Italian risorgimento had overrun the Papal States, making the pontiff a “prisoner of the Vatican.”
“The rapidly expanding working class of an industrializing Europe was leaving the Church in large numbers,” Mr. Weigel writes. “European high culture was becoming increasingly secularized—indeed, hostile to biblical religion.”
Leo didn’t respond in kind; instead, Mr. Weigel suggests, he …. pushed the church toward advocating religious freedom rather than relying on the sponsorship of governments. He reshaped Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which defined the rights of workers and the poor in an industrialized world.
The new pope should promote a morally rigorous conception of democracy, writes Weigel (right).
“Can democracy ‘long endure’ if democracies lack a critical mass of citizens who cherish the common good as well as individual freedom, who complement self-reliance with voluntary charitable service to others, and who understand that they have obligations to future generations, not just to me, myself and I?” he asks.
“A pope who calls the West out of the sandbox of self-absorption and into a nobler vision of human possibility could do wonders for the democratic project.”