Pope Francis the Reformer?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the seventy-six-year-old Archbishop of Buenos Aires, is the new Pope—the first Jesuit and the first Latin American ever to hold that job. He has chosen to take the name Francis, as befits the apparently gracious and humble man who, as everybody now knows, eschewed his archbishop’s limo for a public bus and his archbishop’s palace for a small apartment, and urged his flock to stay home, in Argentina, when he became a cardinal, eight years ago in Rome, and to give the money they would have spent for plane tickets to the poor instead. He is also a reformer, but make no mistake about the meaning of “reform” to Bergoglio or the hundred and fourteen other cardinals who yesterday sent up a puff of white smoke to announce his election to the papacy. They may be known as the “young” cardinals—being under eighty, the only ones eligible to cast ballots in a papal conclave. But it’s worth remembering that all of them were appointed by the last two Popes, and that, when it comes to any interest in loosening the doctrinal strictures that most lay Catholics would call “reform,” they were appointed mainly for their intransigence in the face of change.

That means that you will not see women in the priesthood anytime soon; or married clergy; or an end to the bans on divorce, abortion, and contraception; or a reprieve for the nuns in trousers who go forth to give food, music, and solace to the poor; or even an acknowledgement that “unrepentant” gay and lesbian Catholic men and women might, conceivably, get to heaven. (The best that the church has managed to come up with by way of reform of its social doctrine is to “permit” the use of condoms—not for contraception, but in cases where one partner in a married couple is H.I.V.-positive, to prevent the spread of the disease).

Reform, to the cardinals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, involved one thing when they chose Bergoglio: removing the taint of scandal that hangs precipitously low over the Church of Rome—the scandal of widespread pedophilia, of Vatican banking fraud, of money-laundering schemes that can edge into high farce when, say, a priest known to the local press as Don Bancomat (Italian for an A.T.M. machine) was accused of raiding missionary funds meant for Africa, and handing the cash to one Diego Anemone, a Roman contractor, supposedly close to Silvio Berlusconi, whose various shenanigans are also said to have involved Guido Bertolaso, the former head of Italy’s Department of Civil Protection, prostitutes, and government contracts; Bertolaso has denied wrongdoing. (The rest of that story would take a Goldoni to unravel.)

No one knows how deep into the Holy See this corruption travelled. The famous two-volume papal commission report on “Vatileaks”—said by sources quoted in La Repubblica to include claims of blackmail paid out of Vatican funds to keep the secrets of an alleged gay cabal in the Holy See—now resides in a for-your-eyes-only safe in the papal suite, waiting to be opened by the new Pope Francis.

The good news is that he might actually open it. He has been remarkably candid about wanting to reform the Curia —to really reform it, a task that inevitably involves acknowledging the extent to which money laundering and all manner of other unsavory financial dealings have been a “tradition” at the Vatican and its bank (officially called the Institute for Religious Works) since the days when Paul Marcinkus, an accommodating archbishop from the mob town of Cicero, Illinois, ran it for John Paul II. And that means that he will have to start firing people. Another Pope, especially a Pope from the ranks of the Curia cardinals, might have pursued a “past is past” strategy, ignored the report, and chosen silence, leaving the Curia to run the Vatican undisturbed by the outrage of so many Catholics, and preserving the old Vatican tradition of, as one cardinal put it, “forgiveness.” Absolution is a fine thing, but you have to wonder why a money-laundering or, for that matter, a pedophiliac priest should merit it more than, say, an enthusiastic nun or a happily married gay man or a Catholic senator who votes in favor of reproductive rights.

Angelo Sodano, the eighty-five-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, opened the papal conclave yesterday with a homily that the Guardian nicely described as a “last-ditch attempt to banish infighting” by extolling “the virtues of unity amid diversity.” As Sodano was preparing to speak, the paper noted, a team of anti-Mafia police in Lombardy were raiding clinics, hospitals, offices, and homes, gathering evidence in an investigation of what the police called massive corruption in the region’s health-care system, “linked to tenders by, and supplies to, hospitals.” No one in Lombardy was surprised. Until this year, their governor (now an Italian senator) was a man by the name of Roberto Formigoni, a Berlusconi partisan as well as one of the most powerful politicians in Memores Domini, the core group of an extremely conservative Catholic fellowship known as Communion and Liberation, which in its Lombardy incarnation has a history marked by scandal. Formigoni, as it happens, was also an old childhood friend of the Cardinal of Milan, Angelo Scola, who, as the conclave opened, was the leading contender for Peter’s throne and for some years (though reportedly no longer) an ardent spokesman for Communion and Liberation.

Scola isn’t under investigation. He is known as “an intellectual,” which, in Italy, carries the presumption of being an honest man. But the raids, and with them his choice of friends, not to mention what could be called his theological connections to a group of Milan crooks, clearly rattled the conclave and dimmed his candidacy—which, ironically, had been supported by the many non-Italian cardinals hoping for a pope who, like Bergoglio, came from outside the Curia and its corrupted cliques, and could restore some credibility to their church.

Formigoni’s regional government collapsed late last year, with thirteen of its members under investigation (including him; he has denied wrongdoing), and one of his ministers was accused of buying votes in a scheme that involved the Calabrian mob. But the question on Tuesday morning was whether the conclave would also collapse, searching for a pope with no unsavory connections. There are already stories, from Buenos Aires, claiming that, as a Jesuit leader in Argentina, the new Pope had acquiesced to the military regime that gave us as many as thirty thousand dead and “desaparecidos” and even honored the “victims” of those young, dead protesters. But for the moment, stories is all they are, and the cardinals are counting on him for the credibility that will keep their hierarchy in charge of more than a billion Catholics. It may not be the kind of credibility that tens of millions of believing Catholic progressives want to see, but for the conclave that voted yesterday, it is exactly what God intended.

Photograph by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty.