And that, perhaps, is the best way to understand the strange and interesting character of Jorge Bergoglio, the Argentinian just elected pope. He is an advocate of the poor who has consistently opposed the Argentinian government’s ostensible programs for the poor. A social activist who rejects most social reform. A churchman who refused many of the elaborate trappings of his office while promoting the power of the church. A populist who denies almost every request for an interview. A leftist who denounces the state power and cultural changes demanded by the left. A reactionary who despises the accumulation of wealth and the libertarian freedoms praised by the right. No attempt to impose liberal and conservative definitions on him will succeed. Pope Francis simply won’t fit in those categories, mostly because the ancient religious insights of Christianity—taken, as he takes them, in their undiluted form—cannot find an easy place in the modern world.
All of which makes him quite possibly a saint, in the mode of his namesake, Francis of Assisi. The question, of course, is whether the church can survive a saint like that. Francis of Assisi would have made a horrendous pope; he proved an awful manager of even his own order, as far as that goes, his administrative legacy a drag on the Franciscans until Saint Bonaventure finally regularized them. From Saint Crispin the shoemaker to Saint Louis the king, the Catholic understanding has always been that nearly any human profession can be turned to God’s service. That has never meant, however, that one form of sanctity is appropriate for every sort of job, and the kind of saintliness for which most commentators are praising Pope Francis is not, on its face, the kind the church may need in a pope.