In the name of the Father...

I HEAR they are dancing in the streets in San Francisco. But who would have thought we would have a new pope this year, still less that he would be a South American and the first non-European to hold the sacred office for a millennium.

Much is being made of the fact that Pope Francis has always lived frugally, taking public transport rather than the chauffeured limo and living in a modest house and not in, as I heard on Radio Four this morning, “a palatial palace”. His chosen name Francis is his homage to St Francis, the sublime Italian friar who dressed in rags and lived on what he could retrieve from dustbins and who founded the wonderful order of Franciscans, renowned for their service to the poor.

A song and dance is also being made of the fact that Francis is a Jesuit – though most of the coverage has been stuffed with infantile references to the lurid Da Vinci Code-style ecclesiastical melodrama. No one bothered to mention that the Jesuits were created in the 16th Century to help preserve Christian Europe against the ravages being perpetrated by the protestant iconoclasts.

Francis is said to have an in-tray piled high.

And again the media’s emphasis has been on the scandalous cover-ups of the Church’s involvement in the sexual abuse of children and on alleged corruption in the Vatican bureaucracy.

The Sun newspaper – scraping the bottom of a barrel too gungy even for its sister paper The Times – did at least manage to unearth the news that Francis thinks the Falklands should revert to Argentina. My guess is that we shall be surprised by this papacy, as we have been surprised by all the papacies over the past 50 years.

Pope John XXIII was already an old man when he was appointed in 1958 and he was expected to be a mere stopgap. He astounded the world by setting up the Second Vatican Council – only the second such elite gathering in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. The consequences of Vatican II were pretty disastrous, with the cardinals’ infatuation with modernity leading to a general dumbing down in theology, liturgy and music, culminating in the banning of the Latin Mass.

If the leaders of Vatican II had really understood modernity, they would have known that to ditch a universal language in favour of a plethora of vernacular doggerel would count as an example of the adman’s idea of corporate suicide.

John’s successor, Paul VI, was widely expected to remove the Church’s ban on artificial forms of contraception. But he didn’t. In his encyclical Humanae Vitae he upheld the Church’s utter opposition to the Pill and told Catholic couples worldwide they would have to continue to rely upon the rhythm method of contraception, known in the trade as “Vatican Roulette”.

John Paul I reigned for only 33 days – as his Master Jesus Christ lived for only 33 years – and then died amid a contagion of conspiracy theories. John Paul II, in an alliance with Lech Walesa, the Virgin Mary, Ronald Reagan and a multitude of courageous dissidents throughout the USSR and its eastern European tyrannies, did much to ensure the demise of the communist dictatorships.

POPE Benedict XVI was outstanding in a very different style. He was, and remains, one of the very greatest of all the Church’s great theologians and philosophers and a most elegant writer. His name is up there in lights with St Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. His exposition of the faith is brilliant and readable by all from the most erudite to the most simple. His books on the life of Jesus are a revelation in scholarship, insight and tenderness.

The actual lives and achievements of the previous five popes, as opposed to what the newspapers expected of them, ought to give us pause before we rush into half-baked prognostications as to what the new man will do and what he won’t do.

I believe he will become renowned for far more than cleaning up the bureaucracy and apologising for the 58th time for the disgraceful child abuse. It is fitting that he should come from South America. Catholicism is vital and growing on that continent. Indeed there are more Catholics worldwide than ever – one-anda- quarter billion of them. There are sustained religious revivals throughout Africa and Asia.

Pope Francis’ problem is Europe, which took Christianity to the uttermost parts of the earth but where now the faith struggles under the dead hand of secular bureaucracies and a politically- compromised church hierarchy which scarcely believes the traditional teachings.

So what might the new pope do?

Pope Francis’ illustrious predecessor Benedict XVI co-authored a book Without Roots with Professor Marcello Pera, a philosopher and former president of the Italian Senate.

This prophetic book highlights two crises into which Europe has been thrust and with which it doesn’t know how to deal. The first is Islamic Jihad.

Iquote: “In Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, the Phillipines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, Morocco and much of the Islamic and Arab world, large groups of fundamentalists, radicals, extremists – the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Armed Group and many more have declared a holy war on the West. This is not my imagination. It is a message they have proclaimed, written, preached, communicated and circulated in black and white. Why should I not take note of it?”

The second problem is home-grown. A civilisation can resist even the strongest external threats. But once it loses its confidence in its own history and foundational beliefs, it is doomed. So, far more deadly than the worldwide Islamic jihad, is the rot which has infested western civilisation from within.

Again we hear the warning from Without Roots: “Christianity is so consubstantial with the West that any surrender on its part would have devastating consequences. Will the Church, the clergy and the faithful be able to and want to be purified of the relativism that has almost erased their identity and weakened their message and witness?”

I hope the Holy Father has some answers.