There was something in the 78-year-old Pope's first visit to the US for church conservatives and reformers alike. For the faithful and non-believers. For politicians and environmentalists. For the poor, prisoners, the sexually abused, and for immigrants alike. And yet, in his ten-day tour of Cuba and the US, whose purpose was primarily , as the New York Times put it, "to present a new, more optimistic and welcoming style to US Catholics, and to embrace and encourage a domestic Catholic church that is increasingly Hispanic", he managed most skilfully to avoid countless political/theological minefields .
Easily done if you rely on platitudes and, like many a politician, say nothing. But this is not Francis’s way. Remarkably he provided ammunition for neither conservative nor radical polemics yet while pushing controversial buttons on moral imperatives like fighting climate change, abolishing the death penalty, consumerism, preserving religious liberty, welcoming and valuing immigrants, providing refuge for Syrian refugees ...
His was above all the language of inclusion and tolerance inside the church, and in society generally . Excluding people not considered “like us” is wrong, he said. “Not only does it block conversion to the faith; it is a perversion of the faith... Our common house can no longer tolerate sterile divisions.”
It is a message that echoes several recent papal initiatives and will have been heard by many to signal that while Francis and the church will continue to preach its largely unchanged moral and social messages, an obsession with doctrinal purity will not be allowed to come between it and those faithful who in conscience stray. Women who have had abortions, or those in gay unions . He told bishops that the church must live in “this concrete world.” and urged them not to lament the good old days and dismiss young people as “hopelessly timid, weak, inconsistent.”
In reaching out to victims of clerical sexual abuse Francis spoke movingly and acknowledged that some bishops had failed to protect children. “God weeps,” he said, and, importantly, pledged unequivocally that all responsible would be “held accountable.” US victims groups remain sceptical, however, about his commitment on the issue, not least after comments to clergy in which he emphasised the pain that they had endured. Marie Collins, a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said “like so many other survivors I found the comments disappointing.”
But the overall impression of the visit, mot least the million-strong Mass with which the trip concluded in Philadelphia, remains one of the charismatic Francis’s huge success in mobilising and moving the faithful in a church that faces huge challenges and divisions. It was a vindication of a new kind of papacy represented by a patently good and simple man that is bringing that church back to its people.