"In this war, under whose banner do you serve?"

MASS FOR POPE FRANCIS

Deep in the depository of the Oratory in Oxford there is a piece of paper which the Society of Jesus – the Jesuits – would very much like to get their hands on. I believe that attempts have, in the past, been made to get it back. Generous financial rewards have been offered and exchanges of assets proposed; but the document remains firmly under lock and key in the Oratory’s secret archive. The interesting story of how this coveted object came to be where it is lies beyond the scope of this sermon. Suffice it to say that the import of that yellowed parchment is, quite genuinely, of world-changing significance.

I am, of course, deliberately playing up the Dan Brown style, the Da Vinci Code tone, in an attempt to satirise the hordes of journalists, conspiracy theorists and armchair pundits who have suddenly become world experts on the funeral rites of the Sovereign Pontiff, Vatican politics and the manipulation of papal conclaves. In the coming days, as we should beware of the views of an often ill-informed media and heed to the warning from the aptly named, Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dangerous thing...”

Prurient commentators would be disappointed to learn that the document does not contain secrets that will fatally undermine the Jesuits or destroy the credibility of the CatholicChurch. It is important because it is one of the markers of the beginning of a spiritual and political history whose consequences – both for good and for ill - are still with us. The document I am describing is a letter, signed by St Ignatius of Loyola, and written in his own hand, giving his consent for the establishment of the Portuguese Province of the Society of Jesus. It is not only a historical record; it is a sacred relic.

Pope Alexander VI – yes, the Borgia Pope – divided political and spiritual responsibility for all newly discovered territory outside Europe between Spain and Portugal. Brazil and land to the east as far as Japan were to be the province of the Portuguese. In territories to the west of Brazil, control was given to Spain. (The English and the French were not very enthusiastic about this, but that is another story.) The Society of Jesus had by far the biggest and most powerful influence over the way in which spiritual and political responsibility was exercised in almost the whole of the Southern hemisphere and of Asia. This was the beginning of what was to become, in the centuries that followed, a truly global Church.

As the Cardinals gather in Rome for the novemdiales (the nine days of mourning for the HolyFather) and for the Conclave, a large number of them, probably the majority, come from territories evangelised under the influence of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns. The individual rulers were, in turn, under the influence of Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits. East of Brazil, they ruled large parts of Africa; in India Goa which St Francis Xavier made his base; in China, Matteo Ricci worked in the Imperial Court and Macao became a centre of operations; there were missions inJapan, which were recently the subject of the controversial film Silence - all these were the responsibility of the Portuguese; in the West, Spain controlled what remained of Latin America; in the reducciones of Paraguay there were social (even socialist) experiments, also well portrayed in the cinema in the film The Mission; the Spanish ruled Mexico and the western parts of what is now territory of the United States. In these places we find the troubled history of Cortes with the Aztecs and Pizarro with the Incas, little short of a genocide;  we find the missions to the indigenous people and those who argued for and against slavery; we find the miracle and the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the emergence, in more recent times, of Liberation Theology. There is a lot of history to celebrate. There is a lot of history to bring shame.

Last Monday morning the Cardinal Camerlengo, a product of that global Church, a Spanish-speaking, American Cardinal, born in Dublin, broke the Fisherman’s Ring and addressed the Pope for the last time, not by his regnal name but with the Spanish name with which, 88 years ago in Argentina, he was baptised and redeemed by Jesus Christ. Today, we are praying for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis, who was the most recent fruit of the history I have just described: a story wealth but also of extreme poverty; a story of education but also of exploitation; a conflicted history of grandeur and oppression but, above all, a story of Faith, which explains so much about the Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio was and the Pope he was to become.

It is to one of the first members of the Portuguese Province of the Society of Jesus, Fr Luis Gonçalves da Câmara, that we owe our knowledge of one of the best known and most telling anecdotes from the life of St Ignatius. Gonçalves was a student at the University ofParis in the 1530s with Ignatius and his first companions; he did not go with them to Rome but returned to Portugal, before joining the Society in 1545 and working closely with Ignatius as the first Minister of the Gesù, the headquarters in Rome of the new and growing order.  

Fr Gonçalves was the perfect example of the Jesuit influence I have described. He went on to become tutor and confessor to the future King Sebastian I of Portugal and adviser to the Jesuit General on matters concerning the Portuguese Empire. But above all, Fr Gonçalves is one of the best witnesses we have to the life of the Jesuit founder.He knew him almost as long as anyone; he was his trusted confidant; and after the saint’s death, he became one of his most perceptive biographers. This anecdote is not to be found in the famous Spiritual Exercises or in St Ignatius’s Autobiography. Fr Gonçalves described a private conversation between Ignatius and his physician.

Once when the doctor had told him he should avoid any bout of melancholy, because that would harm him, the Father said afterwards, ‘I have considered what might cause me melancholy, and I have not found anything, except if the Pope were completely to undo the Society: and even this, I think, if I were to recollect myself in prayer for a quarter of an hour, I would be as happy as before, and even more so’.

 Fr Gonçalves’ purpose is, of course, to show that Ignatius was a saint. So he gives an example of how this principle of recollected submission to the will of God was actually put into practice in Ignatius’s life. He describes his friend’s reaction when his chief enemy in Rome, Cardinal Gian Pietro Caraffa, was elected as Pope Paul IV. The initial news shocked him; he turned pale and trembled; but after some recollection, he looked for and discovered the Pope’s good qualities. 

St Ignatius’s reaction to the election of Pope Paul IV will be familiar to Catholics of a conservative disposition, whose reaction to the election and pontificate of Pope Francis was one of shock. It would be less than honest to gloss over this and to deny that many of us were challenged by his words and actions. But we can draw some lessons from Pope Francis’s own spiritual master, St Ignatius Loyola.

The first of these is a classical one, not unique to Christianity: de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Speak nothing but good of the dead.

The second lesson is that we are under no obligation to agree with everything Pope Francis, or any other Pope says unless, of course, they are speaking ex Cathedra (formally intending to teach with authority and in full continuity with the Church’s constant teaching). Good men may respectfully disagree in all charity. Indeed, Pope Francis himself encouraged this when he advocated a policy of parrhesia in the Church. (Parrhesia is just a fancy Greek theological term for a very down-to-earth Yorkshire quality - respect for frank speech and the need to tell the truth, even when it's risky and unpopular.)

There are ways in which we need to be challenged. Who can deny some of Pope Francis’ priorities without denying the priorities of Christ himself?  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to see me. (Mt 25:35-36)

There is much we can celebrate. The Year of Mercy brought with it a marked increase in the numbers coming to confession. His desire to be buried in the Basilica of St Mary Major is not (despite what the commentators say) chiefly because it is in a rough neighbourhood of Rome, but because the Pope clearly loved Our Blessed Lady. Nor was PopeFrancis afraid of offending his supporters by regular condemnations of the“disposable” culture of abortion, the unacceptability of gender reassignment, and the impossibility of the ordination of women as deacons or priests.

If we disagree with the position Pope Francis took about Tradition we can at least look to the troubled history of Latin America and understand the reason for it.

But this Mass is not chiefly about remembering the Pope or giving thanks for his life. Above all, itis to pray for the repose of his soul. There is much to be said about death in the writings of St Ignatius.

In the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius, ever the soldier, gives guidance about how to make good decisions. He writes: I will consider, as if I were at the point of death, what procedure and norm I will at that time wish I had used in the manner of making the present choice. Then, guiding myself by that norm, I should make my decision on the whole matter.

Note that what St Ignatius is recommending, from a deathbed perspective, is not what decision we should have made, but rather how we went about it. Not whether we should have done one thing rather than another, but how we might best have reached our decision. Ignatius wants to help his followers make decisions well. He is more concerned with how we go about making decisions, than with the specific content of the decisions themselves. 

What does a good decision look like? According to St Ignatius it is essentially a decision that is taken freely; not constrained by habit or fear of change; not unduly influenced by the opinions of others; not limited by prior concerns about health, wealth, or worldly prestige. St Ignatius’s only concern is the service of God, that everything should be done ad maiorem Dei gloriam,for the greater glory of God. How will the decisions I make in life best serve that end?

It is in the light of this that, at the end of our lives, we will be judged. It is, in a way, a plea for God, the just judge, to take all things into consideration: our strengths and our weaknesses; our addictions and our fears; our courage and our zeal; what we trust is our fundamental desire, in spite of everything, to do God’s will.

Whenever I was puzzled by the pontificate of Pope Francis – and such moments were not infrequent – I sometimes tried to remember, in the classic Ignatian style, his good qualities. Interviewed about his taste in music, Pope Francis had this to say:  “Among musicians, I love Mozart, of course. The Et incarnatus from the Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God!”

He also had great taste in books. He loved Dante, and Manzoni’s wonderfully Catholic and compassionate novel, The Betrothed; he loved our own English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins; he told Vladimir Putin that he liked Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

In his novel, War and Peace, Tolstoy famously wrote that “to understand all is to forgive all”. No wonder Pope Francis liked Tolstoy. This is a very Ignatian thought. Our whole lives are engaged in a war between good and evil, in search of the peace that will have no end. The great question, posed by Ignatius, the soldier saint, at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises is this: “In this war, under whose banner do you serve”?

The greatest skill of a good general is to have a comprehensive view of all things; to know every weakness and every strength in his army; to understand his men and to take all things into consideration in the deployment of the resources at his disposal for the battle to come.

This must surely be how Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, fulfilled the task assigned to him. This, we trust, is how we will all be judged - everything, good and bad, duly weighed and considered. We hope that Pope Francis, and each one of us, will be found, in the end, for all our failures, to have fought the good fight, to have kept the faith, to have run the race to the finish, under the banner of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to merit to enter with him into the everlasting Kingdom of Heaven.

May St Peter open the Gates of Paradise to Francis his successor and pray for the Church that a worthy man will be found to take his place; and may Christ, our leader and our judge, have mercy on the soul of Pope Francis. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

Amen.