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Pope Francis
"Underneath the excellent job Pope Francis has done to restore the image of the church there has been another agenda – to clean up the Vatican and reform its bureaucracy.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
"Underneath the excellent job Pope Francis has done to restore the image of the church there has been another agenda – to clean up the Vatican and reform its bureaucracy.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

For Pope Francis to talk about mortality and retirement is entirely in character

This article is more than 9 years old
Andrew Brown
As the pope contemplates his future, the big question is how much of the excellent work he has done will survive him

Pope Francis says he expects to live two or three more years

When Pope Francis tells journalists that he may be dead in three years’ time or – better yet – retired, the first thing to consider is that he’s telling the truth. He is 77 and has only one lung. He’s doing a job that would strain someone of any age and killed one of his recent predecessors within six weeks. And he has taken on a huge agenda of internal reform as well as what might be called his figureheading duties, such as the trip round South Korea from which he has just returned.

The shock, then, lies not in what he said but that he said it at all. The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI came like a thunderclap, not least because such a profound traditionalist did something that no pope had done for 600 years. There had of course been a swirl of rumours saying he was past it and sick of the job, but poisonous mutterings swirl around the Vatican like malarial mosquitoes, although they’re harder to eradicate.

Before Benedict, Pope John Paul had been through a prolonged and agonising battle with Parkinson’s disease, which the official machinery denied and hushed up at every turn even though it was obvious to anyone who saw him. So for Francis to talk openly, and with colloquial realism, about his health is both a breach of recent practice and entirely in character. It will immediately invite speculation about his successor – almost all of it uninformed. After three non-Italian popes, two of whom were unexpected, we can safely say that no one understands the College of Cardinals.

What is worth asking is how much he has accomplished already and how much of that will survive him. Underneath the excellent job he has done to restore the image of the church there has been another agenda – to clean up the Vatican and reform its bureaucracy. Some of this has already borne fruit. The Vatican bank has been thoroughly purged, as has its customer list. Five thousand accounts have been closed one way or another and €44m (around £35m) has been withdrawn from its deposits in the process. This started under his predecessor, but Francis drove it through.

Much less is known about the progress of his “counter curia”, a commission of eight cardinals from around the world, ideologically disparate but united by administrative competence and hostility to the central bureaucracy of the Vatican. On their efforts depend his chances of making the curia more responsive and less Italian. In the long term, this will matter as much as anything else he has undertaken.

Over the next two years the big domestic problem facing him will be the church’s fractious and sluggish attempts to come to terms with the prevalence of divorce among ordinary and otherwise faithful Catholics in the developed world. Contraception doesn’t matter, since no one takes any notice of the official teaching. Homosexuality is much too divisive globally for any pope to touch for a while. Married clergy, while an obvious and necessary reform, are on hold for the moment. But accepting some remarried Catholics to communion is necessary if they are to transmit the faith to their children. At the same time, it is meeting some fairly hysterical resistance from reactionaries, who claim, truthfully, that Jesus was sternly opposed to divorce.

Two church councils, or synods, will consider the question this autumn and next. If they can solve it without splitting the church, Francis can retire in the consciousness that he has done an excellent job – and, by retiring, set another precedent the church will need.

More on this story

More on this story

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  • Pope Francis says he expects to live two or three more years, and may retire

  • Pope Francis hints at US trip, says he would go to China 'tomorrow' if invited

  • Pope Francis promotes dialogue with China as church's top priority in Asia

  • Huge Seoul crowds turn out to greet Pope Francis for open-air mass

  • Pope Francis makes big impression with small car in South Korea

  • North Korea test-fires missiles as pope visits South

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