Las mañanitas is the song sung to the Pope this morning on his 86th birthday. As a child, he heard it for the first time from his grandmother Rosa Vassallo, nicknamed “Luchadora”, the wrestler, and who most marked Francesco’s human and spiritual life.
The Feast of the Pope
Unlike many over 80 year olds Bergogliodespite some ‘walking in a wheelchair’, he feels full of energy and power, with the workaholism of a forty-year-old, and regards his peers who are forced to park with pious grace. Having the mind of a young man, he will notwithstanding the chronic diabetes that plagues him, he will plunge into his favorite desserts based on ‘dulce de leche’, a honeyed creamy milk and sugar toffee that would have aged twenty years to blow your mind . And dozens of glasses of dulce de leche arrived in Santa Marta for the occasion. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to celebrate his birthday in the best possible way, the greengrocer’s home in the Vatican took steps to deliver crates of slippery “lychees,” exotic fruits of Chinese origin with a pink, wrinkled skin and white, fragrant pulp , with which they seem to help digestion and maybe that’s why they can be found on the laid Christmas tables in half of Italy.
Best regards from Giorgia Meloni
Of course, there are walnuts and almonds, as the VIP’s super-nutritionist, Sara Farnetti, had prescribed for him in the vain hope of making him lose weight. But besides the food, the Pope’s birthday is also a habit of reading the messages of good wishes that arrive from all over the world. It is rumored among his confidants that he will pay special attention to that of the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which he is pleasantly fascinated by and will soon be hosting at the Sacri Palazzi. That his daughter Ginevra, in the eyes of Francis, was taken to the Bali summit made even more appreciative of the qualities of the woman and the prime minister. But the 86 years are inevitably also an opportunity to take stock of this Pope both loved and criticized in the Catholic world and especially by the Curia.
The Vision of the Curia
It is very likely that church historians will have great difficulty in finding a logical thread in a mass of acts and “laws” that simultaneously affirm and contradict and, above all, tear to pieces the “strong” institutions of the church. Exclaiming “I am the Bishop of Rome,” he practically delegitimized the entire diplomatic class of the Holy See and “detained” all those trained at the Casaroli and Sodano schools (perhaps just out of Latin American dislike of the latter, Nuncio) . Chile at the time of Pinochet) and had a third of the approximately 200 diplomats with cassocks selected by a little-experienced and little-known nuncio, the Pole Jan Pavlowskiall in their forties, with a few exceptions of just fifties, from Eastern Europe, traditionalists, anti-conciliarists, bearers of a bigoted and identitarian Catholicism, promoted regardless of the merits of their poor careers.
A pope who knows no prudence
Taking into account that they will remain in service until the age of 75, The next two or three popes will find a diplomatic corps with a traditionalist bloc, nationalist and against multilateralism. Plus, a Secretariat of State without resources (the budget for the 180 nunciatures is the same as that spent on the useless Dicastery of Communications) constantly delegitimized by the utterances of a pope who knows no prudence: what did the Vatican have to reveal? mediated between Russia and Ukraine for the exchange of prisoners? And to put in harsh words what the diplomats tried to tell the chancellor’s office about the atrocities committed by the Islamic militiamen of the former Soviet republics in Ukraine? The continuation of trips that were as costly as they were of little use to the church: Kazakhstan, Bahrain, but initially also in Egypt and Kuwait, embarrassed the Christian communities with a pro-Islamic enthusiasm, completely contrary to historical reality.
The College of Cardinals, theoretically the “Pope’s Senate,” has not been convened for a decade. Prominent cardinals have been pilloried without the Pope lifting a finger to defend them, even when, like Pell, Barbarin, the allegations against them turned out to be fanciful and unrealistic. Who knows if the Becciu affair, which has yet to be clarified, will meet the same fate. There are many cardinals and bishops in the Catholic world who have been humiliated in recent years, but today is the Pope’s birthday and therefore Francesco best wishes and long life. And let’s not forget to pray for him. He really needs it.
Luigi Bisignani for Il Tempo December 17, 2022