Pope Francis inaugural Mass: can this extraordinary man save the Catholic Church?

By Damian Thompson      

    

It's a beautiful morning in Rome, a beautiful ceremony, and as for the liturgical fine points… I'm not going there. Not after a week trying to talk my traditionalist buddies off the ledge because Pope Francis is, as one of my priest friends put it, "rather Low Church". It doesn't matter right now. Maybe later, but not today.
The new Pope reminds me of a charismatic parish priest: not the sort who turns the 11 am Mass into his personal game show, but one who delivers a short, pungent sermon that leaves you feeling uncomfortable about your selfishness as you leave Mass. He's also the priest who knows everyone by name, who brightens your day with the warmth of his greeting, and whose parishioners worry about him because he's still pushing himself as hard as ever, visiting hospitals in the middle of the night at the age of 76.
I should, given my record of banging on about the subject, be losing sleep over the possibility that Pope Francis won't implement Summorum Pontificum. Don't get me wrong: it's crucial that Pope Benedict's new way of thinking about the Latin Mass is preserved, and there are clear grounds for concern. But, actually, the thought that's been rattling round my head has been the Holy Father's message – delivered with a conversational intensity that I've never seen in a pope – that "it's not God who gets tired of granting forgiveness, it's we who get tired of asking for it".
And that stuff about helping the poor. He means, you know, actually rolling up your sleeves and helping the poor, rather than signing a self-righteous e-petition against some government adjustment to the benefits system.
As for the task facing Pope Francis, and the reason Pope Benedict – indirectly – gave him to us, you can't do better than read a piece in the New York Times by its conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat. The shadow of the sex abuse scandals still darkens the Church, he says – but you need to understand the nature of the shadow. "At this point it’s no longer really about priestly sex abuse itself. Rather, it’s about a church that has cleaned house effectively and set up impressive structures of accountability everywhere except at the most prominent levels of the hierarchy," he writes.
The fact that Cardinal Sodano and Cardinal Mahony, both cover-up merchants, are swanning around the Vatican gloating about the "new simplicity" of Pope Francis should make any Catholic feel outrage, irrespective of their liturgical preferences. To quote Douthat:

If real closure is to come, if the sex abuse era is to be firmly ended rather than ever-so-slowly left behind, the beginning of this papacy is probably the church’s last, best opportunity. And so while I can appreciate the qualities in Pope Francis that so many people have found immediately attractive, I would trade all the humble mannerisms and charming gestures for the promise that the Mahonys and Sodanos of the church would be consigned, once and for all, to lives of penitence and silence.

Can Francis deliver this closure? One very influential traditionalist priest I know, a man poles apart from Jorge Bergoglio in style of worship, believes that he can. And that's why he is celebrating this morning.