[blog] François I^er

[1] edit 3/8/13 : lire aussi :

What happened over gay marriage in Argentina is illuminating. Bergoglio’s traditionalist position was condemned by President Cristina Kirchner as “medieval” but it was considerably more subtle. Initially angry, one close friend told me, at the shocking things religious conservatives were saying, linking homosexuality with paedophilia, he kept out of the debate. Behind the scenes he went to the Argentinian bishops’ conference and suggested the church should offer to back same-sex civil unions in an attempt to get the gay marriage law ditched. He persuaded a prominent evangelical MP to make the same proposal in parliament.

What followed illustrated another unappreciated truth about the new Pope – his extreme political craftiness. (This had caused a bitter split in the Argentinian Jesuits when he was their leader, but that is a different part of the story.) Knowing that hard-line conservatives were complaining about him to Rome, he embarked upon a dangerous tactic. A month before the parliament was due to vote he wrote a letter about gay marriage, taking the orthodox line and using vivid language, to a closed order of Carmelite nuns, asking them to pray for the right outcome in the vote. He called the plan a plot by the devil.

One of his closest aides, Father Guillermo Marcó, told me that Bergoglio assumed that a closed order would not make the contents public, “but that he could send a copy of it to Rome to show he was doing what was required”. The strategy backfired when the letter was published. Bergoglio then lost the vote among the bishops to back civil unions and parliament passed the gay marriage law. It was the only time in more than a decade that Bergoglio was unable to broker consensus.