What Francis — ‘a pope of surprises’ — brings to Canada’s historic moment of reconciliation

“Francis is a pope of surprises, so it’s hard to predict exactly what he might say,” says Mark McGowan, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in the history of the Catholic Church.

“He goes off script all the time in terms of what his protocol officers want him to do, but don’t be surprised to see him — even despite his mobility issues — engaging with individuals and particularly victims of those schools.”

Key to the 85-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as his Argentine birth certificate reads, is understanding that he strives to be more salt-of-the-earth pastor than a golden-threaded, kiss-the-ring prelate.

A Jesuit and a liberal, he takes his orders to live in the model of Jesus Christ to lengths not seen in modern papal history.

That goes beyond shunning the traditional red papal slippers, silken robes and Vatican palace.

As a member of the Society of Jesus, a missionary order that dates to the 16th century, he would subscribe to the notion that his religious vocation must be “lived in the real world,” says Robert Ventresca, a history professor at King’s University College at Western University.

“He’s someone who’s used to being in touch with the daily realities of the faithful, the daily struggles of the faithful.”

He rose through the ranks of the Argentine Catholic Church when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship and leadership required cunning, a sense of diplomacy and extreme care to navigate the fraught political terrain, and to shield or squirrel people away from the reach of death squads.

One particular experience involving the kidnapping and torture of two Jesuit priests over a period of five months, resulting in a controversy that followed Francis all the way to the Vatican, says Emma Anderson, a religious studies professor at the University of Ottawa.

He had been critical of the work that the priests had been doing in the slums and was accused of reporting them to the authorities — a charge that was never substantiated and was even countered by testimonies that Francis had protected priests from the military.

But Anderson says the incident prompted a change in his once-dominating style of leadership.

“Someone who has experienced moments of total humiliation and total awareness of their own lack of ability … That changes somebody.”

It was also in Argentina that Francis picked up the philosophical viewpoint that will serve him well as he delves into the long history of abuses, mistreatment and the campaigns to rid Indigenous children of their language and culture in the residential schools.

From philosopher Amelia Podetti, he internalized the idea that “reality is most clearly seen from the peripheries, from the margins,” says Father Matthew Baugh, Philosophy and Letters Chair at St. Louis University, who teaches a course on the politics of Pope Francis.

“If you’re standing at the centre of cultural power or authority, it can be hard to see the peripheries as they actually are,” Baugh explains of Podetti’s reasoning.

“The point of going to Canada is to go to the peripheries of Canada, and in this case the situation of extremely vulnerable people who suffered injury that no one saw or really gave much attention to for years.”

Previous papal visits to Canada have tended to breeze over the traumas suffered by Indigenous people due to the acts of Catholic missionaries.

In 1984, Pope John Paul II gave special thanks in his comments to the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate for their work in the Canadian North.

Today, that same order is opening its archives to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to investigate the actions and identities of abusers and their victims at residential schools across the country.

John Paul II, who travelled three times to Canada, insisted that missionaries were Indigenous peoples’ “best friends” — comments that now show a clear intention to lump a few errant individuals with responsibility for wrongdoing while sheltering the institution of the church.

“Whatever faults and imperfections they had, whatever mistakes were made, together with whatever harm involuntarily resulted, they are now at pains to repair,” he said in a September 1984 message broadcast on radio and television.

It wasn’t until 2009, when John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, met Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine, that the Vatican’s public stance began to shift.

“Given the sufferings that some Indigenous children experienced in the Canadian residential school system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity,” said a Vatican statement.

Getting to the point of saying “sorry,” which first occurred in April and will be reiterated and extended over the coming week, has taken the acknowledgments and apologies of the Canadian government, the hearings and conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the arrival of Pope Francis.

Experts say he may be the one who is finally ready to make the church vulnerable in order to help victims heal.

In one of his first public declarations after assuming the papacy in 2013, Pope Francis wrote: “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the street, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Such talk has garnered Francis critics among the more conservative old guard within the Vatican, but has been welcomed by many others, says U of T’s McGowan.

“He’s the breath of fresh air that many of us on the more progressive side of the church were waiting for. I think he’s better grounded in many ways. He may not be the theologian that Benedict was, but then again, we have hundreds of theologians in the Catholic community.”

When Gary Gagnon travelled to Rome in the spring to meet Francis and receive his initial statement of apology, the vice-president of the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 4, says he was overcome with emotion, particularly when the Pope said that he was “very sorry” for what he called the “deplorable conduct” that occurred at residential schools.

“I thought he was very sincere,” Gagnon says. “He listened to us, and he paid attention.”

With Pope Francis’s arrival in Canada, he opens himself and his church up to a reception taking place on fraught terrain that is altogether less certain.

“He will know that there are those who don’t want him here, that there are those who don’t think the apology is enough, that there are those who’ll be asking for other commitments from the Catholic Church,” says Ventresca.

Some Indigenous groups are calling for the return of cultural artifacts held in Vatican museums and financial pledges put toward healing and reconciliation programs.

Others want to hear Francis renounce the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery used as the legal basis for European explorers to claim and colonize territories inhabited by non-Christians.

Renouncing the more than 500-year-old Papal Bulls, as the edicts are known, could truly distinguish Francis’s Canadian visit and set up the “penitential pilgrimage” for success.

“If he does it (renounce the Doctrine of Discovery) I won’t be surprised, but if he doesn’t do it I won’t be surprised,” Ventresca says.

“Sometimes he’ll take one step and you’ll think, ‘Wow, he’s a revolutionary.’ Then, a week later, he’ll say another thing and you think, ‘That sounds like it could have been any one of his predecessors.’

“Popes are keepers of an office that is very, very slow to change,” he said.