The God of surprises seems to have been very much at work during the last conclave. The surprises were of two kinds: the person who was chosen as Pope – Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems to have been on nobody’s shortlist, and the style of the new Pope.

The cardinals must have felt that Church renewal demanded a creative updating of evangelisation, not a re-proposing of the past

In the very first hours of his pontificate he came out with the totally unexpected: asking the people to pray for him in silence, refraining from using the usual papal regalia, travelling together with the other cardinals, insisting on paying his hotel bill himself.

All this was received with great appreciation by the world. The cartoonists, usually emphasising the negative more than the positive, were very benign in his regard.

Although some did refer critically to his past choices during the time of the Dirty War in Argentina their criticism does not seem to have dented the positive image he was portraying.

As before every conclave, journalists tried to guess who the next Pope would be. Two men most quoted were Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan and Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Montreal.

Theirs was not mere guessing; it was logical reasoning. The cardinal electors were all chosen by Benedict XVI and John Paul II. Although these two popes were temperamentally different, their understanding of the Petrine ministry (the role of the pope) was quite similar.

They had also chosen like-minded people as cardinals. So it was to be expected that the next Pope would be of the same stock.

The best representatives of this continuity were precisely Scola and Ouellet. A little background of what was happening immediately after Vatican II would be helpful. In the enthusiastic aftermath of the Council, a group of theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger, founded a theological journal called Concilium.

The journal’s aim was to further deepen the understanding of the theology underlying the Council documents. This journal became very popular and was published in various languages.

But after a while, Ratzinger thought that Concilium was giving the impression that the Council brought something totally new rather than being a continuation of the past. So he left Concilium, and co-founded a new theological journal, Communio.

Communio claims to be a more authentic interpretation of the Council and tends to minimise the newness brought about by the Council. Until a little before he resigned as Pope, Benedict XVI insisted on ‘the hermeneutic of continuity’.

Both Scola and Ouellet were Communio people, with the latter having contributed various articles to Communio. So were the cardinal electors from the Roman Curia. All this explains the ‘logic’ of the journalists.

Then, the unimaginable happened. The like-minded cardinals chose somebody who was totally different! Were they deceived in their appraisal? Not likely.

After his election, Pope Francis gave permission for a short speech he had given in the pre-conclave meeting to be published. In it, he expressed his views on the Church in three points: (i) the Church needs to come out of herself and go to the peripheries (sin, pain, injustice, ignorance and indifference to religion, intellectual currents, misery); (ii) if this is not done she becomes self-referential and gets sick; (iii) when the Church becomes self-referential, inadvertently, she believes she has her own light.

He concluded: “The next Pope must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out to the existential peripheries that help her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelising.”

So the cardinals knew exactly whom they were choosing. This was precisely the man they were seeking. They must have felt that Church renewal demanded a creative updating of evangelisation, not a re-proposing of the past.

I am still waiting to see how the new Pope will use collegiality, how the Synods of Bishops will be managed. However, his insistence on being the “Bishop of Rome”, and, more recently, his setting-up of an international advisory commission, are promising, and probably collegial government will be favoured.

alfred.j.micallef@um.edu.mt

Fr Alfred Micallef is a member of the Society of Jesus.