Only a handful of times in my life have I witnessed an instance of what could be described as perfect manners, and one of those occurred in Azerbaijan, during a period of three or four days that I spent following Pope Francis around. This was almost a decade ago. He was on some kind of official Vatican interfaith-outreach tour, which involved paying visits to a couple of nations with tiny Catholic populations, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is, of course, a Muslim country. Fewer than a thousand Catholics lived there in 2016, with only about 300 of those being native Azeris. As for Georgia, something like 84 percent of its people belonged to a branch of the Eastern Orthodox faith. These were more openly hostile to the arriving Roman Catholics than the Shiite Muslims in Azerbaijan were. Granted, that may have owed largely to the greater freedom of expression they enjoyed.
We were met at the airport in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, by sizable groups of protesters carrying signs that read “Pope Francis is the Antichrist”; his refusal in 2013, shortly after his election to the papacy, to condemn homosexuality outright — “Who am I to judge?” — was blamed for having freshly stoked a traditional religious enmity. And certain Orthodox priests from the local patriarchate, scheduled to attend the pope’s Mass at a stadium on the outskirts of the city, changed their minds at the last minute and snubbed him.
When I say “perfect manners,” I have in mind a situation in which a person is faced with what seems, in the moment, to be an impossible social predicament, but in which the person is somehow able, through a combination of quick thinking and innate goodness of soul, to improvise a solution. In the case that I observed, the pope was involved in some kind of procession. It was right before the Mass that he celebrated at Azerbaijan’s lone Catholic cathedral, in the capital city of Baku. Late morning, chilly, bright sun. He shuffled down a gravel path toward the church. Walking alongside him was the tall, mustachioed president of Azerbaijan, the authoritarian Ilham Aliyev. As they went, they passed between two groups of people, who were lined up on either side. One group comprised us, the foreign reporters, mostly Italians who covered the Vatican beat, plus a few rogues like me. We all had cameras and notepads out.
On the other side of the path was a military band, playing a marching song to mark his passage. A long row of musicians, two deep. Suddenly came a strong gust of wind. To everyone’s shock, it blew the pope’s cap clean off his head, onto the ground. You know the little white yarmulke-like cap the popes wear? It’s called a zucchetta, after a kind of gourd. The word is related to “zucchini.” The cap is thought to resemble the chopped-off end of such a gourd. Only the pope is allowed to wear a white one. Now his white zucchetta lay there on the gravel. He walked on, as if he had failed even to notice that it had fallen. Perhaps he hadn’t felt it, or he simply did not know what to do. If he were to stop and bend down to pick it up, would that be seen as disrespectful to the pomp and circumstance that the government had arranged to have performed for him? A tense, vibrating moment.
I noticed that one musician, an Azeri trumpeter in the front row of the band, appeared especially vexed. As he blew into his horn, his eyes danced a triangle, from the pope’s bare head, to the cap on the ground, to us on the other side of the path, the press, with potentially unfriendly scrutiny in our eyes. I was captivated by the trumpeter’s anxiety. This was a dictatorship, after all. In my imagination, he feared some punishment for this embarrassing scene, which he could already see replayed on television, described in the papers …
With an abrupt and suitably military motion, he dropped his horn to his side. He stepped into the path, directly behind the pope. There were a couple of gasps, including one from my own body. It was so irregular to approach the papal person in this fashion. Weren’t there snipers somewhere? The man bent down sharply, snatched up the zucchetta and then, most incredibly, placed it directly onto the Holy Father’s head. It was like something you’d do for a child, put the little hat back on. The pope reacted the same as when the cap had been blown off to begin with, which is to say not at all. He just kept walking, slowly, stooped. The trumpeter took three steps backward, into his position, lifted his instrument and resumed blowing. I turned to the woman beside me. We grinned at each other in relief and amazement.
We spent the days like this, gathered off to one side, watching Francis navigate various public events. Tables full of fantastic food, fruit from around the world, would appear and hardly be touched. The cars he rode in were later auctioned off to benefit charities. In the group of reporters I traveled with, there were a few Italian ladies, very stylishly dressed. His usually somber face would light up when they spoke to him. I got the sense that the pope liked women, in the sense that he enjoyed their presence and energy. He joked with them. He once recalled, in an interview, a time when he went to a wedding as a young seminarian and met a girl. “I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance … and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while. I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing.” But he decided to keep going.
On the evening of the second day of our trip, at an Orthodox cathedral in Tbilisi, a priest and a little girl sang for the pope. Francis sat in a chair at one end of a long red carpet; the priest and the girl stood at the other end. The priest was an Assyrian monk, a stocky, bushy-bearded man with long black hair; the girl looked to be about 11. Her voice had a purity that pierced the chest. The monk was Seraphim Bit-Kharibi, known to the people as Mama Seraphim (“mama” means father in the Georgian language). A choir of other priests and a couple of women, whose heads were hooded in red scarves, stood behind the main priest and the girl, droning. The song was a kind of chant.
Researching it later, I learned that the text came from the 51st Psalm: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness.” The lyrics were in Aramaic, the language that scholars think Jesus spoke in everyday life. The word used for God was Alaha. Francis kept his head bowed, with his chin sunk into his chest, throughout the entire performance. Those standing closest to him said later that there had been tears on his face.
Toward the end of the trip, we were all flying in the Pope Plane over the Black Sea, headed back to Rome, and I was allowed to ask a question. One question. There was a whole system. The pope stood at the front. The reporters approached one by one, as we were summoned, and sort of crouched down beside him. You were offered the microphone, and you asked your question, and he answered, and then you went back to your seat, no follow-ups. His right-hand man, the Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, stood beside him, translating. This was in October 2016. The election in the States was a month away. I asked the pope what advice he would give to practicing Catholics who couldn’t decide how to vote. I specifically mentioned the ugly statements regarding immigrants that had been made by Donald Trump, one of the candidates.
I remember that he smiled, as if to say, “I see what you’re doing.” And he was right. My question was a setup. I had not thought of it as a trick or a trap, though. In my mind, I was teeing him up to articulate thoughts that I hoped he might be looking for an opportunity to express. But he was warier than that. Some months before, when Trump had been pushing his border wall plan, Francis had remarked to the press that it was not Christian to build such walls, and many had taken him to task for trying to meddle in American political affairs. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I have thought many times about the way he chose to answer instead.
“In electoral campaigns,” he said, “I never say a word. The people are sovereign.” Then he gave a word of advice, albeit in the form of almost a nonstatement: “Study the proposals well, pray and choose in conscience.” Then he said, and repeated, a more abstract idea. I’ve never quite made up my mind on whether it was a profundity or a banality. “When it happens that in whatever country, there are two, three or four candidates that no one likes, that means that the political life of the nation perhaps is too politicized, but perhaps it doesn’t have that much politics.”
He rephrased and reiterated this paradox: “There are nations, and I’m thinking of Latin America, which are too politicized, but they don’t have political culture.” Too “politicized,” but with no “political culture”? What did he mean by this, by political culture? “One of the jobs of the church,” he said, “also in the teaching in the [university] faculties, is teaching to have political culture.” But what is this culture? “People are from this party or that one,” he said, but “effectively without a clear thought on the foundations, the proposals.”
He was, I think, describing cultures where the population has become obsessed with politics, but as a form of entertainment, or perhaps a mere vehicle for venting outrage. In these countries, the people possess an inadequate grasp of the underlying ethical principles over which they argue. The problem, he seemed to suggest, was deeper than a choice between this or that candidate, and lay with the nation itself.
It had been, in certain respects, an evasive answer, one befitting a priest who was often seen as frustratingly ambiguous even by his fellow Jesuits (among whom his nickname was la Gioconda, or the Mona Lisa — who could say what her smile, or his words, really meant?). On the other hand, he had admirably resisted my ideologically motivated gambit, denied me a sound bite and insisted on complexity and the long historical perspective.
Had he been wise or too cautious by half? It is the question with which scholars who hope to evaluate his legacy must now contend.
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