A Pope has not independently proposed a canonization for centuries. It did not happen even when John Paul II’s “factory of saints” continually proclaimed saints and the blessed. The Pope is the only one that may proclaim a saint with scienza certa (certainty in knowledge). In fact, neither  Benedict XVI nor John Paul II deviated from the strict rules of canonization established by John Paul himself. The only exception was that shortly after he became pope, Benedict XVI decided to start his beloved predecessor’s beatification procedure, waiving the 5 years from the date of death for John Paul’s cause.

The announcement of the canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II was made on July 5. John Paul II will perhaps be proclaimed saint together with John XXIII on December 8.

While John Paul II never proclaimed a saint without following the rules, Pope Francis went for a double pirouette. According to a source in the Congregation, during the July 2 meeting members of the Congregation had,  they discussed a possible miracle attributed to the intercession of Pope John XXIII.

So, the question is: was this presumed miracle rejected by the Congregation as an actual miracle, and Pope Francis then acted de imperio? Or was the miracle’s discussion overcome by events, with Francis’ decision?

This cannot be known. But it proves that Pope Francis has his mind clear on what he wants.

It is now action time for Pope Francis. Within the Sacred Walls, dossiers are delivered every day for his action. With the Secretariat of State about to leave office, everybody feels a duty to denounce everyone, hoping to gain a better post for themselves.

Pope Francis is already surrounded by people he trusts.

Urban myth or not, in the Vatican there is talk of the Pope making unscheduled phone calls personally. The Pope has taken the reins and the direct control of operations.  So, the Secretariat of State is prodded aside. However, nobody is worried at State: they are the first hoping for a new structure for the Curia which would give them a selective coordinating role, and relieve them from the burden of being involved in each and every decision.

Ultimately, Pope Francis is signaling agreement with calls for a more straightforward rapport with the pontiff.

Currently, Pope Francis personally calls some of the heads of dicasteries daily, and he meets with them often. But he also listens to simple clerks and mid-level Vatican officials, perhaps asking them about the letter he sent three and a half years ago for which he never got an answer. The reform of the Curia needs also to start from here, paying attention to small things and keeping an eye on many different areas.

Pope Francis would also call Benedict XVI often. The two Popes are reportedly continually in touch, sometimes holding personal meetings. Benedict XVI is serene, work-free. He has thought a lot and come to understand what is that is not going well. He knows the hearts of people in the Vatican, and perhaps the Vatileaks affair has helped him to take a step back and be able to look with a certain level of detachment even at his closest collaborators. For the love of the Church, he serves as a friend on whom Francis can lean on for support.

Pope Francis is so keenly aware of this, that he wanted Pope Benedict by his side on July 5 for the  dedication of a statue of Saint Michael in the Vatican Gardens. Thus, Pope emeritus and Pope in charge were once again side by side, this time in a public event.

Another relay took the stage not even two hours later, the very same July 5: the encyclical Lumen Fidei was released.

Benedict XVI began to write it before his renunciation. He consulted with others. He incorporated some of his old homilies, taking on themes he had reflected upon all his life, not just during his pontificate. He put it all together in a draft. After his renunciation, he passed it all to his successor, Pope Francis. «If you please, carry it on.» Pope Francis, in fact, found a draft that was already beautiful and profound. He left it almost untouched, barely making some «adjustments». This is how the encyclical Lumen Fidei was born.

What’s Benedict’s and what’s Pope Francis’ in this Lumen Fidei? The latter, in the end, completely assumed the work of the former. Pope Francis thus completely and fraternally embraced Benedict XVI’s viewpoint. The perspective that Joseph Ratzinger expressed in The New Pagans and the Church, one of his very first essays born from his experience as vice parish priest in a small town in Bavaria. The same perspective that Benedict XVI developed at the end of his pontificate, when he felt like professor Ratzinger again and imparted the Roman clergy an off-the-cuff lesson on what the Second Vatican Council really was, distinguishing it from the Council the media has portrayed. A masterful lecture underscoring that the real Council, anchored in the truth and the depositum fidei, would prevail.

Now that Pope Benedict has put together speeches like a master architect would erect cathedrals, lifting up the faith and at the same time providing it with a solid base, Pope Francis must make the light of faith shine also in the peripheries. This has always been Francis’ intention, as he himself explained to the General Congregations, the pre-conclave official meetings of cardinals. A program that led him to his victory in the race for the papacy.

The encyclical must be read as a whole, without thinking which of the two Popes wrote this or that passage. More than an encyclical penned by two different authors, it is an encyclical that Pope Francis made his own. In it, there are warnings about the dangers of idolatry, Gnosticism, and Pharisaism. There is also a closing prayer for the Madonna, described as «the perfect icon of faith.»

There are also references to daily life which are typically Francis’. For example, where it reads: «We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court.  We also need someone trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned.» This someone is Christ, «he who shows us God» through «his way of knowing the father and to experience completely his relation with Him.»

From the two popes’ fraternal union, an encyclical of less of 100 pages has emerged with a clear thread: even though there was a notion that «it is of no use nowadays, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways,» the «light of faith» is «capable of illuminating all of life,» since it is «capable of enhancing the richness of hu­man relations, their ability to endure, to be trust­worthy, to enrich our life together. Faith does not draw us away from the world or prove irrelevant to the concrete concerns of the men and women of our time. Without a love which is trustworthy, nothing could truly keep men and women unit­ed.»

Publishing the encyclical as it stood in its first draft, without further elaborating it, may seem unfair to Benedict XVI’s thought. But perhaps this was in fact a case of a Pope simply paying homage to his predecessor. In this we see a Pope Francis that for the people is the bishop of Rome, but who  has started to act as a pope in the Vatican.

What happened on July 5 proves that Pope Francis has begun to make decisions.

In just one day, there was the announcement of the canonization of two popes and two sort of relays between the Pope emeritus and the Pope. Is this the sign that things are definitely going to change?

Evangelization is the main topic for Brazil. Benedict XVI made of evangelization a key point of his trip to Brazil in 2007. He was the one who chose, for July 7, 2005, the theme of the fifth general conference of the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean: «Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ». It was he who wanted that the other phrase of the title – «That all may have life» – should end by specifying: «in Him». And that the statement of Jesus himself should be added: «I am the way, the truth, and the life». Even the 2013 Wyd theme deals with the mission of evanelization: «Go and Make Disciples of All Nations».  The Pope himself underlined – during the homily in the Holy Missal in Sao Paulo in 2007 – the need for a new evangelization. For Benedict XVI, a strong effort of evangelization is the real response to the attacks against the family, to the crimes against life, to the abandoning of Catholicism in favor of the new “evangelical” and Pentecostal sects. And priestly celibacy also weakens when «the structure of total consecration to God begins to lose its deepest meaning». And the poor must also be offered «the divine balm of the faith, without overlooking material bread».

The Papal words had been considered a provocation by many in Brazil. Liberation  Theology made of the poor the measure of all things and of the image of a revolutionary Jesus an example, Benedict XVI statements divide the families. For example, they have divided the brothers Clodovis and Leonardo Boff. Clodovis Boff is a member of the Servants of Mary, Leonardo Boff –  banned from teaching in Catholic theology faculties in a 1985 sentence from the congregation for the doctrine of the faith – left the Franciscan order and got married. He was one of the fathers of Liberation Theology, and recently he changed his point of view: the poor is still the center of his predication; but the poor is not intended to be the man, but the earth, and the measure of all thing is the ecology: taking care of the earth is taking care of the man.

By changing his point of view, Leonardo Boff got closer to the Pope: the attention for  the evironment and the ecology was such a key point in Benedict XVI’s pontificate that he was described as the «Green Pope» in the Us Secreatary of State dispatches leaked by Wikileaks, and that he was ranked 17th among the ‘top 100 global thinkers’ of 2009 for having «positioned the church prominently and unexpectedly as an advocate for the environment and warned against the perils of climate change». In fact, Benedict XVI view goes beyond. And Clodovis Boff goes beyond as well. His “conversion” was finally expressed in the essay published in the Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira. In Clodovis Boff judgment, the «fatal» error into which it falls is that of setting up the poor as the «first operative principle of theology», substituting them for God and Jesus Christ.
«The ‘pastoral action of liberation’  - Clodovis Boff wrote – becomes one of the many branches of the ‘popular movement’. The Church becomes like an NGO, and so also loses substance physically: it loses workers, militants, and faithful». Clodovis Boff seemed to have centered the key point, since this is probably the reason why a shortsighted vision of Liberation Theology is brought on from the so-called “secular world”, who committed in a struggle to make the Holy See an organization on a par with any Ngo, with no diplomatic weight.

Leonardo Boff replied to his brother essay by claiming that «Clodovis has passed over body and soul to maintaining with naive optimism and youthful enthusiasm» the approach dictated by the Latin American bishops at their continental conference held in Aparecida, Brazil, in May of 2007, and inaugurated by Benedict XVI in person”. Leonardo’s reply was publish on the Institute Humanitas Unisinos website. It is the same Institute that scheduled for October 8-11, 2012 a big congress on the Liberation Theology. Among the special guests, there should be Leonardo Boff. But none of the speakers still confirmed his participation. The news was nevertheless spread to a great audience, by claiming a counter position between the 2013 Wyd and the 2012 congress. The Christian Base Communities repeatedly accused Benedict XVI – as former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – to have been the biggest censor of Liberation Theology. Just a few remember that there had been two notes of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith about the Liberation Theology: the Libertatis Nuntius (1984) and the Libertatis Conscientia (1986). The first one can be considered the pars destruens  of a dialectic process, intended to purify Liberation Theology by its Marxist-oriented excesses; the second one can instead be considered the pars construens , in order to enhance the positive part of Liberation Theology. That is why the cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga explains the reasons of the two notes in his Liberation Theology classes. Rodriguez Maradiaga links the notes of the Congretion for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Social Doctrine of the Chuch, which he defines «the best kept secret» of the Catholic world.

The key is the way one describes Jesus. The Jesuit University of Valle del Rio dos Sinos (40,000 students) is a prestigious center of cultural diffusion for all of South America and has recently launched a series of seminars to analyze the globalization project – developed from the beginning by the Society of Jesus – and its repercussions over the centuries, up to the present time. The aim, in particular, is to focus the action and the participation of the religious order on the formation and dissemination of modern culture and its spiritual and cultural role in Brazil and Latin America, through the missionary apostolate and educational efforts. During the last General Congregation of the Society of Jesus – that brought to the election of fr. Adolfo Nicolas as Superior General of the Jesuit – the Vatican admonished the Jesuit to harmonize their position with the ones of the Apostolic See, in the name of the peculiar vote of obedience  to the Pope observed by the members of the Society.

In the last years, four Jesuit theologians had been banned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith: Jacques Dupuis in 2001, Roger Haight in 2004, Jon Sobrino in 2006 and Peter C. Phan in 2007. The key point was always the Jesus quest. Jesus is subjected to the canons of comprehension of secular culture. Jesus is so exalted as a great man and a worker of justice, but his divinity is obscured. The opposite of the Jesus of Nazaret sketched on the two books that Joseph Ratzinger dedicated to the Jesus as the gospels outline him (the third one will be published at the beginning of the next year).

The Jesus true man and true God was one of the main points of the Doctrinal Note on some aspects of the Evangelization, delivered by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2007. The note had been in reserve for a number of years, and then delivered as the introduction states – because of the  «growing confusion» over the Church’s duty to proclaim Jesus to the world, also penetrated within missionary institutes.

Among the causes of this growing confusion, there is the conviction that proposing Christian truth to others is an attack on their freedom and, at the same time, a conception of the Kingdom of God that is not identified in the person of Jesus Christ, but in «a generic reality that overarches all the religious experiences or traditions, toward which these should incline as toward a universal and indistinct communion of all those who seek God».   Spreading the news of Jesus true God and True man is the challenge of the Wyd 2013. The post-Wyd Madrid has already begun.