Alexander Chancellor: What Pope Francis and Silvio Berlusconi have in common

It’s filthy wet weather in Tuscany, so I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon reading through the Italian newspapers. They are full of stuff about Pope Francis — how his humility, his simplicity, and his reforming zeal are breathing new life into the Roman Catholic Church. They say that the long decline in church attendance in Italy has been reversed in the few months since a previously little-known bishop from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected to the papacy. His public appearances at the Vatican are also drawing enormous crowds. He is, in short, a superstar, and by no means in Italy alone. Everywhere in the world, including Britain, lapsed Catholics are flocking back to church. And even among non-Catholics on the left, his popularity is huge. In last Saturday’s Guardian, the self-confessed atheist Jonathan Freedland wrote passionately in his praise. The Pope’s personal modesty, he said, conveyed ‘a powerful message of almost elemental egalitarianism’; and he was now ‘the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo’. ‘You don’t have to be a believer,’ said Freedland, ‘to believe in that.’

Well, I was lapping up this stuff when I chanced upon an article in Corriere della Sera by a well-known Catholic writer, Vittorio Messori, which sounded a note of warning about this papal idolatry. This, he said, was ‘reawakening an ancient and recurrent myth among Catholics — a dream, that is, of a return to the early Church, all poverty, brotherhood and simplicity, without hierarchical structures or canonical laws’; a dream of ‘a slimmed-down, democratic Church’ in which there would be no Vatican, no Curia, no banks or diplomats but ‘a return at last to the community of Jerusalem after the Pentecost’.