NCR Today

Rome – For years, experts on ecumenism have said that the main stumbling block to putting the divided Christian family back together again isn’t so much the papacy, but a certain overly monarchical model of it. If we could find new ways of exercising primacy, they prophesied, unity might move a massive step closer to reality.

One veteran expert believes those “new ways” may have arrived with Pope Francis, predicting that this pontiff will prove a “boon” to ecumenism.

One of Rome’s best known members of the Society of Jesus, and certainly one of the most wired in terms of Vatican contacts, said yesterday that for those with eyes to see, Francis cannot help but seem a “profoundly Jesuit” pope.

Jesuit Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, a distinguished canon lawyer and former rector of the Jesuit-run Gregorian University, spoke April 19 as part of a panel discussing Francis’ papacy at the one-month mark. The event was sponsored by the “Alberto Hurtado Center for Faith and Culture” at the Gregorian.