Pope Francis: Making of a New History of Church Leadership

The self-understanding of the Church and its leadership has gone through evolutionary changes and paradigm-shifts. For Robert Bellarmine of seventeenth century the Church was a pyramid-structure with the power of the papacy supreme within the Church. His ecclesiology stressed the institutional structure of the Church where the pope was seen primarily as an administration. The challenges of the 16th century Reformation and the 18th century Enlightenment did not change the static ecclesiology of the Catholic Church The risk of change and new beginnings was avoided and the Catholic Church remained linked to a past age and became increasingly irrelevant to the present. It was Vatican II that changed the self-understanding of the Church and attempted to make the Church relevant to the present day challenges. Imbibing the spirit and vision of the ecclesiology of Vatican II, Pope Francis began his mission of recasting the role of the papacy and, in the process, the image of the Church. Pope Francis has put into effect the practice of consultation with his fellow bishops in mapping out policies and guidelines for the Church. This quasi-synodal mode of governing the Church does not mean that that Francis abdicates his own responsibility as the final authority in the Church; it means that an informed authority has greater credibility and that decisions from the centre are made in dialogue with the periphery