This might have been the year when Pope Francis would have seen his work completed. Instead, Covid-19 pitched the world into turmoil and darkness, with its future in the balance, and gave its most prominent spiritual leader his greatest challenge – and opportunity
This will be seen by historians as the year Pope Francis relaunched his pontificate just as it was supposed to be winding down: 2020 was going to be the year in which his cycle of teaching and reforms would be concluded. Then Covid-19 landed the Pope an unexpected new global mission: to be the storm pilot leading God’s People through the tempest to a new horizon of possibility.
This unexpected turnaround has happened before in his life, most recently in 2012-13, when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio turned 75 and offered Benedict XVI his resignation as archbishop of Buenos Aires. He began to put his papers in order and plan his retirement. Instead, he found himself called to Rome, and to what he likes laughingly to call a “change of diocese”.
There is no evidence that Francis had been getting ready to retire in 2020. But he had seen it as the conclusion of a “seven-year plan” (it had originally been a five-year plan, but when the strength of the opposition to his reforms became clear, he decided to extend it). This was to be the year that the reorganisation of how the Vatican serves the life of the Church would be bedded down in a new constitution, when the financial reorganisation came together, and when the various pastoral reforms – in the selection of bishops and cardinals, the training of priests, the anti-abuse measures – acquired citizenship in the Church.