Gabriel Byrne: Pope Francis Is a ‘figurehead, a Ceo’

By Lindsay Lowe
The Parade
December 5, 2013

http://www.parade.com/239072/linzlowe/gabriel-byrne-pope-francis-is-a-figurehead-a-ceo/


Since he was elected pope this March, Pope Francis has made headlines for his relatively simple lifestyle and his emphasis on helping the poor and embracing people of all faiths.

However, not everyone is a fan. Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, who was raised in a strict Catholic household and once trained for the priesthood, says that despite the Pope’s talk of reform, he will not fundamentally change the Catholic Church.

“Like Barack Obama, a bit like Tony Blair, he’s a figurehead, a CEO—a man who does the bidding of the masters who hide behind him,” Bryne said in an interview with the Michael Des Barres Show today.

He added that while Pope Francis has set a new tone within the Church by performing “Christ-like things” such as bathing prisoners’ feet, these are empty gestures that won’t change the Catholic Church’s “innately conservative” agenda.

“Can one man change an institution?” he said. “I feel the answer is no. He can initiate certain reforms in the Vatican…but unless he radically alters the policies of the Catholic Church there won’t be a change.” For example, he says, the Church remains “profoundly anti-women” and contradicts its own founding principle of love by forbidding its own priests from marrying.

Byrne, 63, has long been fascinated by his Irish cultural heritage, in which Catholicism plays an important role.

“It is my culture and my home and my roots, so I’ve come back every single year since I’ve left, at least two or three times a year,” he told Parade earlier this year. “It’s tremendously important to me because it defines me as any culture defines anybody who’s a product of it. I’m a product of my Irish culture and I could no more lose that than I could my sense of identity.”

Byrne, who attended an English seminary as a young boy and at one time trained to be a priest, revealed he was sexually abused by a member of the clergy, a tragedy that “deeply hurt” him throughout his life.

“I didn’t think it severely impacted me at the time,” he told The Guardian in 2010. “But when I think about my later life, and how I had difficulties with certain issues, there is the real possibility they could have been attributable to that.”