ROME
National Catholic Reporter
March 13, 2019
By Michael Sean Winters
It was the early afternoon Eastern time when the smoke started to billow from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel. At first, it was hard to tell if it was white or not, but as the camera stayed trained on it, and the TV anchors debated its color, the smoke grew whiter and whiter, and then the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica began to ring. Habemus papam.
It has been six years to the day since the cardinals elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the senior cardinal deacon, announced: Qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum.
The new pope emerged on the loggia wearing a simple white cassock and greeted the people gathered in the square below with the simple words of greeting: “Buona sera.” The choice of name indicated a concern for the poor, and the simplicity of his manner suggested a less exalted or, at any rate, a less fancy papacy.
Unlike his concern for the poor and a more simple papal style that were immediately apparent, something not discernible that first night turned out to be foundational: Pope Francis has retrieved a sense of synodality that had been obscured, but never eliminated, after almost two centuries of Ultramontanist ecclesiology. As Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro, one of the Holy Father’s closest confidants, wrote earlier this week:
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