Pope Francis shuns information tech

The newly installed Pope Francis - the Catholic Church's first to emerge from the Latin American "ends of the earth", as the pope himself described it in his first public comments - is not someone known for his comfort with media and modern information and communication technologies.

Still, he is very aware of the power of media, based on his prior role as archbishop of Buenos Aires. He will certainly not hesitate to appeal to media to help reinforce his ministry, though it's doubtful he will employ them as actively as Latin America's evangelical pastors now do.

A few simple observations clearly illustrate the cold relationship that Francis had with the world of media and communication technologies: in his study in Buenos Aires, he used an old typewriter. He did not watch television and never used email. He does not have a personal profile on Twitter, and his Facebook account is managed by someone else, as well.

Monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, the Argentine who runs the Vatican's office of internet services, gave Jorge Bergoglio a new iPad on March 16, although no one believes he will use it even once.

Unlike Pope John Paul II, who was a great mass communicator, Bergoglio does not have the reputation of being a gifted and charismatic orator. During his labors in Buenos Aires he was known mostly for maintaining an extremely low profile. He did not make himself available to journalists for interviews or press conferences. He avoided any place that would expose him to public attention, with the exception of the major pilgrimages and religious activities.

His communication strengths were most evident in personal encounters. For example, he would receive priests and laypeople with equal grace. He customarily responded to political leaders with personal phone calls or written letters. He refused to accept help from personal assistants, and he mixed with the common people on Buenos Aires' uncomfortable, and sometimes unsafe, public transportation system.

His main platform in the media were his homilies, a few radio and television spots marking special holidays, such as Holy Week and Christmas and a television series he launched (Span.) that ran in 2010 and 2011 together with a rabbi and hosted by a Presbyterian.

As the top Catholic leader in Argentina for six years, and due to his position as archbishop in the largest city in Argentina, where nearly a third of the country's 40 million people live, Bergoglio's words were reproduced and broadcast widely by mass media. His comments drew even greater media attention after 2004, when he began to clash publicly with the presidential couple Nestor and Cristina Kirchner.

The new pope knows well the power of media and the influence that they wield to multiply images and words almost to the point of absurdity. As such, from the first moments of his ministry in the Vatican, he is giving signs of keeping close to the people, and he is sending signals inside the Catholic Church that indicate he wants to make changes and to find a way of answering the challenges that face Catholicism theologically and institutionally.

Some analysts in Europe and the Americas claim the election of Francis aims to slow Catholic migration into evangelical churches in South America, and particularly in Brazil, the country with historically the largest numbers of Catholics. Nevertheless, Bergoglio's track record as cardinal gives no indication of belligerence toward evangelicals.

In fact, by his physical presence and his sermons, he has backed a movement of dialog and sharing between charismatic Catholics and Pentecostal pastors, called CRECES (meaning "you grow" in Spanish). And in 2006, he didn't hesitate to publicly kneel and request a blessing on his life from a group of key evangelical pastors (Span.) in Buenos Aires. He also publicly joined the position of the evangelical sector in 2010 and 2011, as the issue of legalizing same-sex marriage was being debated in the Parliament.

Bergoglio also pushed hard for inter-religious dialog in Buenos Aires and in Argentina, an effort that was notably lacking and even regressed during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. His first effort toward advancing dialog as pope was a letter he sent the Chief Rabbi in Rome, just hours after being elected, expressing his desire to establish a close, fraternal relationship.

As the Swiss theologian Hans Küng told Brazil's O Globo newspaper, Bergoglio will play a role in the Catholic Church similar to the role ex-minister Mikhail Gorbachev played in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Gorbachev "did not launch a revolution, but instead introduced reforms that corrected existing errors. I expect the same of Bergoglio. Even if he does not launch a revolution and thus divide the Church, he will introduce reforms," Küng observed.

Another theologian, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, an active proponent of Liberation Theology, indicated that Francis "with his experience as a pastor, with a new view of things, from below, will be able to reform the curate, decentralize the administration and give a new, more credible face to the Church."