Breaking Faith (2001) and The Pontiff in Winter (2004) were devastating in their indictments of the corruption and failures of the John Paul II years. They make a powerful case for the prosecution, which revelations since 2005 have largely vindicated, but there was an edge to Cornwell’s j’accuse, a barely disguised anger and contempt, which could partly be explained by more recent books, above all Seminary Boy (2006) and The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (2014). In these books Cornwell lays bare his suffering from the toxic cocktail of sex, sin, and abuse in the Church culture he experienced as a young man. Hence the revealing aside at the close of Church, Interrupted. The John Paul II papacy, he says, had “encouraged an oppression aimed at reinstating the sin-cycle of former years.”
In Breaking Faith Cornwell dreams of a pope who ceases to berate and condemn the sinfulness and wrongness of the world, yearning for a pastor who would instead “mend the breaking faith of our Church” and see in “the sinners, the marginalized, the dissidents, the discouraged” people in need of love and inclusion. Francis has fulfilled that hope. Church, Interrupted is the mirror opposite of The Pontiff in Winter. The savage indictments have given way to a touching admiration and affection. Where once he skewered the Polish pope, now he wields the skewer to defend the Argentine pope from his merciless critics.
Some of his sharpest lines are reserved for the anti-Francis lobby, whose convoluted, self-contradictory criticisms reveal their bad faith. “Francis could not win, could not be allowed to win, whatever he did or said, or did not do or say,” Cornwell writes, in what could be a perfect description of Jesus and the pharisees. Noting that many of Francis’s critics are converts in search of a more militant affirmation of particular moral concerns, Cornwell observes the curious feature of conservative attacks, “that [Francis’s] extension of moral concerns to embrace neglected issues meant a repudiation of others, even though there were deep parallel connections.” Thus the pope’s condemnation of capital punishment and nuclear weapons, for example, are used as evidence to claim (absurdly) that he is soft on abortion, which reminds Cornwell of the joke about the mother who buys her son two ties for his birthday. When he next sees her, he is wearing one. She says: “So you didn’t like the other one?”
Church, Interrupted is made up of twenty-four brief chapters, each around the length of a Commonweal article, which take “soundings across [Francis’s] key initiatives and reactions to events.” It is a jerky format that plays to Cornwell’s gifts of concision and forensic focus. Each short essay supplies enough background information for the reader to grasp the significance of Francis’s “interruption,” then hones in on key stories and anecdotes to illustrate the departure. It makes the book highly readable and accessible and, for an outsider curious about the Francis Effect, a fine introduction to the heart of what makes this pontificate so extraordinary.
Perhaps the best chapter is on gossip, which Francis constantly returns to as an evil to be extirpated from the Vatican—and with good reason. The atmosphere in Rome is “like a permanent Sunday afternoon,” where “the physical structure creates a sense of hothouse separation, an enclosed palace filled mostly with celibates adrift from the real world.” Cornwell is delighted that Francis is the first pope “to lambaste the malicious tongue-wagging of the Roman prelates,” whose cynicism and failure in charity corrode the Church’s mission.
Also sophisticated is the chapter on China, about which Francis has said almost nothing publicly, but which has been a major focus of his diplomacy. The secret accord with Beijing over the nomination of bishops has been heavily criticized from all sides—not least by the emeritus archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, and the island’s former British governor, Lord Christopher Patten—but Cornwell sees it as a necessary gamble, a bold attempt to end a situation in which the Chinese government has been dividing and ruling the Church.
Yet sometimes the format of the book constrains Cornwell to an efficient summary without much insight: on Laudato si’, for example, we get little beyond a précis of the encyclical. On women in the Church, Cornwell makes a good case for seeing Francis as an innovator introducing “striking changes” but, in explaining why the pope has not gone further toward ordaining women, falls back on the cliché that he is a man of his time and place. (If Cornwell thinks Francis has been timorous or retrograde he should say so, rather than patronizing supposed Argentine “machismo.”) Sometimes the research is light: when Francis said that women were the “strawberries on the cake” of theology, it was to complain that there were so few in the International Theological Commission that they risked looking like a token presence.