Time bình chọn Đức Giáo Hoàng Francis là Nhân vật của năm
http://tuoitre.vn/The-gioi/584842/time-binh-chon-duc-giao-hoang-francis-la-nhan-vat-cua-nam.html
11/12/2013 21:34 (GMT + 7)
TTO - Tạp chí Time vừa bình chọn
Đức Giáo Hoàng Francis là Nhân vật của năm, đánh giá cao những đóng góp
to lớn của ông trong việc chuyển dịch thông điệp từ Giáo Hội Công Giáo
nhằm vãn hồi niềm tin của hàng triệu tín đồ đã từng “trở nên vỡ mộng với
Vatican”.
Đức
Thánh Cha Francis ban phước vào cuối buổi tiếp kiến chung hàng tuần tại
quảng trường
St. Peter tại Vatican ngày 11-12-2013 - Ảnh: Reuters
St. Peter tại Vatican ngày 11-12-2013 - Ảnh: Reuters
Tin bài liên quan
"Vì vậy, phần lớn những gì ông đã làm trong chín tháng ngắn ngủi sau khi ông đăng quang vừa qua đã thực sự thay đổi giọng điệu của những phát ngôn từ Vatican", tổng biên tập của Time, bà Nancy Gibbs, cho hay trong việc công bố về việc bầu chọn này trên chương trình "Today" của kênh truyền hình NBC.
Ông ấy đã từng nói: "Chúng ta cần quay lại nhiệm vụ chính của nhà thờ - chữa lành bệnh, chứ không phải việc giám sát tư tưởng".
Với việc được bầu chọn lần này, Đức Giáo Hoàng đã đánh
bại Edward Snowden, nhà hoạt động về nhân quyền cho người đồng tính
Edith Windsor, cũng như một vài ứng viên khác là Tổng thống Syria Bashar
al-Assad và Thượng nghị sĩ Ted Cruz của Texas.
"Một trong những yếu tố quan trọng giúp Đức Giáo Hoàng
Francis chiến thắng trong việc bầu chọn lần này là tốc độ lấy lại niềm
tin của hàng triệu tín đồ vốn dĩ đã từ bỏ hy vọng vào nhà thờ", Time tuyên bố trên trang web của mình.
Phát ngôn viên Vatican Federico Lombardi nói trong một
lời tuyên bố trên chương trình "Today" rằng Đức Giáo Hoàng không tìm
cách để trở nên nổi tiếng hoặc để nhận được danh hiệu. Nhưng nếu việc
được bình chọn là Nhân vật của năm giúp truyền bá thông điệp của phúc âm
- nhắn gửi về tình yêu Thiên Chúa dành cho tất cả mọi người - ông chắc
chắn sẽ được hạnh phúc về điều đó".
QUỐC THOẠI
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TIME: PERSON OF THE YEAR: Pope Francis, The People’s Pope
Pope Francis, The Choice
With a focus
on compassion, the leader of the Catholic Church has become a new voice
of conscience. Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs explains why Francis is
TIME's choice for Person of the Year 2013Once
there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge.
The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the
lesson.
How do you practice humility from the most exalted
throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so
much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis.
In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center
of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty,
fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role
of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.
At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many
places, along comes a man with no army or weapons, no kingdom beyond a
tight fist of land in the middle of Rome but with the immense wealth and
weight of history behind him, to throw down a challenge. The world is
getting smaller; individual voices are getting louder; technology is
turning virtue viral, so his pulpit is visible to the ends of the earth.
When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a
Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
The skeptics will point to the obstacles Francis faces in accomplishing
much of anything beyond making casual believers feel better about the
softer tone coming out of Rome while feeling free to ignore the harder
substance. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest
institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change
does not come naturally. At its best it inspires and instructs, helps
and heals and calls the faithful to heed their better angels. But it has
been weakened worldwide by scandal, corruption, a shortage of priests
and a challenge, especially across the fertile mission fields of the
southern hemisphere, from evangelical and Pentecostal rivals. In some
quarters, core teachings on divorce and contraception are widely ignored
and orthodoxy derided as obsolete. Vatican bureaucrats and clergy stand
accused of infighting, graft, blackmail and an obsession with
“small-minded rules,” as Francis puts it, rather than the vast
possibilities of grace. Don’t just preach; listen, he says. Don’t scold;
heal.
And yet in less than a year, he has done something remarkable: he has
not changed the words, but he’s changed the music. Tone and temperament
matter in a church built on the substance of symbols—bread and wine,
body and blood—so it is a mistake to dismiss any Pope’s symbolic
choices as gestures empty of the force of law. He released his first
exhortation, an attack on “the idolatry of money,” just as Americans
were contemplating the day set aside for gratitude and whether to spend
it at the mall. This is a man with a sense of timing. He lives not in
the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel
surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the
dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up
Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his
neck. When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information
on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German
Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby
of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is
doing more than modeling mercy and transparency. He is embracing
complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its
own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals.
Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to
the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty
is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his
cholesterol level.
This focus on compassion, along with a general aura of merriment not
always associated with princes of the church, has made Francis something
of a rock star. More than 3 million people turned out to see him on
Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro last summer, the crowds in St.
Peter’s Square are ecstatic, and the souvenirs are selling fast.
Francesco is the most popular male baby name in Italy. Churches report a
“Francis effect” of lapsed Catholics returning to Mass and confession,
though anecdotes are no substitute for hard evidence, and surveys of
U.S. Catholics, at least, see little change in practice thus far. But
the fascination with Francis even outside his flock gives him an
opportunity that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, never had—to magnify the
message of the church and its power to do great good.
The giddy embrace of the secular press makes Francis suspect among
traditionalists who fear he buys popularity at the price of a
watered-down faith. He has deftly leveraged the media’s fascination to
draw attention to everything from his prayers for peace in Syria to his
pointed attack on trickle-down economics, which inspired Jesse Jackson
to compare him to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to wonder
whether he’s a Marxist. When you are a media celebrity, every word you
speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak. Why has he not
said more about the priest sex-abuse scandal? ask victims’ advocates.
(Just this month, he set up a commission to address the abuse of
children by priests.) Why does he not talk more about the sanctity of
life? ask conservatives, who note that in his exhortation, abortion is
mentioned once, mercy 32 times. Francis both affirms traditional
teachings on sexuality and warns that the church has become distracted
by them. He attacks priests who won’t baptize children born out of
wedlock for their “rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism.” He
declares that God “has redeemed all of us … not just Catholics.
Everyone, even atheists.” He posed with environmental activists holding
an antifracking T-shirt and called on politicians and business leaders
to be “protectors of creation.”
(MORE: Behind the Pope Francis Cover)
None of which makes him a liberal—he also says the all-male priesthood
is not subject to debate, nor is abortion, nor is the definition of
marriage. But his focus on the poor and the fact that the world’s
poorest 50% control barely 1% of its wealth unsettles those who defend
capitalism as the most successful antipoverty program in history. You
could argue that he is Teddy Roosevelt protecting capitalism from its
own excesses or he is simply saying what Popes before him have said,
that Jesus calls us to care for the least among us—only he’s saying it
in a way that people seem to be hearing differently. And that may be
especially important coming from the first Pope from the New World. A
century ago, two-thirds of Catholics lived in Europe; now fewer than a
quarter do, and how he is heard in countries where being gay is a crime
and educating women for leadership roles is a heresy may have the power
to transform cultures in which Catholicism is a growing, even
potentially liberating force.
These days it is bracing to hear a leader say anything that annoys
anyone. Now liberals and conservatives alike face a choice as they
listen to a new voice of conscience: Which matters more, that this
charismatic leader is saying things they think need to be said or that
he is also saying things they’d rather not hear?
The heart is a strong muscle; he’s proposing a rigorous exercise plan.
And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a
hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into
the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting
its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year.
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