But now there is something new, something that is tilting the balance in favor of the peripheral, the local, and the particular.

You could see it happening in the gentle battle over liturgical space in the run-up to the synod's opening.

On October 4 in the Vatican Gardens and on the following night at a church not far from St Peter's, dozens of indigenous leaders and church workers led offerings and prayers, using objects and forms of worship from the region: a canoe, a mandorla, the image of a pregnant woman, as well as placards of Amazon martrys such as Sr. Dorothy Stang.

It was joyful, generous, and unmistakably Amazonian: the faithful People of God speaking and praying and dancing in their own way.

Yet at the big papal Mass in St Peter's the next morning, Amazonia was all but banished.

If the pope in his zinger homily hadn't invoked the Holy Spirit to "renew the paths of the Church in Amazonia, so that the fire of mission will continue to burn," you would have had no idea the synod was even taking place.

Indigenous leaders sat at the front and brought up the gifts but were silent: there were no intercessions for the region, no readings in an Amerindian language, and almost everything was Italian and solemn.

The center was back in charge.

But not for long.

The next morning the Amazonian people were in St. Peter's Basilica with Pope Francis, along with the canoe and the martyrs and Our Lady of the Amazon.

In a remarkable move, unprecedented at previous synods, the pope processed from the Basilica with the indigenous peoples, in their midst—el pastor con su pueblo—as they joyfully chanted, "The sons and daughters of the Forest, we praise you, Lord."

As they left St. Peter's and crossed the square to the synod hall, I thought of Jeremy Irons in Roland Joffé's film The Mission, the Jesuit who walks with his people into a hail of colonialist bullets.

There had been no shortage of rhetorical bullets in the run-up to the synod:

• superannuated cardinals telling Amazonian Catholics they were heretics for proposing to ordain married men;
• a panel of traditionalists (Cardinal Burke in the front row) claiming the synod would not "civilize the savages" but would instead "make the civilized savages"; and
• an EWTN-owned news outlet reporting that the ceremony in the Vatican Gardens—in which native peoples honored God's creation—was an essentially pagan, pantheistic affair.

In his speech opening the synod, the pope spoke of his pain at overhearing someone at the previous day's Mass mock the feather headdress of the leader who brought the gifts to the altar.

"Tell me," the pope asked the 300-odd participants, "what difference is there between wearing feathers on your head and the three-cornered hat used by some officials in our curial departments?"

In that opening address Francis was clear about where he and the synod would stand.

They would look at the Amazon region with the eyes of disciples and missionaries, respectful of the ancestral wisdom and culture of its peoples, and rejecting any approach that was colonialist, ideological, or exploitative.

They would not try to "discipline" the locals.

For whenever the church has had this mindset, Francis warned, it has failed utterly to evangelize.

The Jesuit pope reminded the synod's participants of the ill-fated sixteenth-century missions of the Jesuits Roberto Di Nobili, SJ, and Matteo Ricci, SJ, whose bold attempts at inculturation, in India and China respectively, were quashed by the pettiness and colonialist mindsets of church leaders at the time.

Without being planted in the local culture, the Gospel cannot take root: "homogenizing centralism," said Francis, is the enemy of "the authenticity of the culture of the peoples."

This synod would go the other way.

"We come to contemplate, to understand, to serve the peoples."

What matters, then, is the people of Amazonia, and especially the 3 million or so indigenous gathered in 390 peoples who, for the first time, are the central concern of a synod.

It is their welfare, their pastoral needs, that are at the heart of this gathering, as well as the natural world to which they are deeply, symbiotically connected.

Both are threatened with destruction as never before.

This life-or-death urgency demands, in turn, that the church examine the nature of its presence, how it can be embedded and inculturated, how it can it stand with, and promote the life of, its peoples in an area where one "regional vicariate" might be the size of half of Italy yet have just a handful of priests.

The issue is one of agency.

The synod is a test of the church's ability to implement the vision of Laudato si' in a region that almost daily dramatizes that encyclical's call to conversion.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ—a key drafter of Laudato si' who will also be drawing up the final document on which the synod will vote on October 26—told Commonweal that because "the Amazon region exemplifies the inextricable connection between the social and natural environments, the fate of people there and of their natural surroundings" there could be "no more concrete manner than this [synod] to lift Laudato si' off the page and put it into action."

This is the first ever "territorial" synod. Continue reading

When you apply the context lens, two recent events help answer that question.

One was yesterday: Amoris Laetitia - the most fought-over papal teaching since the Humanae Vitae controversies of 1968 - quietly celebrated its second anniversary.

Over the weekend, its handful of celebrity opponents organized an event in Rome to insist Amoris was heretical, while a group of bishops in Lombardy became the latest of dozens of dioceses to accept and implement it.

At the heart of Amoris is an attempt to change the Church's focus: Away from concentrating on the defense of the truth about marriage at the level of culture and law and towards widening the access to grace that enables people to live that truth. (Whether it compromises the witness to that truth in the process, as its critics claim, is the disputed matter).

The paragraph that best revealed the Amoris agenda was #37: "We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families, strengthening the marriage bond and giving meaning to marital life," Francis admonished.

In Evangelii Gaudium in 2013, the pope foresaw the difficulty some might have with this refocusing, which the 2007 Aparecida document of the Latin American bishops called "pastoral conversion."

That resistance, he suggested, had echoes of early-Church battles over the ancient heresies of Gnosticism and Pelagianism, at the heart of which was, precisely, the role of grace.

And now, having sought to open the channels of grace in the Church, he is turning to people, and inviting them to open to grace too.

Hence Event Two

A few weeks ago, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a brief treatise "on certain aspects of Christian salvation." Although the CDF prefect, Archbishop Luis Ladaria, spoke of the document as contributing to ongoing debates since John Paul II's 2000 Dominus Iesus, the first paragraph of Placuit Deo made clear it was about deepening the teaching on salvation "with particular reference to the teachings of Pope Francis."

Its topic too was grace, and the way it is excluded by the contemporary versions of the ancient heresies of Gnosticism and Pelagianism, which Francis from the start of his pontificate has warned infect not just modern culture but also the Church. Continue reading

• Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist and commentator, and co-founder of Catholic Voices, a communications project now in 20 countries. He is the author of the biography The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, and How to Defend the Faith Without Raising Your Voice.

Father James Kelly recalls the regime at the Colegio Maximo in the early 1980s with awe, but with mixed feelings. "

I had never seen anything like it," he told me. It was intense, austere and insular, but deeply rooted in spiritual discipline and a focused pastoral action aimed at raising the lives of the poor.

Not only did Bergoglio have a clear vision, said Father Kelly, but he was "dynamic enough to put it into practice."

The regime at the Maximo - as Francis himself confessed in an interview after becoming pope - was authoritarian. Father Kelly describes it as "monolithic."

But it was also - as I describe in my biography of Pope Francis - compelling, exciting and deeply attractive to a whole generation of new vocations that filled the colegio.

Over the years, Father Kelly has thought often about Bergoglio's vision - the intense prayer and pastoral focus at the college - and reflected that "maybe there was truth in what he was doing."

Sure, there was too little freedom, and it was too dependent on the charisma of one extraordinary leader.

Yet despite its faults, at a time when the Society of Jesus worldwide was struggling, he believes, Bergoglio "had the vision that others were forgetting."

What was that vision? "Everything was encased in this spiritual framework," the Irish Jesuit recalls.

In much of the Church at the time - and particularly among the Jesuits - the social came first: the yardstick to measure your Christianity was your commitment to changing unjust structures.

For Bergoglio, on the other hand, "the social had to flow from the religious." Continue reading

• Austin Ivereigh in ABC Religion & Ethics

Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist and commentator on religious and political affairs who holds a doctorate from Oxford University.

For one, there have already been so many biographies written that it is difficult to imagine how anything new or previously unknown could be presented.

For another, the fact that Francis himself is making headlines weekly (at least) rather tends to highlight there may well be more interest in his own words rather than what might be written about him.

Given such challenges, Austen Ivereigh's new biography, The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical Pope is a highly significant - and successful - achievement.

The Man and His Three Reforms

In his Prologue, Ivereigh writes that "This is a story not just of the man [Jorge Bergoglio/Pope Francis] but his three reforms: of the Argentine Jesuit province, of the Argentine Church, and now of the universal Church."

It is an ambitious undertaking but Ivereigh is well-qualified to attempt it: he was (briefly) a Jesuit novice; he wrote his PhD thesis on the Church and politics in Argentina and he is well-versed in the universal Church having been at one time Director for Public Affairs of Westminster Archdiocese under Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

This background enables Ivereigh to write with great insight and clarity on the society and the Church which formed Jorge Bergoglio.

More than any other English-language biography, Ivereigh "fleshes out" Bergoglio and shows that what he is doing worldwide now is a continuation of what he was doing in Argentina and in Latin America.

Most significantly, Ivereigh makes it more evident and understandable why Jorge Bergoglio could have been elected as Pope.

His sensitivity, compassion, political acumen and strength of personality in dealing especially, but not only, with the various political factions in Argentina over many years showed both his pastoral and his leadership skills.

But it has to be said that the very strength of Ivereigh's background also causes a few difficulties in the biography.

Relationships with the Society of Jesus

The story of the relationship between Bergoglio the Jesuit and the Society of Jesus is both complex and clouded.

From being a very young Provincial, to a virtual outcast within the Province of Argentina (although clearly revered by younger Jesuits), to a bishop who never visited the Jesuit General House in over 20 years, Bergoglio's relationship with the Society of Jesus remains tied in knots.

It is a reality but one that Ivereigh tries too hard to solve.

He quite clearly sides with Bergoglio and adopts the attitude that he was more sinned against than sinning in terms of his relationships with his fellow Jesuits.

But even Francis himself, since his election as Pope, has acknowledged that he did not always get things right as a leader within the Province of Argentina.

The most notable and well-known controversy was his handling of the situation of two priests (Orlando Yorio and Franz Jelics) working amongst the poor although Ivereigh's biography provides a new and compelling case for a much more positive reading of Bergoglio's involvement.

It also doesn't strengthen Ivereigh's apologia for Bergoglio the Jesuit that, curiously, twice in the book the name of the current Superior General of the Jesuits is misspelled.

The Conclave

The other - and well-publicised - issue in the biography arises out of Ivereigh's relationship with Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.

The account of the 2013 Papal Conclave suggests that there was, in effect, an overt campaign by some cardinals (including Murphy-O'Connor) to ensure the election of Bergoglio and to guarantee his acceptance.

This has since been expressly refuted and Ivereigh has acknowledged that in future reprints the paragraph referring to securing Bergoglio's assent will be amended to more accurately reflect the reality of what went on at the Conclave.

This is appropriate and Ivereigh is to be commended for his openness and willingness to make things clear - but the fact that it is even necessary might make the reader wonder about the accuracy of other significant episodes in the book.

For all that, though, there is no doubt that this is an extremely important and highly readable book - and one that gives English-language readers in particular an invaluable insight into the social, religious and political background of the man who has become Pope Francis.

Ivereigh concludes the biography with a quote from Pope Francis to the crowds in St Peter's Square on Pentecost Sunday 2014: "If the Church is alive, it must always surprise."

The same could be said of The Great Reformer: it is very much "alive" as a biography and in a very positive sense it does continually surprise and enlighten the reader.

The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical Pope, Austen Ivereigh (Allen & Unwin, 445 pages, $49.99)

Brian Cummings SM

• Brian Cummings is Director of the Marist Spirituality Centre at Pa Maria in Wellington and is a former Provincial of the Society of Mary in New Zealand.