A glimmer of humility goes a long way

Pope Francis caused his usual stir with his first Christmas address as pontiff.

Departing from his script with a verve that must give his advisers kittens, he urged non-believers to unite with believers in committing themselves to peace.

Thus atheists now find themselves scooped up with people of different faiths and sexual orientations into the unexpectedly generous embrace of the new man at the Vatican.

None of his pronouncements would have half as much effect if Francis were not also master of the eloquent gesture. He carries his own bags, pays his own bills, eschews the papal apartments in favour of a local guesthouse, walks to work and declines to wear the red pontiff’s hat while being perfectly happy to pose in a red clown’s nose.

He is much too shrewd not to understand the news value of inviting homeless people to dine with him in St Peter’s Square. He has a hot PR chief and a busy Twitter account.

But with this man there is a sense that these gestures are the real thing. The Argentinian servant priest really does seem to have brought humility and inclusiveness into the lair of pomp and hierarchy. And the rest of us are watching, agog, to see if he gets away with it.

What we respond to in Pope Francis is the same quality the world found in Nelson Mandela. We long for leaders to surprise us by how big rather than how small they are. We long for some modesty in a world that has made a cult of egoism. We ache for costly integrity.

Sometimes we may not even realise what has been missing from public life until we meet it again in a Francis or a Mandela. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is shaping up interestingly too.

We recognise integrity often enough in private, though. People frequently ask me about the most impressive people I’ve interviewed in my TV career, but the fact is their names would mean nothing. They have invariably been “ordinary” people who have produced goodness out of tawdriness, forgiveness where only hate seemed possible and courage where I would probably have ducked.

The passersby who rushed bravely towards the Clutha Vaults to help in last month’s helicopter disaster tapped into that part of our humanity that thrills to see it in others. We were all proud and touched to see in action the finer aspects of what it means to be human.

The test for Pope Francis will be how to enjoy such warm acclaim without starting to need it. How to resist the snares of celebrity while, in effect, courting it with every action. How to balance new thinking with older, sometimes difficult truths. How to guard that servant heart of his in a wily, wealthy institution dedicated to power.

The question for the rest of us is whether we can admire his qualities while resisting the desire to knock him off the pedestal we are so busy erecting for him, when one day he puts a foot wrong. As he surely will.