The best that Roman Catholicism can be
Pope Francis was as progressive a force for change as possible under the most change-resistant institution on the planet. It could never have been enough.
Unlike the death of Pope Benedict XVI—which I ignored, having already said all there was to say in a book about him—I cannot help but say nice things about Pope Francis in the wake of the latter’s death today at the age of eighty-eight. I knew something was up a few weeks ago when, following news reports of his health struggles, I felt relief that he had somehow survived two bouts of pneumonia that nearly killed him: to my surprise, I actually cared and was rooting for the guy.
Why the sudden concern? Why this compassion for the figurehead of an archaic religious institution I had long ago abandoned and continued to hold in contempt? Perhaps, in embodying the hopes and dreams of so many of his flock for a more humane way of spreading the gospels, Pope Francis truly was the genuine article. Unlike the mean-spirited ideologue who preceded him—a coldly distant, right-wing cleric and intellectual snob who eschewed the masses—Jorge Bergoglio had the common touch. He was warm, friendly and joyful, a cleric more interested in bringing people together than in enforcing compliance through dogmatism.
Apart from John Paul I, whose potential as a “People’s Pope” would forever remain unproven because he dropped dead under highly suspicious circumstances after only 33 days in office, Pope Francis was the Roman Catholic Church’s most progressive leader since John XXIII, the force behind Vatican II and its many reforms. And so, despite the entrenchment of my atheistic lapsed Catholicism, despite deep cynicism toward the institution itself, I managed to reserve some respect for the man himself.
From the moment Jorge Bergoglio made his unlikely ascension to the papacy in 2013, naming himself after St. Francis of Assisi, he was seen as the progressive pope: a man who would turn the Church away from its conservative focus on doctrinal purity, make it more inclusive, and emphasize its pastoral work with the marginalized, thus helping it regain credibility after the clerical sex abuse scandals that had threatened to bankrupt it. He arrived when the Church had little moral authority; he left as the world’s conscience, a voice of compassion all the more welcome as the messaging of authoritarians and fascists took over the public sphere worldwide.
In becoming the first Jesuit and Latin American pope, Bergoglio inherited a Church in turmoil. First, he was taking over from a controversial and unpopular pope. As Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger will go down in history as the Church’s Richard Nixon: rather than facing ultimate accountability for the clerical sex abuse scandal he had both enabled and covered up during his years as a top Vatican disciplinarian, Benedict chose to resign his office—becoming the first pope in nearly six hundred years to do so. Content to live out the rest of his days in the woolly embrace of diplomatic immunity, he tucked himself away in a Vatican Gardens monastery originally built for cloistered nuns dedicated to praying for the health of the pope.
Pope Francis supported Pope Emeritus Benedict, both publicly and privately, until the latter’s death on December 31, 2022. One might regard such solidarity as a tawdry necessity of Vatican realpolitik: for the sake of continuity between past and present—to keep The Firm together, as it were—harmony between the two was critical. Many even saw Francis’s support as honourable, given the two men’s theological differences and the unfortunate reality of the mess the new pope had been left to clean up.
So how did he do in the job?
There has been much debate around his approach to homosexuality, but on that issue Pope Francis comes out ahead of all his predecessors combined. After the bigotry of Ratzinger, who once authored an encyclical for Pope John Paul II describing gay people as “intrinsically disordered” (and who, as Pope Benedict, laughably denied the presence of gay men in the Vatican and blamed the paedophile priest scandal on homosexuality run amok), anything would be an improvement. And so, early in his papacy when Francis answered a reporter’s question about gay priests by saying “Who am I to judge?”, that was seen as a radical sign of acceptance of queer Catholics.
But the excitement was shortlived. Francis occasionally stumbled with his statements about gay men, last year apologizing for repeating a homophobic slur in Italian. He suggested that men with strong gay leanings should probably not enter the priesthood. And he went back and forth over whether to allow priests to bless same-sex couples—finally approving the gesture, if not formal marriage under Catholic ritual. The fact he was willing to meet with gay and trans Catholics, given his generation and the macho culture of the Argentinian society in which he was raised, was significant in itself.
There was similar ambiguity in his approach to women. As part of his call for more involvement by the laity, he agreed that women should have a bigger role in Church affairs—just not as priests. And, while he opposed denying communion to Catholic politicians who supported abortion rights, he would never have made a statement affirming women’s dominion over their own bodies. Instead, ever the pragmatist, he converted the Pontifical Academy for Life (a base camp for anti-abortion culture warriors) into Laity, Family and Life, which also opposed the death penalty.
On the sex abuse file he stumbled out of the gate, initially giving more credence to accused clerics than to their victims. But eventually he came around, listening to sexual abuse survivors and imposing new rules to hold bishops and other top religious figures accountable for the abuse or its cover-up. (That said, his work to create more transparency and tougher obligations for civil reporting fell short of expectations.)
But in two areas of his papacy—broadening the Catholic tent to make the Church more inclusive and denouncing the clericalism that had alienated so many of the faithful—Francis made a big difference in positive ways.
In the first case, he built on his work in Argentina by establishing a papacy that prioritized caring for the poor and marginalized. His support of migrant rights was critical during a time when mass displacement caused by wars, famine, and the climate crisis made the plight of migrants around the world a top issue. His frequent critiques of billionaire capitalism and calls for economic justice were a welcome relief from neoliberalism’s narrative dominance of the business pages. And his willingness to visit far-flung corners of the planet, including African countries ravaged by war, made his point more forcefully.
In the second case, Francis went far to decentralize the power of the Church, reducing the concentration of its authority in Rome to establish a more collegial, less ideological approach. He angered the Church’s right wing by demoting conservatives in Vatican offices, replacing them with bishops closer to the flock than to the business-friendly Opus Dei. (He even fired conservative Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller by choosing not to extend his term as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the doctrinal watchdog position once famously held by Ratzinger.) He converted synods into policy meetings for empowered bishops rather than as opportunities for more lectures by the Roman curia. And he made the College of Cardinals a more diverse body, appointing more than half of its voters who will select his successor. As the New York Times put it, he made the college “less white (appointing the first African American cardinal), less Italian and less representative of the Roman curia.”
Whether the reforms he brought to the Vatican will continue or the pendulum will instead shift backward with the choice of his successor, who knows? But after thirty-five years of dreary, right-wing conservatism under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and with lowered expectations of the Church’s potential as a relevant force for positive change, perhaps the world has been lucky to have had Pope Francis for the past dozen years.
Despite some of his eye-rolling pronouncements about certain issues, despite my cynical skepticism around his historic apology to Indigenous peoples in Canada, and despite my impossibly high standards for papal renunciation of homophobia, Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis remained someone with whom I would have enjoyed sitting down with a nice glass of Malbec.
And that’s a lot more than I could say about his predecessors.
So here’s to you, Your Holiness. Rest ye well.
Papa Frank did a darned fine job trying to steer the oldest continuously operating bureaucracy on the planet. I am afraid his successor will be a hard turn to the Right and align with global fascism