On Pope Francis

Francis​ assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals, which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful. Catholicism in the eyes of the world was defined by abuse, paedophilia and cover-up.

In the background were two other problems: a steady decline in churchgoing and the legacy of the Second Vatican Council – a vast exercise in reform, which reshaped every aspect of Catholic practice, streamlining the Mass and permitting its celebration in languages other than Latin. John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt to ‘throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through’.

Much church politics over the last few decades has been driven by attempts to close the windows again. Attitudes to Vatican II are good predictors of other positions: liberals and progressives tend to approve of it, wishing its reforms had gone further in changing the church’s approach to social issues; conservatives tend to see it as a sad loss of self-confidence, degrading a rich and beautiful tradition and setting the church adrift. Mixed positions, which combine progressive social views with affection for traditional forms (or vice versa), are much rarer than they are in the Church of England.

Francis at first offered hope for progressives, who had felt asphyxiated by his two predecessors. The name was a positive sign, taken from a saint – Francis of Assisi – who championed spiritual renewal through poverty, who sought Christ among the poor and infirm, and whose followers often troubled the institutional church. Pope Francis spoke of a church for the poor, active in the world, with priests as ‘shepherds who smell of the sheep’. His earliest apostolic exhortation wished for ‘a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets’. His first trip out of Rome was to celebrate a penitential Mass at Lampedusa among migrants to remember the hundreds who had recently drowned, on an altar made from an upturned boat. There, he castigated ‘globalised indifference’ and a ‘culture of comfort’ which ‘makes us insensitive to the cries of other people’.

It helped that he wasn’t his immediate predecessor. Benedict had earned his reputation as a conservative enforcer. But he was a shy, cerebral and abstruse man ill-suited to the modern papacy. Caricaturing Benedict and Francis as, respectively, the intellectual and the populist would be wrong: Francis’s earthy manner – he once accused scandal-mongering journalists of being coprophiles – concealed a powerful intellect with strong cultural tastes. He loved Furtwängler’s recordings of Wagner; his letter on the value of literature quotes Proust, Cocteau, Borges and Celan. His reflections on the Covid pandemic quote Hölderlin, in lines which also characterise his papal approach: ‘where the danger is, grows/the saving power also.’

Both sides of the culture war profited from caricatures of Francis as Pope Woke. The reality was less clear-cut. He distrusted the liberal impulse to make the church a vague, hand-wringing Roman branch of the human rights campaign. His positions on war, free-market exploitation and climate change were all in the mainstream of Catholic Social Teaching, though articulated with unusual directness and clarity. His interviews often gave the impression that he thought the church’s hang-ups about sexuality were just that – symptoms of an un-Christlike clerical trend to flee from real humanity.

Probably the most famous words of his papacy were uttered in response to a journalist’s question about gay priests: ‘Who am I to judge?’ Like most of Francis’s progressive moves on sex and gender – such as receiving trans Catholics at general audiences – it was symbolic and rhetorical rather than doctrinal. A declaration in 2023 to permit the blessing of couples in same-sex relationships prompted a global tantrum from conservatives; a few weeks later the Vatican issued a barely cogent attack on ‘gender theory’. Francis made no attempt to alter the catechesis that homosexuality is ‘intrinsically disordered’ and gay sex ‘grave depravity’.

The general pattern was of rhetorical progress undercut by doctrinal inertia: praise for women in the church and reaffirmation of male priesthood; a vision of a decentralised church promulgated by a dominating and combative papacy. Real changes to the reporting of abuse, and reckoning with the church’s catastrophic failings, were marred by erratic and temporising decisions on individual cases.

What you make of this depends on where you stand. A cynic might suggest Francis was merely a good PR man, savvy about the disposition of Western progressives but short on substance. A church historian might see a flexible Jesuit cunning in his public statements. Others might acknowledge that, in the lives of the faithful, the symbolic gestures made by the pope are profoundly meaningful, perhaps more so than his doctrinal pronouncements. That is why his washing the feet of migrants, prisoners, women and non-Christians, or his refusing of grand papal apartments, or his daily phone calls to Catholics in Gaza, took on such significance.

His Jesuit background was underexplored. He was the first modern pope to have taken a vow of poverty along with the standard vows of obedience and chastity. His loathing of clericalism – the sycophantic and self-glorifying tendency to exalt the priesthood, which he called a ‘perversion of the church’ – had its roots here. That his ultra-conservative opponents in the church loved lace, gold and watered silk seemed to underline the point. He was especially fond of the Gospel of Matthew and must often have thought of Christ’s disdain for the showy teachers of the law who made their tassels long, who ‘love the place of honour at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues’ but never sought to lighten others’ loads.

Unusually, Francis retained the Jesuit monogram and his episcopal motto in his papal arms. He had chosen the phrase ‘miserando atque eligendo’ from Bede’s homily on the calling of Matthew. Christ saw Matthew, the tax collector, ‘through the eyes of mercy and chose him’. Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church of the peripheries, and for everyone. It runs through his pronouncements on divorce and his spiritual writing on the Sacred Heart, Dilexit Nos (‘he loved us’). It explains his off-the-cuff remark that he hoped Hell was empty, and the way he consoled a weeping boy worried that his non-believer father might not have gone to Heaven.

Christopher Butler, an English abbot who attended Vatican II, once characterised it as a remedy to a church falling into ‘monumental irrelevance’. What was greeted in 2013 as a reforming papacy, determined to tackle that risk anew, seemed simply to run out of steam, exhausted by that monumentality. Francis leaves a troubled and divided church, at risk of degenerating into factional warfare. Conservatives, including ‘MAGA Catholics’ in the US, want an anti-Francis to replace him. That seems improbable, not least because most of the electors were put in place by Francis. Yet what the Curia does is stranger and less predictable than the Oscar-winning clichés of the hit movie Conclave would suggest. It was, after all, a consistory of cardinals chosen by conservative popes that elected Francis.

When I was young, the pope always seemed to be dying. John Paul II’s long, public suffering with Parkinson’s made him an emblem for Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. At the time, I thought it sad and cruel. But I came to understand something of that emblematic force as I watched the ailing Francis insist on visiting prisoners, gasping out greetings, being present for his Easter message, speaking against the madness of rearmament and war, squeezing every last opportunity to speak to the world as it continues to erect new prisons and walls, and new oligarchic idols. ‘Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,’ Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. ‘Theirs is the construction site of Hell.’