Francis In Full
BISHOP, DIOCESE OF
WINONA-ROCHESTER,
MINNESOTA
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made at one of the General Congregations preceding the conclave of 2013. The archbishop of Buenos Aires spoke in a simple but passionate way of a Church that goes out from itself to the margins, both economic and existential, in order to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ. Wearied by the scandals that bedeviled Pope Benedict XVI in the latter years of his papacy and eager for a breath of fresh air, the cardinals turned to this man who spoke with such clarity and confidence. Cardinal Bergoglio’s eloquent speech signaled continuity with the deepest instincts of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, with the teaching of Pope Paul VI, with the rich and complex magisterium of Pope John Paul II, and with the witness of Pope Benedict XVI. I believe that his brother cardinals correctly sensed in his oration the best of the conciliar and postconciliar elan.
And I further believe that Pope Francis did indeed make the evangelical outreach to the wider world the leitmotif of his papacy. During the ad limina visit of the California bishops in early 2020, I heard Francis say that Evangelii Gaudium, his apostolic exhortation on the new evangelization, was “the key to understanding” his magisterium. That text, whose title cleverly combines Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi and Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, speaks of a Church in permanent mission, always in an attitude of joyful extraversion.
Time and again, in his sermons and popular presentations, Pope Francis urged priests to “get out of the sacristies” and into the streets, to get their hands dirty, and most famously, to “smell of the sheep” they serve. Early in his papacy, he was asked whether it bothered him to see priests dressed in cassocks. His response: “As long as they roll up their sleeves and get to work, I don’t really care what they wear.” In a memorable homily for the Chrism Mass some years ago, the pope told priests that the oil of their ordination must run down their heads, onto their vestments, and finally off their vestments into the world. If this flow is interrupted, he said, the sacred oil becomes rancid.
All of this is congruent with an image of the Church that he employed in the opening months of his papacy, namely that of the field hospital. An essential aspect of the missionary outreach of the Church is to those who have been seriously wounded in the blasted cultural space of postmodernity. It is important to note that field hospitals, on the edge of battlefields, are not places where minor injuries are addressed; they are for the most urgent care possible. Here I think that Francis’s reference in his General Congregation address to the “existential” margins has been underappreciated. He was implying that the missionary effort of the Church is not simply to the economically poor and politically disenfranchised, but also to those who are poor intellectually, culturally, and spiritually.
The last thirty years or so have witnessed the massive disaffiliation of young people in the West from the churches and a simultaneous increase among them in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. In describing the mission to the existential margins, Francis raised a prophetic voice. The instinct for the margins conditioned many of the practical moves that Pope Francis made: including more women in the governance of the Church, dramatically increasing the profile of the Vatican almoner, advocating for migrants, and most remarkably, choosing cardinals from the ends of the world, even from tiny dioceses that had never before been considered cardinalatial sees.
Perhaps the most obvious mark of Francis’s papacy was simplicity. Shaped profoundly by the Ignatian discipline of detachment, Francis sought to embody the poverty of spirit that he wished for the entire Church. As is well known, just days after his election to the Chair of Peter, he returned to the humble clerical residence where he had been lodging prior to the conclave and paid his bill in person. He elected to live, not in the papal palace but in three basic rooms in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guest house. (I stayed there once while attending a conference and can attest that it is anything but elegant.)
He rode in an almost comically tiny Fiat. I recall standing on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington with my brother bishops on the occasion of Francis’s visit to the United States. A fleet of luxury vehicles pulled up one by one, carrying presidents, prime ministers, and other dignitaries—and then came the miniscule papal car, the incongruity prompting a guffaw from the bystanders.
During the Francis years, ostentatious clerical garb was out (with Gamarelli’s coming in for regular criticism), and Castel Gandolfo, the lovely papal retreat in the hills outside of Rome, fell into disuse. When Francis assumed the papal office, the Church was embroiled in a particularly terrible round of clerical sex abuse and financial scandals. The new pope’s embrace of a poorer, more evangelical lifestyle appealed to many around the world and served to change the conversation, at least for a time.
Another key theme of the Francis papacy was care for the earth. I understand that, in making this remark, I can leave the impression Pope Francis was little more than a standard Euro-left environmentalist, but this would be a gross misinterpretation. When his encyclical Laudato Si appeared, many thought of it as the “global warming” letter, but this is rather spectacularly to overlook the biblical and philosophical underpinning of the text. In calling the Church back to a concern for the earth, which had become, in the pope’s memorable phrase, “a pile of filth,” he was appealing to a biblical and premodern sensibility that situated humanity in the wider framework of God’s creation.
An inspiration for Laudato Si was, of course, St. Francis of Assisi, but so, too, was the hugely influential twentieth-century theologian who was the subject of the young Jorge Bergoglio’s doctoral research, namely, Romano Guardini. In a number of texts, but especially in his early-career Letters from Lake Como, Guardini had sharply criticized the manner in which modern philosophy—anthropocentric and technocratic—had effected, in the long run, an abuse of nature. He lamented the decline from the older architecture around Lake Como, which conformed to the patterns and rhythms of nature, to the newer buildings that imposed themselves aggressively on the environment.
Under the influence of Guardini, Pope Francis scored a Cartesian rationalism that would “master nature” and a Baconian scientism that would “put nature on the rack” so as to compel it to reveal its secrets. The pope’s preference for a pre-modern perspective on the relationship between human beings and the environment brought him close to the perspectives of Thomas Aquinas and the author of Genesis. It is worth noting, as well, that in this regard, Francis’s thought echoed closely that of Benedict XVI, who was known as “the green pope.”
There is no question that Francis was dedicated to the range of issues that we categorize under the heading of “social justice,” and this brought him in line with practically all of his predecessors back to Leo XIII. His preoccupation with these matters found dramatic expression in his visit to the refugees on Lampedusa, in his excoriation of unfettered capitalism as “an economy that kills,” and in his insistence on welcoming the migrant. A novelty of Francis’s social doctrine was the extrapolation from individual ethics to the ethical obligations that should obtain among and between nations.
In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, the pope called upon the classic Catholic teaching regarding the universal destination of goods. With its roots in the Bible, the Church Fathers, and especially Thomas Aquinas, this doctrine holds that though private ownership is morally permissible, the use of what one owns must be governed primarily by a concern for the common good. In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII drew upon this teaching when he commented, “once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.”
Francis applied the same principle to international relations, insisting that richer countries, though certainly permitted to own their own property and economic goods, have a moral obligation to aid poorer nations. For his troubles, Francis was called—even by some devout Catholics—a Marxist, though “Thomist” would have been a far fairer description. With particular verve, Francis highlighted a theme dear to John Paul II, namely, that a market economy must not be left to its own devices but rather be circumscribed by a moral sensibility.
What I find perhaps most intriguing about Pope Francis is what he didn’t do. In the first days following his election, the buzz was that he was a “conservative,” an authoritarian whom the Jesuits had exiled after difficult years in administration. But soon enough, when it became clear that Francis in fact leaned to the port side of the ideological spectrum, many on the Catholic left commenced to see him as the long-awaited liberal savior, the one who would revive the postconciliar dream that had been punctured by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis, they were convinced, would, at long last, bring us married priests, women priests, and gay marriage, a liberalizing of the Church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and birth control.
Well, he delivered on precisely none of it. The great Catholic surrender to the demands of the culture didn’t happen on his watch, and it was amusing in the extreme to watch the mainstream liberal Catholic media try to come to terms with this. In fact, abortion had no stronger opponent than Francis, who frequently compared it to the “hiring of a hitman.” And he was a strenuous critic of what he often called “gender ideology,” the imposition of which on developing nations he termed “ideological colonization.”
I can testify that at the California ad limina, Pope Francis urged us, as we were leaving the room, to fight with all our strength against the gender ideology that, he said, is repugnant to the Bible and to the teaching of the Church. Regarding married and female clergy, Francis did indeed allow the issue of women in the diaconate to surface at the Synod on Synodality, but then he consigned it to a study group whose findings would appear at some indefinite point in the future. One might be forgiven for thinking that he was effectively kicking the can down the road. Despite his sometimes freewheeling style and imprecise manner of speaking, Pope Francis held the line, demonstrating thereby the mysterious guidance of the Holy Spirit over the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church. All of the aforesaid I would count among the very real accomplishments of Pope Francis.
And yet, what one reads in almost every assessment of the late pope is that he was, at the very least, “controversial,” “confusing,” “ambiguous.” Some commentators would go so far as to say that he was heretical, undermining the ancient traditions of the Church. I do not at all subscribe to that latter position, but I sympathize to a degree with the former characterizations. Pope Francis was a puzzling figure in many ways, seeming to delight in confounding expectations, zigging when you thought he would zag. He famously told the young people gathered for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro to “hagan lío” (make a mess), and sometimes he appeared to take pleasure in doing just that.
One of the messier moments of the Francis pontificate was the two-part Synod on the Family, which took place in 2014 and 2015. The fact that Walter Cardinal Kasper, a long-time advocate of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, spoke at the outset of the gathering indicated rather clearly the direction that Pope Francis wanted the synod to take. But he was met with stiff resistance from bishops, especially from the developing world, and when the final document appeared, the famous Amoris Laetitia, the question seemed oddly unresolved, open to a variety of interpretations. When the pope’s apologists pointed to an obscure footnote buried deep in the document as providing the requisite clarity, many in the Church were, to say the least, incredulous. And when four cardinals petitioned the pope to resolve a number of puzzles (dubia, in the technical jargon) that Amoris Laetitia had raised in their minds, they were basically ignored.
There are indeed many beautiful insights in Amoris Laetitia, but they were largely overlooked due to the controversy and ambiguity that accompanied the document. Indeed, in the wake of its publication, a sort of “doctrinal anarchy” was let loose, as various bishops’ conferences gave the document varying interpretations, so that, for example, what remained a mortal sin in Poland seemed permissible in Malta. If a primary responsibility of the pope is to maintain unity in doctrine and morals, it is hard to see how Pope Francis met that obligation throughout that synodal process and its aftermath.
And he oddly did not seem to learn from this situation. In 2023, after the first round of the Synod on Synodality (more on this anon), Pope Francis’s doctrinal chief, Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, issued the statement Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed for the possibility of blessing those in same-sex unions. To say that a firestorm broke out in the Catholic world would be an understatement, and the opposition was led, once again, by Catholic leaders from the non-Western sphere. In an astonishing display of unity and courage, the bishops of Africa said that they would not enforce the teaching of Fiducia in their countries, and the pope backed down, permitting them to dissent from the document. That all of this unfolded immediately after a gathering of four hundred leaders from around the Catholic world, who were never consulted on the matter, simply beggars belief. Once again, the pope struggled to maintain the unity of the Church.
At times, too, the pope’s admirably generous instincts appeared to lead him into saying doctrinally imprecise things or countenancing problematic behaviors. An example of the first would be his endorsement, on a number of occasions, of the proposition that all religions are legitimate paths to God, like differing languages speaking the same truth. Now, given his clear enthusiasm for evangelization, I want to be generous in my interpretation of his words, construing them perhaps along the lines of the Second Vatican Council’s assertion that there are elements of truth in all religions. But I think it is fair to say that the pope at least gave the strong impression of religious indifferentism.
As an example of his countenancing of problematic behaviors, I would point to the (in)famous Pachamama incident at the Synod on the Amazon in 2019. Though there remains a good deal of confusion about the purpose of the placement of the Pachamama statue in the Vatican Gardens during a prayer with the pope, it is certainly fair to say that it generated much controversy and that the various attempts to explain it only made matters worse. Once more, the pope found himself in the middle of a self-created and completely unnecessary kerfuffle, the man supposed to guarantee unity at least implicitly undermining it.
No one doubts that Pope Francis was rhetorically gifted, not in the academic manner of John Paul II or Benedict XVI to be sure, but in the manner of a parish priest adept at popular homilizing. And his speech very often had an edge. Here are a few of his gems: “Mr. and Mrs. Whiner”; “liquid Christian”; “pickled-pepper-faced Christian”; “weak to the point of rottenness”; “Church who is more spinster than mother.” And I believe it is fair to say that his rhetorical venom was, more often than not, directed at conservative Catholics. Here are a few more zingers: “the closed, legalistic slave of his own rigidity”; “doctors of the letter!”; “Rigidity conceals the leading of a double life, something pathological”; “professionals of the sacred! Reactionaries”; and, most famously, “backwardists.”
I know that these withering criticisms often deeply discouraged orthodox Catholics, especially young priests and seminarians, whom the pope once referred to as “little monsters.” On one occasion, during the first session of the Synod on Synodality, the pope spoke to the assembled delegates. This sort of direct papal intervention was extremely rare, for, to his credit, the pope did not want excessively to sway or dominate the discussion. He spoke, in a sarcastic tone, of young clerics in Rome who spend too much time at the clerical haberdashery shops, trying on hats, collars, and cassocks. Now, there may indeed be some immature priests and students who are preoccupied with such things, but it struck me as exceedingly strange that this was the topic the pope chose for this rare opportunity to address some of the top leadership of the Church.
To me, it indicated a curious fixation on, and demonization of, the more conservatively minded. And what made matters even more mystifying is that Francis had to have known that the Church is flourishing precisely among its more conservative members. As the famously liberal church of Germany withers on the vine, the conservative, supernaturally-oriented church of Nigeria is exploding in numbers. And in the West, the lively parts of the Church are, without doubt, those that embrace a vibrant orthodoxy rather than those that accommodate the secularist culture. Many of the pope’s expressions and stories were indeed funny, but one would be hard pressed to characterize them as invitations to dialogue with conservative interlocutors.
By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about synodality, which I believe Francis himself would identify as his signature theme. I was privileged to be an elected delegate to both sessions of the Synod on Synodality. For two months, I listened to and spoke with representatives from all over the world, and I learned a lot about how Catholics respond to challenges in remarkably diverse cultural milieux. I very much enjoyed the conversations, both those formal exchanges around the table, and even more so, the informal chats during coffee breaks. I came to understand the pope’s Jesuit-inspired process of prayerful discernment.
I also came, I must admit, to appreciate the limits of synodality. Though every dialogue was lively and informative, very few of them moved toward decision, judgment, or resolution. Most were stuck at what Bernard Lonergan would call the second stage of the epistemic process, namely, being intelligent or having bright ideas. They didn’t move to Lonergan’s third level, which is the act of making a judgment, much less to his fourth stage, which is that of responsible action. So respectful were we of the “process” of conversation that we had almost a phobia of coming to decision.
This is a fatal problem for Christians entrusted with the evangelical command to announce Christ to the world. The upshot is something that I believe is repugnant to what Pope Francis has consistently said he wants the Church to be: extroverted, mission-oriented, not stuck in the sacristy. I wondered at times during the two rounds of the synod whether synodality represented a tension within the mind and heart of Francis himself.
Of all of the popes in my lifetime, Francis is, by far, the one I knew the best. I was with him for three Octobers: the two already mentioned, and a third for the Synod on Young People in 2018. During those wonderful months, I saw him practically every day and had a few occasions to speak to him. I also encountered him on an ad limina visit and at a handful of other audiences. I always found him gracious, funny, and approachable; once we had a short but intense spiritual conversation. I considered him my spiritual father and sincerely mourn his passing. Requiescat in pace.
By common consensus, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio won the papacy by means of an intervention he made at one of the General Congregations preceding the conclave of 2013. The archbishop of Buenos Aires spoke in a simple but passionate way of a Church that goes out from itself to the margins, both economic and existential, in order to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ. Wearied by the scandals that bedeviled Pope Benedict XVI in the latter years of his papacy and eager for a breath of fresh air, the cardinals turned to this man who spoke with such clarity and confidence. Cardinal Bergoglio’s eloquent speech signaled continuity with the deepest instincts of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, with the teaching of Pope Paul VI, with the rich and complex magisterium of Pope John Paul II, and with the witness of Pope Benedict XVI. I believe that his brother cardinals correctly sensed in his oration the best of the conciliar and postconciliar elan.
And I further believe that Pope Francis did indeed make the evangelical outreach to the wider world the leitmotif of his papacy. During the ad limina visit of the California bishops in early 2020, I heard Francis say that Evangelii Gaudium, his apostolic exhortation on the new evangelization, was “the key to understanding” his magisterium. That text, whose title cleverly combines Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi and Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, speaks of a Church in permanent mission, always in an attitude of joyful extraversion.
Time and again, in his sermons and popular presentations, Pope Francis urged priests to “get out of the sacristies” and into the streets, to get their hands dirty, and most famously, to “smell of the sheep” they serve. Early in his papacy, he was asked whether it bothered him to see priests dressed in cassocks. His response: “As long as they roll up their sleeves and get to work, I don’t really care what they wear.” In a memorable homily for the Chrism Mass some years ago, the pope told priests that the oil of their ordination must run down their heads, onto their vestments, and finally off their vestments into the world. If this flow is interrupted, he said, the sacred oil becomes rancid.
All of this is congruent with an image of the Church that he employed in the opening months of his papacy, namely that of the field hospital. An essential aspect of the missionary outreach of the Church is to those who have been seriously wounded in the blasted cultural space of postmodernity. It is important to note that field hospitals, on the edge of battlefields, are not places where minor injuries are addressed; they are for the most urgent care possible. Here I think that Francis’s reference in his General Congregation address to the “existential” margins has been underappreciated. He was implying that the missionary effort of the Church is not simply to the economically poor and politically disenfranchised, but also to those who are poor intellectually, culturally, and spiritually.
The last thirty years or so have witnessed the massive disaffiliation of young people in the West from the churches and a simultaneous increase among them in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. In describing the mission to the existential margins, Francis raised a prophetic voice. The instinct for the margins conditioned many of the practical moves that Pope Francis made: including more women in the governance of the Church, dramatically increasing the profile of the Vatican almoner, advocating for migrants, and most remarkably, choosing cardinals from the ends of the world, even from tiny dioceses that had never before been considered cardinalatial sees.
Perhaps the most obvious mark of Francis’s papacy was simplicity. Shaped profoundly by the Ignatian discipline of detachment, Francis sought to embody the poverty of spirit that he wished for the entire Church. As is well known, just days after his election to the Chair of Peter, he returned to the humble clerical residence where he had been lodging prior to the conclave and paid his bill in person. He elected to live, not in the papal palace but in three basic rooms in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guest house. (I stayed there once while attending a conference and can attest that it is anything but elegant.)
He rode in an almost comically tiny Fiat. I recall standing on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington with my brother bishops on the occasion of Francis’s visit to the United States. A fleet of luxury vehicles pulled up one by one, carrying presidents, prime ministers, and other dignitaries—and then came the miniscule papal car, the incongruity prompting a guffaw from the bystanders.
During the Francis years, ostentatious clerical garb was out (with Gamarelli’s coming in for regular criticism), and Castel Gandolfo, the lovely papal retreat in the hills outside of Rome, fell into disuse. When Francis assumed the papal office, the Church was embroiled in a particularly terrible round of clerical sex abuse and financial scandals. The new pope’s embrace of a poorer, more evangelical lifestyle appealed to many around the world and served to change the conversation, at least for a time.
Another key theme of the Francis papacy was care for the earth. I understand that, in making this remark, I can leave the impression Pope Francis was little more than a standard Euro-left environmentalist, but this would be a gross misinterpretation. When his encyclical Laudato Si appeared, many thought of it as the “global warming” letter, but this is rather spectacularly to overlook the biblical and philosophical underpinning of the text. In calling the Church back to a concern for the earth, which had become, in the pope’s memorable phrase, “a pile of filth,” he was appealing to a biblical and premodern sensibility that situated humanity in the wider framework of God’s creation.
An inspiration for Laudato Si was, of course, St. Francis of Assisi, but so, too, was the hugely influential twentieth-century theologian who was the subject of the young Jorge Bergoglio’s doctoral research, namely, Romano Guardini. In a number of texts, but especially in his early-career Letters from Lake Como, Guardini had sharply criticized the manner in which modern philosophy—anthropocentric and technocratic—had effected, in the long run, an abuse of nature. He lamented the decline from the older architecture around Lake Como, which conformed to the patterns and rhythms of nature, to the newer buildings that imposed themselves aggressively on the environment.
Under the influence of Guardini, Pope Francis scored a Cartesian rationalism that would “master nature” and a Baconian scientism that would “put nature on the rack” so as to compel it to reveal its secrets. The pope’s preference for a pre-modern perspective on the relationship between human beings and the environment brought him close to the perspectives of Thomas Aquinas and the author of Genesis. It is worth noting, as well, that in this regard, Francis’s thought echoed closely that of Benedict XVI, who was known as “the green pope.”
There is no question that Francis was dedicated to the range of issues that we categorize under the heading of “social justice,” and this brought him in line with practically all of his predecessors back to Leo XIII. His preoccupation with these matters found dramatic expression in his visit to the refugees on Lampedusa, in his excoriation of unfettered capitalism as “an economy that kills,” and in his insistence on welcoming the migrant. A novelty of Francis’s social doctrine was the extrapolation from individual ethics to the ethical obligations that should obtain among and between nations.
In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, the pope called upon the classic Catholic teaching regarding the universal destination of goods. With its roots in the Bible, the Church Fathers, and especially Thomas Aquinas, this doctrine holds that though private ownership is morally permissible, the use of what one owns must be governed primarily by a concern for the common good. In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII drew upon this teaching when he commented, “once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.”
Francis applied the same principle to international relations, insisting that richer countries, though certainly permitted to own their own property and economic goods, have a moral obligation to aid poorer nations. For his troubles, Francis was called—even by some devout Catholics—a Marxist, though “Thomist” would have been a far fairer description. With particular verve, Francis highlighted a theme dear to John Paul II, namely, that a market economy must not be left to its own devices but rather be circumscribed by a moral sensibility.
What I find perhaps most intriguing about Pope Francis is what he didn’t do. In the first days following his election, the buzz was that he was a “conservative,” an authoritarian whom the Jesuits had exiled after difficult years in administration. But soon enough, when it became clear that Francis in fact leaned to the port side of the ideological spectrum, many on the Catholic left commenced to see him as the long-awaited liberal savior, the one who would revive the postconciliar dream that had been punctured by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis, they were convinced, would, at long last, bring us married priests, women priests, and gay marriage, a liberalizing of the Church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and birth control.
Well, he delivered on precisely none of it. The great Catholic surrender to the demands of the culture didn’t happen on his watch, and it was amusing in the extreme to watch the mainstream liberal Catholic media try to come to terms with this. In fact, abortion had no stronger opponent than Francis, who frequently compared it to the “hiring of a hitman.” And he was a strenuous critic of what he often called “gender ideology,” the imposition of which on developing nations he termed “ideological colonization.”
I can testify that at the California ad limina, Pope Francis urged us, as we were leaving the room, to fight with all our strength against the gender ideology that, he said, is repugnant to the Bible and to the teaching of the Church. Regarding married and female clergy, Francis did indeed allow the issue of women in the diaconate to surface at the Synod on Synodality, but then he consigned it to a study group whose findings would appear at some indefinite point in the future. One might be forgiven for thinking that he was effectively kicking the can down the road. Despite his sometimes freewheeling style and imprecise manner of speaking, Pope Francis held the line, demonstrating thereby the mysterious guidance of the Holy Spirit over the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church. All of the aforesaid I would count among the very real accomplishments of Pope Francis.
And yet, what one reads in almost every assessment of the late pope is that he was, at the very least, “controversial,” “confusing,” “ambiguous.” Some commentators would go so far as to say that he was heretical, undermining the ancient traditions of the Church. I do not at all subscribe to that latter position, but I sympathize to a degree with the former characterizations. Pope Francis was a puzzling figure in many ways, seeming to delight in confounding expectations, zigging when you thought he would zag. He famously told the young people gathered for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro to “hagan lío” (make a mess), and sometimes he appeared to take pleasure in doing just that.
One of the messier moments of the Francis pontificate was the two-part Synod on the Family, which took place in 2014 and 2015. The fact that Walter Cardinal Kasper, a long-time advocate of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, spoke at the outset of the gathering indicated rather clearly the direction that Pope Francis wanted the synod to take. But he was met with stiff resistance from bishops, especially from the developing world, and when the final document appeared, the famous Amoris Laetitia, the question seemed oddly unresolved, open to a variety of interpretations. When the pope’s apologists pointed to an obscure footnote buried deep in the document as providing the requisite clarity, many in the Church were, to say the least, incredulous. And when four cardinals petitioned the pope to resolve a number of puzzles (dubia, in the technical jargon) that Amoris Laetitia had raised in their minds, they were basically ignored.
There are indeed many beautiful insights in Amoris Laetitia, but they were largely overlooked due to the controversy and ambiguity that accompanied the document. Indeed, in the wake of its publication, a sort of “doctrinal anarchy” was let loose, as various bishops’ conferences gave the document varying interpretations, so that, for example, what remained a mortal sin in Poland seemed permissible in Malta. If a primary responsibility of the pope is to maintain unity in doctrine and morals, it is hard to see how Pope Francis met that obligation throughout that synodal process and its aftermath.
And he oddly did not seem to learn from this situation. In 2023, after the first round of the Synod on Synodality (more on this anon), Pope Francis’s doctrinal chief, Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, issued the statement Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed for the possibility of blessing those in same-sex unions. To say that a firestorm broke out in the Catholic world would be an understatement, and the opposition was led, once again, by Catholic leaders from the non-Western sphere. In an astonishing display of unity and courage, the bishops of Africa said that they would not enforce the teaching of Fiducia in their countries, and the pope backed down, permitting them to dissent from the document. That all of this unfolded immediately after a gathering of four hundred leaders from around the Catholic world, who were never consulted on the matter, simply beggars belief. Once again, the pope struggled to maintain the unity of the Church.
At times, too, the pope’s admirably generous instincts appeared to lead him into saying doctrinally imprecise things or countenancing problematic behaviors. An example of the first would be his endorsement, on a number of occasions, of the proposition that all religions are legitimate paths to God, like differing languages speaking the same truth. Now, given his clear enthusiasm for evangelization, I want to be generous in my interpretation of his words, construing them perhaps along the lines of the Second Vatican Council’s assertion that there are elements of truth in all religions. But I think it is fair to say that the pope at least gave the strong impression of religious indifferentism.
As an example of his countenancing of problematic behaviors, I would point to the (in)famous Pachamama incident at the Synod on the Amazon in 2019. Though there remains a good deal of confusion about the purpose of the placement of the Pachamama statue in the Vatican Gardens during a prayer with the pope, it is certainly fair to say that it generated much controversy and that the various attempts to explain it only made matters worse. Once more, the pope found himself in the middle of a self-created and completely unnecessary kerfuffle, the man supposed to guarantee unity at least implicitly undermining it.
No one doubts that Pope Francis was rhetorically gifted, not in the academic manner of John Paul II or Benedict XVI to be sure, but in the manner of a parish priest adept at popular homilizing. And his speech very often had an edge. Here are a few of his gems: “Mr. and Mrs. Whiner”; “liquid Christian”; “pickled-pepper-faced Christian”; “weak to the point of rottenness”; “Church who is more spinster than mother.” And I believe it is fair to say that his rhetorical venom was, more often than not, directed at conservative Catholics. Here are a few more zingers: “the closed, legalistic slave of his own rigidity”; “doctors of the letter!”; “Rigidity conceals the leading of a double life, something pathological”; “professionals of the sacred! Reactionaries”; and, most famously, “backwardists.”
I know that these withering criticisms often deeply discouraged orthodox Catholics, especially young priests and seminarians, whom the pope once referred to as “little monsters.” On one occasion, during the first session of the Synod on Synodality, the pope spoke to the assembled delegates. This sort of direct papal intervention was extremely rare, for, to his credit, the pope did not want excessively to sway or dominate the discussion. He spoke, in a sarcastic tone, of young clerics in Rome who spend too much time at the clerical haberdashery shops, trying on hats, collars, and cassocks. Now, there may indeed be some immature priests and students who are preoccupied with such things, but it struck me as exceedingly strange that this was the topic the pope chose for this rare opportunity to address some of the top leadership of the Church.
To me, it indicated a curious fixation on, and demonization of, the more conservatively minded. And what made matters even more mystifying is that Francis had to have known that the Church is flourishing precisely among its more conservative members. As the famously liberal church of Germany withers on the vine, the conservative, supernaturally-oriented church of Nigeria is exploding in numbers. And in the West, the lively parts of the Church are, without doubt, those that embrace a vibrant orthodoxy rather than those that accommodate the secularist culture. Many of the pope’s expressions and stories were indeed funny, but one would be hard pressed to characterize them as invitations to dialogue with conservative interlocutors.
By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about synodality, which I believe Francis himself would identify as his signature theme. I was privileged to be an elected delegate to both sessions of the Synod on Synodality. For two months, I listened to and spoke with representatives from all over the world, and I learned a lot about how Catholics respond to challenges in remarkably diverse cultural milieux. I very much enjoyed the conversations, both those formal exchanges around the table, and even more so, the informal chats during coffee breaks. I came to understand the pope’s Jesuit-inspired process of prayerful discernment.
I also came, I must admit, to appreciate the limits of synodality. Though every dialogue was lively and informative, very few of them moved toward decision, judgment, or resolution. Most were stuck at what Bernard Lonergan would call the second stage of the epistemic process, namely, being intelligent or having bright ideas. They didn’t move to Lonergan’s third level, which is the act of making a judgment, much less to his fourth stage, which is that of responsible action. So respectful were we of the “process” of conversation that we had almost a phobia of coming to decision.
This is a fatal problem for Christians entrusted with the evangelical command to announce Christ to the world. The upshot is something that I believe is repugnant to what Pope Francis has consistently said he wants the Church to be: extroverted, mission-oriented, not stuck in the sacristy. I wondered at times during the two rounds of the synod whether synodality represented a tension within the mind and heart of Francis himself.
Of all of the popes in my lifetime, Francis is, by far, the one I knew the best. I was with him for three Octobers: the two already mentioned, and a third for the Synod on Young People in 2018. During those wonderful months, I saw him practically every day and had a few occasions to speak to him. I also encountered him on an ad limina visit and at a handful of other audiences. I always found him gracious, funny, and approachable; once we had a short but intense spiritual conversation. I considered him my spiritual father and sincerely mourn his passing. Requiescat in pace.
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