I am by no means glad that Pope Francis is dead, but I must admit that I am relieved that his papacy is over — or I would be, if I didn’t suspect that even worse is to come.
Pope Francis was consistently and unreasonably generous towards those he deemed his theopolitical allies, regardless of their moral failings; consistently and unreasonably mean-spirited towards those he deemed his theopolitical enemies, regardless of their piety and devotion to the Church; and habitually prone to sowing confusion about what that Church teaches, as well as about its authority to teach it. About people to whom he had decided to be friendly, he asked, “Who am I to judge?” About people whom he was inclined to mistrust, for instance those who prefer the Latin Mass, he was instantaneous and inflexible in his judgments. As Colm Tóibín wrote in a long 2021 essay that mainly focuses on Francis’s pre-papal career in Argentina, “Bergoglio could play the anarchist one moment and the next revert to his role as authoritarian.” The unpredictability and inconsistency were problematic, especially once he became Pope.
However: Francis offered much wise and vital teaching in Laudato Sí — I wish that were more widely discussed in assessments of his legacy. (I wrote about it here.)
There’s a good chance that his successor will be more impartial than Francis was — less Schmittian in his deployment of a Friend/Enemy scheme in dealing with people — and that he will be clearer in his articulation of what Catholicism teaches and why.
I’m less confident, though, thanks to Francis’s work at reshaping the institution in his image, that the next Pope will be as independent of the Zeitgeist as he ought to be. Pio Nono got many individual judgments wrong, but when he (rather indignantly) denied that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” he was spot on. It is the task of Christ’s Church to preach and teach the Gospel and help the world to come to terms with it. I am of course not Roman Catholic, but any branch of the church that does that particular work earns my gratitude.
My fear is is that Francis has reshaped the imperatives of the Roman communion in ways that make it overly sensitive to the indignation of the bien-pensant and insufficiently sensitive to the unchanging message of the Christian Gospel. My hope is that my fear is unwarranted.
UPDATE: Elizabeth Bruenig:
It was the pope’s efforts to quell growing Western hostility toward migrants that recently put him directly at odds with the Trump administration. After Vice President J. D. Vance had a public spat with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the rollback of a Biden-era law preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending undocumented migrants in schools and churches, Francis wrote a letter that seemed to chastise Vance directly. “The true ordo amoris,” Francis wrote, citing a Catholic term Vance had invoked to defend the proposition that love of kin and countryman should reign supreme, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan.’” That is, he continued, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Francis was right about that too, and vitally so. Matthew 12:50 is worth remembering here, as well as Matthew 25:34–40. (The problem with Bruenig’s essay, by the way, is that she doesn’t clearly distinguish between political progressivism and theological “progressivism.”)
Like many other progressive celebrants of Francis, Bruenig speaks of Francis’s “opponents” as though they picked fights with him, when in fact the opposite was often true. Francis was regularly sneering towards and contemptuous of traditionalists who had never said a bad word about him and both prayed for him and encouraged others to pray for him. In Evangelii Gaudium, for instance, he wrote that “In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time.” That many of those traditionalists are not “ostentatious” but rather heartfelt, and that they promote the Latin Mass and highly traditional forms of Catholic spirituality precisely because they believe such practices to meet “the concrete needs of the present time,” are facts that Francis preferred never to acknowledge. He judged, and he judged harshly.
Still, when the man was right he was right, and this commendation by James Butler is powerful, moving, and challenging:
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.’
