Humble, but determined, Francis bent the papacy to his will

National Post, 21 April 2025

To certain traditional Catholic ears, the pontiff from Buenos Aires was cause for concern. To more worldly ears, he was cause for rejoicing

The real achievement of Pope Francis was not often remarked. It was that he managed to do the job at all, sometimes well, sometimes less so. But after two historic predecessors, the great fear was the office would overwhelm the man.

Pope John Paul II, already canonized, was spoken of by Francis himself as “the Great” — a title given only to Pope Leo the Great (440-461) and Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). John Paul, one of the dominant figures of the 20th century, is amongst those few popes who will be remembered centuries after his death. Likewise, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, a rare case of a towering theologian seated on the papal throne, will be studied for generations hence. They were unusual; most popes, maximally prominent during their lives, fade quickly after their deaths.

In 2013, the question was whether any successor could truly succeed. The demands of the modern papacy were such that Benedict abdicated under the increasing burden of age. Even the most accomplished of men might be crushed by the burden. But Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, the first Latin American pope, was not at all overwhelmed.

From the first he bent the ancient office to his will, refusing to wear the customary ceremonial garb on the balcony, refusing to use the papal car (he hopped on the Cardinals’ shuttle bus) and then refusing to live in the papal residence (he took quarters in the Vatican hotel). He was confident and charted his own course.

No office — even one established by Jesus Christ — can endure if it requires only superheroes to fill it. Pope Francis brought the office back down to size after 35 years of giants, John Paul and Benedict.

The humble Pope was massively popular at the outset, paying his own hotel bill after the conclave, calling the newspaper vendor back home to cancel his subscription, inviting a garbage scavenger he had befriended to his inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square. A more familiar papacy emerged — Francis gave lengthy press conferences while airborne on trips, engaged a parade of journalists, providing material for a constant stream of stories, and published some two dozen interview books.

All that made the papacy not only humble in style, but smaller in impact. Often enough Francis became only another voice in the noisy digital environment. Last year and this year he released what were billed as “first-ever autobiographies.” Both sank without making a significant splash.

The rhetorical shrinking began at the outset when, just months into his papacy, Francis made his most famous statement, in what would become the signature theme of his pontificate: “Who am I to judge?”

To certain more traditional Catholic ears, the answer was obvious: The Pope. Popes judge. As Jesus did, frequently enough with great severity — “throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

To more worldly ears, Francis was cause for rejoicing. The age of nonjudgmentalism had found an unlikely hero in, astonishingly, the Roman Pontiff. The laudations sounded around the world, especially because the context of “who am I to judge?” was a question about homosexuality. Pope Francis didn’t change Church teaching, but his manner and mode of teaching was a change from his predecessors. It was widely welcomed with enthusiasm.

Time magazine named him Person of the Year before his first anniversary; as did the gay magazine The Advocate. In contrast, John Paul had been pope for 16 years and brought down the Iron Curtain before Time gave him similar recognition in 1994. The secular world, and the various quarters of liberal Christianity, were euphoric. Finally, the pope they had fervently desired had arrived, a pope who would not pontificate.

Francis was more complicated than that.

In point of fact, he delivered judgments on a wider array of topics than his predecessors, and in much more vivid language. Abortion, he said, was “like hiring a hitman.” Gender theory was the “ugliest ideology of our time.” “This economy kills,” he said of financial markets. Regarding his closest collaborators in the Vatican, he identified “curial diseases” to which they were prone — and then proceeded to list more than a dozen of them, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, “rivalry and vainglory,” “existential schizophrenia,” “indifference to others” and a “lugubrious face.”

No pope in living memory spoke like that.

And none of his predecessors spoke so specifically on policy matters, preferring to restrict themselves more to principles than practical application. Pope Francis released a major encyclical — the highest form of papal teaching — specifically to influence the 2015 Paris climate conference. He objected to the immigration policies of President Donald Trump and various European conservative political parties. He made no secret of his sympathy for Palestinians relative to Israelis, calling every day the Catholic parish in Gaza since the Hamas war began. And he advised Ukraine to have the courage to embrace the “white flag” in the face of Russia’s invasion.

In foreign policy, so to speak, his impact was limited. His advocacy of the climate change agenda and liberal migration was ardent, but his papacy ended with both losing popularity and suffering policy reversals.

Regarding tyrants, he never found the same voice he had on other issues. Ukrainians were frustrated that he found it difficult to condemn Russia’s aggression by name. The persecution of Catholics in China intensified, but Francis never said a word. In Venezuela and Nicaragua, the regimes openly declared war on the Catholic Church — the latter expelled Mother Teresa’s nuns and threw bishops in jail without trial — and the first Latin American pope could not muster a robust response.

The things he didn’t say about China and Russia angered conservatives. The things he did say about Church practice — on blessings for same-sex couples, for example — encouraged liberals, but over time they lamented that words — not concrete reforms — seemed to be his limit.

Toward the end, Pope Francis became a figure of affection more than admiration. Conservatives objected to his liberalizing tendencies; liberals objected that they remained only tendencies. Yet the affection remained for a modest pastor who had a heart transparently open to the suffering and the afflicted, those on the margins and the “peripheries” — a word he introduced into Catholic vocabulary, an echo of Jesus’ command to feed, clothe, and visit the “least of my brethren.”

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