‘Francis Effect’ difficult to measure
Five years ago today on a wet and wintry Roman afternoon, little-known Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and the papacy he launched was as unprecedented as his name: Pope Francis.
From his initial call on that Vatican balcony to receive the prayers of the faithful before blessing them, he began his papacy with a series of viral media moments that reflected his namesake, the medieval saint of the streets.
Pope Francis embraced the hideously disfigured. He walked through Brazilian slums with its people. He asked “Who am I to judge” a God-seeking gay person. He urged priests to “be shepherds with the smell of sheep.”
He was a rock star — almost literally, as he made the cover of Rolling Stone. In 2015, he enthralled multitudes on the streets of Philadelphia and other U.S. cities. Many spoke of a “Francis Effect,” of
welcoming estranged Catholics back the church.
So five years in, is there a Francis Effect? It depends on what you mean.
Is Francis still widely popular? Yes, though he has lost some points over his handling of sexual abuse by priests, and politically conservative Catholics are cooling to him.
Are the church’s numbers going up or down under his watch? In general, numbers that were going up from the start of the 21st century — two papacies ago — are still going up, and numbers that have been declining since then are still declining.
But ask local Catholics, and they’ll tell you they see the Francis Effect in spiritual terms.
For Natalie Kohuth, a senior liberal arts major at Saint Vincent College near Latrobe, one piece of evidence is in her conversion to Catholicism. There were other factors for the cradle Protestant, including the encouragement of a roommate and others on campus, but it helped to see the example of Francis’ outreach.
One can get so “tunnel-visioned that you forget about the people who fall away,” she said. “He focuses on the fact that we’re all sinners.”
The Rev. Lou Vallone sees the Francis Effect at the grocery store, wedding receptions and family reunions.
“At almost any setting, sooner or later a discussion comes up about him,” said the pastor of St. John of God Parish in McKees Rocks and St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Crescent.
Divorced-and-remarried people, he said, are responding after Francis called on the church to make it easier to get earlier marriages annulled, enabling them access to the sacraments.
“The numbers of people who come to talk to me about investigating annulments has increased exponentially,” Father Vallone said.
The Rev. Charles Bober of St. Kilian Parish in Cranberry sees the Francis Effect in how people respond to Francis’ emphasis on the needy. Early on, Father Bober said, he and the parish councils imagined how they would respond if Pope Francis visited and asked, “What have you guys done?”
Such questions, he said, inspired the creation of a food pantry to help the oftenhidden poor in and around the affluent suburb, as well as a weekly meal for the hungry and lonely.
Maria Franey, a junior at Saint Vincent College, grew up Catholic but said the pontiff set a strong example as she made her faith her own.
“Pope Francis had an open love about him and a true honesty,” she said. “He wasn’t afraid to say things even if they made people feel uncomfortable.”
To be sure, Francis’ popularity is far from universal.
He still enjoys favorable ratings among 84 percent of U.S. Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center, but a growing share of Catholic Republicans think he’s too liberal and naive.
That could reflect Pope Francis’ divergence from the GOP agenda. He notably criticized President Donald Trump’s call to wall off immigration from Mexico. The pontiff’s encyclical Laudato Si, with its unsparing call for action to combat man-made climate change, has little buy-in among Republican agenda-setters.
Overall, fewer Catholics approve of Francis’ handling of sexual abuse by priests than in the past. In January, Francis defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse, and he called the bishop’s critics slanderous. Francis has since attempted to walk back the comment and appointed an investigator, but the January episode revived headlines about the defining scandal of the modern Catholic Church.
Francis also generated controversy when, after consulting two synods of bishops, he published a document on family issues that called for a more pastoral approach to the divorced-andremarried. He called for such people to confer privately with their priests, leaving a small but vocal group on the right demanding to know whether he was opening the way for them to receive sacraments without an annulment.
Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said the pope is indeed upholding church teachings. Although he’s aware of such debates, “I don’t hear people making disparaging comments about Pope Francis. I hear people speak of their excitement about Pope Francis.”
Francis, he said, is drawing on his experience as a pastor in Argentina.
“Everything that Pope Francis does ... is focused on mercy,” he said. “This isn’t just his particular brand of faith. It is at the heart of what the church has to be about. If we’re going to call ourselves Catholics, [ we must focus] on God’s mindblowing mercy.”
Local men studying to be priests say they are feeling the Francis Effect.
“We have guys who are seeking out pastoral ways of implementing what they learn in the classrooms,” said Kristian Sherman, who is studying at Saint Vincent Seminary to be a priest for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. “They’re not just sticking to the books, but they’re wanting to get a little head start on bringing their relationship with Christ to the young people especially.”
While Francis calls on priests to reach those on the margins of society, he also has renewed a call for a strong devotional life.
There’s a “great emphasis on the spiritual life, fostering that for priests so they could foster that for the people,” said Saint Vincent seminarian Joseph Uzar of the Dicoese of Pittsburgh.
“We can’t go to the peripheries if we don’t know who we’re bringing to the peripheries,” added fellow seminarian Christopher Pujol of the Diocese of Greensburg.
So what about those numbers? The most recent official Catholic statistics are from 2015, the year of the pope’s triumphant U.S. tour.
Globally, the numbers of Catholics keep increasing — as they were before Francis became pope.
In the United States, according to the church’s own membership records, the numbers of Catholics grew to a record 71 million in the Francis papacy. But they’ve been growing for years, so there’s no sign of a specific Francis Effect there.
Many other Catholic vital signs are decreasing. There are fewer baptisms, first communions, confirmations, church marriages and Catholic-school pupils. But that trend has been going at least since 2000, dating to the last years of Pope John Paul II and the entire Benedict XVI papacy. Such trends have been attributed to everything from lower birth rates to the impact of the abuse crisis to growing secularization — all trends that predate the Francis era and continue through it.