Ten years in, Pope Francis has pleased no one
In the secular press, the narrative of Pope Francis as a great reformer was established early on. As contrary evidence has emerged, the response has often been a decorous silence.
On the 10th anniversary of his ascent to the papal throne, there are the grim numbers for the Francis-era church, like the accelerating drop in the number of men studying for the priesthood worldwide, which peaked around the beginning of Francis’ pontificate and has been declining ever since. Or the unhappy financial picture, now bad enough that the Vatican is charging higher rents to its highest officials to compensate for years of deficits.
And there are the grim cases of well-connected clerics accused of sex abuse who seem immune to the rules and reforms that are supposed to put limits on their ministry, like the Jesuit priest-artist Father Marko Rupnik.
It’s been mostly left to his conservative critics to compile the lists of clerics accused of abuse who have been given favorable treatment by this pontiff; or to harp on the failures of financial reform and the absence of any obvious renewal in the pews; or to point out that a pontificate that once promised to make the church less self-referential, less inward-focused, has instead produced a decade of bitter internal arguments and widening theological divisions — while Catholicism’s official verbiage is received with conspicuous indifference by the wider world.
Consider a counterfactual scenario where the pope’s early months played out identically — the gestures of inclusivity and welcome, the famous question, “Who am I to judge?” — but thereafter his approach was focused, strategic, designed to seek change but also to maintain unity. This could have meant, for instance, pushing through the changes sought by liberal Catholics that are easiest to square with existing doctrine, like relaxing the rule of celibacy for priests or even allowing female deacons, while simultaneously making strong efforts to reassure conservatives that the church wasn’t just surrendering its commitments or dissolving its teachings about sex and marriage.
That kind of push would have still met conservative opposition (my personal view is that lifting the rule of celibacy would be a mistake), while the limits and reassurances would have still disappointed liberals who wanted much more thoroughgoing change. But the goals would have been concrete and achievable, the limits and boundaries clear, and the pope would have been trying to play something like the role of the father in the parable of the prodigal son, with his rush to welcome the younger brother but also his loving reassurance of the older one.
Instead, Francis’ opening gambit involved a controversy much more clearly entangled with Catholic doctrine — the question of remarriage after divorce, where the very words of Jesus are at issue. Meanwhile, his larger approach has been to open controversies on the widest possible array of fronts.
Sometimes he does this through his statements, sometimes through his appointments, and for a while through the bizarre strategy of conducting repeated conversations with an atheist Italian journalist who famously did not take notes, leaving ordinary Catholics to puzzle over whether the pope had really denied, say, the doctrine of hell, or whether he was just content for readers of La Repubblica to think so.
All of this Francis has supplemented with a running critique of conservatives, and especially traditionalists, for being rigid and pharisaical and coldhearted, for being “all stiff in black cassocks” and wearing “grandma’s lace” — the equivalent of the father in the parable turning his elder son and chewing him out for being such an uptight weirdo. And when the traditionalist faction became, predictably, a locus for sometimes paranoid online opposition, the pope who preached decentralization and diversity embraced a micromanagerial cruelty, attempting the strangulation of Latin Mass congregations through such merciful gestures as forbidding their masses from appearing in parish bulletins.
And yet with all this the pope has not actually delivered all that much concrete change to the church’s progressive wing, pulling back repeatedly instead — retreating into ambiguity on Communion for the divorced and the remarried, pulling up short when it appeared he was going to allow new experiments with married priests, permitting his office of doctrine to declare the impossibility of the blessings for same-sex couples that many European bishops wish to license.
Which, also predictably, has created both disappointment at unmet expectations and a constant impulse to push as far as possible, even toward the liberal Protestantism that the German church especially seems to seek, on the theory that Francis needs to be forced into embracing the changes he’s always contemplating but never quite delivering.
Seen now at its 10-year milestone, then, this pontificate hasn’t just faced inevitable resistance because of its zeal for reform. It has needlessly multiplied controversies and exacerbated divisions for the sake of an agenda that can still feel vaporous, and its choices at every turn have seemed to design to create the greatest possible alienation between the church’s factions.