Promise has faded in Francis’s 10-year reign
Some say his reforms of the Catholic Church haven’t gone far enough
Rome —Early in Pope Francis’s pontificate, the sense of expectation was enormous.
He spoke simply and powerfully. He eschewed the typical trappings of papal luxury. He was seen as an outsider and a natural reformer. He stirred some trepidation among conservatives, but not enough to override the global adulation. “The People’s Pope,” Time magazine called him, naming him person of the year in 2013.
On Monday, it will be 10 years since Francis was elected pope. In that time, he has retained many of his personal hallmarks, and he has altered the Catholic Church in important and potentially enduring ways, including by making pillars out of issues such as migration and the environment.
But the sense of possibility has diminished, replaced by greater discontent. Conservative opposition has intensified. Just as important, Francis has also faced criticism from the church’s left, a flank led by Germany, where some leaders say he hasn’t gone far enough in remaking an institution in crisis.
His famous “Who am I to judge?” comment, made months into his pontificate, marked a tonal shift in how popes speak about LGBTQ Catholics — but Francis hasn’t changed official church teaching, which calls homosexual acts “disordered.” Meanwhile, he has opened opportunities for women,
In leading the church, Francis has found himself caught between two poles, transforming too much for one side, not enough for the other. He has been a reformist pope — kind of. He is also a product of an institution that is almost always slow-moving.
Francis’s biggest marks
Francis’s election as the first Latin American pope nodded to the church’s internationalization, and his moves as pope have hastened that trend. Europe, with its emptying pews, is no longer Catholicism’s epicenter, and Francis has run the church with that in mind. He has traveled to Catholicism’s new growth zones, including in Africa and Asia, and named cardinals from parts of the world that were previously less represented. He has raised the odds that future popes will be like him: non-Western.
Francis has also positioned himself as a sometimes lonely voice pleading for the world to recognize the humanity of immigrants. While politicians across the West have rebuffed his message, building walls and other barriers to asylum seekers, Francis has washed the feet of immigrants, visited with them on most overseas trips, spoken constantly about their rights, and even flew a dozen out of a dire migrant camp in Greece.
He has also positioned himself as a climate change pope, in ways that will probably prove prescient. Rarely before Francis had the environment been a church point of emphasis; now it is. In 2015, he devoted an encyclical — a major papal document — entirely to the environment.
“He made it clear that the poor would pay the dearest price for robbing nature,” said Lucetta Scaraffia, a historian and former editor of a Vatican magazine who has criticized Francis on some issues.
Where Francis has fallen short
Francis’s tenure has coincided with more bruising revelations about the scale of the clerical abuse crisis. And though he has acknowledged the systemic nature of the problem, and taken some unprecedented steps — like holding a major abuse-related summit at the Vatican — he has also failed to make the church’s response to the issue more transparent. His signature rules for holding bishops accountable are applied inconsistently, with little explanation. The church doesn’t share information about clerics, including high-ranking ones, who are punished. Francis has shown himself reluctant to act forcefully on allegations against people close to him, including Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta.
On abuse, Francis has “basically failed,” said Emiliano Fittipaldi, an Italian investigative journalist. “The practical effect of the actions he took is close to zero, regardless of triumphalist tones.”
Francis has also struggled to build a consistent message on the epochal event of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Especially in the early months of the war, he confused many Catholics with his hesitancy to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin, and with his attempts to maintain neutrality, emphasizing that wars have victims on both sides. At one point he appeared to echo a Kremlin talking point, describing the “barking of NATO at Russia’s door.”
Francis would eventually become more vocal in his critique of Russia, comparing its campaign to a “genocide,” but by that point he had already drawn several rebukes from Ukrainians in government or in the church.