The Guardian view on Pope Francis 10 years on: a vital progressive voice
Ten years ago, when Pope Francis addressed St Peter’s Square for the first time, he observed that the conclave that elected him went “almost to the ends of the earth” to find a new pontiff. It was a self-deprecating but telling joke – one that signalled that the Argentinian cardinal planned a very different kind of papacy from anything that had come before. Opting to live modestly in a church guest house on the edge of Vatican City – rather than in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace – Francis has positioned himself as a kind of outsider pope, a champion of the marginal, peripheral and excluded.
A decade on, that approach has made him one of the most necessary moral voices of the age. On the key and related issues of troubled times – the chronic refugee crisis, the climate emergency and global economic injustice – the first non-European pope of modern times has provided a powerful defence of universal values.
On migration the pope has been a prophetic voice, speaking more clearly and trenchantly than many progressive governments. In a 2016 visit to the Greek island of Lesbos, Francis told local Catholics: “Europe is the homeland of human rights, and whoever sets foot on European soil ought to sense this.” Amid multiple signs of a hardening Fortress Europe mentality, with Britain in the vanguard, that message is still more vital today.
In its critique of unrestrained economic appetites in the west, the 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’, drew vital connections between the fate of the world’s poor and the fate of regions at the sharp end of the climate emergency. Here again, Francis has focused on the need for solidarity with regions and peoples who lie beyond the world’s centres of power and affluence.
Within the church itself, Francis has also taken on entrenched bastions of traditional authority, delivering memorable and regular dressing-downs to the Roman curia on the subject of humility. The ongoing synod on synodality – a consultation process with the world’s Catholics on an unprecedented scale – is intended to further undermine the notion of the church as a monarchical type institution.
Meanwhile, on issues ranging from same-sex relationships to the status of divorcees and the remarried within the church, the pope has sought to emphasise pastoral engagement and empathy over doctrinal rigidity, and mercy over judgment. Most famously, when questioned by journalists on the subject of gay relationships, Francis responded: “Who am I to judge?”
After decades of entrenched and defensive conservative orthodoxy under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, this has been bold stuff, as testified by the furious response from conserv
ative bishops, particularly in the United States.
Early in Pope Francis’s papacy, the
American gossip site Gawker, saluted him as “our cool new pope”. But the 86year-old Francis should not be viewed as some kind of anomalous apostle of the secular liberal enlightenment.
Nor has his record been free of mistakes and missteps. He has admitted to serious errors in dealing with the sex abuse crisis that has shamed the Catholic church across the world. Many remain acutely frustrated with the lack of progress on female empowerment in the church. But at a time when globalisation and its discontents are generating a new insularity in the politics of the world’s richer nations, Pope Francis’s calls for radical inclusion and solidarity are providing a vital counterpoint.