Pope Francis: A Candid Assessment

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church’s future.

On the day of Pope Francis’s election, I spoke with a respected Jesuit professor, offering him my congratulations on a Latin American Jesuit’s becoming pope. To my surprise, he looked dour. This was bad news, he said. Fr. Bergoglio had had a reputation for being an authoritarian provincial; the Jesuits in Argentina had a lot of trouble with him.

In time, the professor’s premonition proved correct. The man who had been a difficult superior became a difficult pope. As I have reflected on Pope Francis’s words and actions over the years, I realized that if I treated my sons the way Francis treated my fellow believers and me, I would rightly be considered a bad father. This remains the best hermeneutical key I know for explaining Francis’s pontificate: he was a man whose tragic flaws undermined the good he sought to do and the duties of the office that he bore. When such a father dies, it is fitting to mourn his passing. But it is also fitting to name the damage done and lament the growth and closeness that could have been there. Perhaps a reflection on fatherhood can serve as a diagnosis of the recent pontificate, and provide some counsel for the next one. 

A good father loves his children by keeping order in the home. Children need to know what they can expect from their parents. Parents, in turn, need to treat their children fairly and not play favorites. Discipline should be clear and regular, firm but not harsh, edifying without being humiliating or insulting. Parents should explain why they are acting as they do in terms that children can understand. By this common standard, Pope Francis was a deeply flawed father. His remarks frequently stung, whether or not they were intended as insults: large families that breed like rabbits, priests who cling to grandma’s lace, seminaries with too much “frociaggine.” Then there were the actions taken to undermine the faithful who should have been his most loyal followers, most notably the restrictions on the Latin Mass. Too often during his pontificate, the faithful were left waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or not drop, as the case may be. For, as J. D. Flynn and Ed Condon have amply documented, Francis undermined the rule of law in the Church and made its application deeply personal. Their report concludes: “When instability replaces the rule of law, the law no longer becomes the tool protecting human dignity that Pope Francis praised; rather, it becomes an instrument that can be wielded arbitrarily, to the harm of that same dignity.” Flynn and Condon offer numerous cases of this, but the most infamous are connected to sexual predation and are well known: Marko Rupnik, Gustavo Zanchetta, Juan Barros, and Ariel Alberto Principi. If Pope Francis had “a pontificate of the heart,” it was unfortunately a heart too wedded to its own judgment and preferences.

A similar dynamic played out in his teaching magisterium. A good father teaches his children the truth about themselves and the world around them. He hands on skills, lore, and family traditions. But most importantly, he tells children their own story, from the way their parents met to the fact that God has created them to love him and the world that he ordered well. He leaves room for them to question and discern, but provides a bedrock of belief on which they can build their lives. He teaches them right from wrong and inspires a vision of what the moral life looks like when lived well. 

Unfortunately, Pope Francis sowed confusion where clarity was much needed, inasmuch as his teachings on certain issues seemed to contradict the Church’s tradition and practice. This was a matter of both form and content in many of the documents of his pontificate. Too often his writings exhibited a disregard for rigorous, clear thinking rooted in the Church’s tradition, or framed such thinking as the enemy of real pastoral work. Too often they seemed to create ambiguities that allowed for work-arounds to the universal call to holiness. Take the case of Amoris Laetitia. As I noted when it was published, the document treats Christ’s teaching about marriage in three different ways: “exhorting it as an ideal—noble to be sure but too difficult for many (298, 307); repeating it as a doctrine or a duty (134); and stressing it as a moral issue without regard for the consciences we might be burdening in the process (37).”

Francis cited Thomas Aquinas to argue that general principles may be necessary in pastoral discernment, but they break down as we descend into particular cases (AL 304; ST I-II q. 94 a. 4). The passage comes from the Summa’s discussion of natural law. But Christ clarified that the indissolubility of marriage is part of the divine law, whose purpose is to lead us to communion with God forever. And the new law of Christ is the grace of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, in part by means of the sacraments, including “indissoluble matrimony” (ST I-II q. 106 a. 1–2). In short, I concluded, “Thomas corrects how Amoris Laetitia tends to speak about indissolubility. The New Law Christ teaches is not just a matter of natural law, a duty, a moral issue, or an ideal. It is life-giving, perfect; it revives the soul and giving joy to the heart (cf. Psalm 19:7–8). Christ’s teaching about marriage clarifies the path of perfection God desires for us. But it also turns that path into a sacrament, a vehicle by which the Holy Spirit fills our hearts with love and realizes that perfection in us.” 

Or take the case of Francis’s second social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Chapter 2 offers a moving exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and later Francis reminds his readers of the connection between the right to private property and the universal destination of goods. Unfortunately, other parts employ argumentation that becomes embarrassing. Francis exceeds his predecessors’ condemnation of capital punishment by calling life imprisonment “a secret death penalty,” but never gives a sense of what to do with unrepentant, dangerous criminals. As I observed after its publication, “He concludes by writing that Christ’s command to Peter to sheathe his sword (Matt. 26:52) is an echo of the ancient warning: ‘I will require a reckoning for human life. Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed’ (Gen. 9:5–6). An echo may be there, but Francis ends multiple paragraphs against capital punishment with the first of many divine commands for it.” 

Capital punishment proved to be a sample case for Francis’s approach to the theological tradition. As Ed Feser has ably argued, the Catholic Church has repeatedly taught throughout its history that capital punishment is permissible. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI made it clear that they believed as a prudential matter that it should very rarely be used. But Francis changed the Catechism of the Catholic Church to say that the death penalty was “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and made statements that clearly implied the death penalty per se violates the natural law and the law of the gospel.

However, Feser argues: “If capital punishment is wrong in principle, then the Church has for two millennia consistently taught grave moral error and badly misinterpreted scripture. And if the Church has been so wrong for so long about something so serious, then there is no teaching that might not be reversed, with the reversal justified by the stipulation that it be called a ‘development’ rather than a contradiction.” Hence Cardinal Avery Dulles, who was personally opposed to capital punishment, argued that “the reversal of a doctrine as well established as the legitimacy of capital punishment would raise serious problems regarding the credibility of the magisterium.” In this matter as in others, Francis was more concerned with getting to the answer he wanted than with the impact that would have on the Church’s doctrine as a whole.

Later in Fratelli Tutti, Francis dismisses the entire just war tradition in a footnote. He writes that “war can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses.” True enough, although John Paul II called for exactly such intervention to stop atrocities in Yugoslavia. He claims that “every war leaves our world worse than it was before. War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil.” But then one thinks of Great Britain, which Benedict XVI thanked for “courageously resisting the forces” of Nazi tyranny. Francis concludes by arguing that military spending should be redirected to “establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified life.” We should not be surprised that a few years later, the people of Ukraine would find his response to their plight frustrating.

In sum, Francis was much more interested in solving pastoral problems than in theological doctrines. But his responsibility was to safeguard the Church’s doctrine and to cherish and promote its theological reasoning. It is a cause of enduring sadness that he failed to do so. His successor should take this task up again with renewed vigor. And he should remember that in the Church, theological reasoning outlasts politics. Francis made a mess, but messes can be unmade.

During Pope Francis’s final days, numerous outlets reported an increasing number of conversions to Catholicism in the U.S., France, and Britain. Francis and his inner circle had a complicated relationship with converts, especially American ones. He appeared not to understand how beauty and tradition are important and attractive to young people, how justice and order are for the Church’s good, and how doctrinal clarity and stability make the Church a shelter in the midst of the storms of our age. As Ross Douthat recently put it, we live in “an age of extinction” in which technology-driven change puts pressure on social institutions and inherited beliefs. Catholicism will flourish insofar as it is chosen and practiced, not inherited and taken for granted. It will require spiritual fathers who give persuasive answers to the question “Why should I become Catholic?” Let us pray that the next pope can do so, joyfully.

Image by JoniVideography and sourced via Wikimedia Commons.