The Real Legacy of Pope Francis

On March 13, in the year 857, two men were put to death by the Islamic authorities at Córdoba, in Andalusia. One of them was Rodrigo, a priest from Cabra. Rodrigo had two brothers, a Muslim and an atheist, who quarreled fiercely. On one occasion when Rodrigo attempted to play peacemaker, they turned on him. He was dragged through the streets by the Muslim, who saw that the surest way to bring about his brother’s death was to announce that Rodrigo had converted to Islam. When Rodrigo insisted that he remained a Christian, he was charged with apostasy and martyred.

Pope Francis, who died this morning at the age of 88, was elevated to the papacy in 2013 on the feast day of Saint Rodrigo. The coincidence is suggestive. During his pontificate, Francis would also find himself pressed into the role of a would-be mediator—not only between rival factions within the Catholic Church but also between the Church and secular liberals, who saw in the first Latin American pope a fellow traveler.

Like those of Saint Rodrigo, Francis’s efforts at mediation largely failed. The Church today is more divided—her competing factions more embittered and refractory, her secular critics more emboldened—than before his election.

Francis came to bring not peace but a sword. On whose behalf was it wielded? By the time Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, the battle lines were already being drawn between traditionalists, progressive Catholics, and moderate conservatives, who would have a hard time reconciling their maximalist understanding of papal authority with a pope who did not always share their commitments.

Those who expected Francis to be a “liberal” pope were disappointed. One by one, their hopes—the ordination of women to the priesthood or even the diaconate, the approval of contraception, an end to the teaching that sexual relations between persons of the same sex are “acts of grave depravity”—were dashed against the rocks. (One could argue that such aspirations were naive, even impossible, but that is another question.) But conservatives were not reassured. Even at the end of his pontificate, their worst fears remained unassuaged.

Perhaps Francis’s real legacy is discord. Catholics could not agree about the value of his words and acts or even their meaning, and these disagreements gave rise to further misunderstandings and recriminations. Francis himself was responsible for at least some of these misunderstandings; when given a chance to clarify his intentions, he tended to prefer inscrutability. It is even possible that he found division valuable. His declaration before an audience of pilgrims in 2013 now appears prophetic: “I want a mess.”

Francis was always an enigma, baffling to Catholic and secular observers alike. This was true even at the level of his personality. The Two Popes, a bad film about a hypothetical meeting between Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, is premised upon a contrast between the austere German intellectual whose chief relaxation was playing Schumann on the piano and the freewheeling Hispanic man of the people gushing about the Beatles.

This was nonsense. In literature, music, and art, Francis’s tastes were anything but populist; his imagination was more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of German Romanticism than Benedict’s. He valued difficulty and idiosyncrasy for their own sakes, and admired artists and philosophers with reputations for being inaccessible. One of his favorite conductors was Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose unconventional style—and complete disregard for tempo markings—are preserved in low-quality recordings cherished by a handful of enthusiasts. His favorite poet was reputed to have been Hölderlin, the inscrutable mystic for whom the pagan gods were real personages rather than symbols. In his reflections on technology, Francis’s main influence appears to have been Heidegger, whose philosophical awakening had begun with his rejection of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic theology that was for centuries the default grammar of the Church. Before Francis, it is difficult to imagine a papal document citing Donna Haraway, the pioneer of “cyborg” feminism, for example.

This confusion extended beyond Francis’s personal interests and intellectual influences to his beliefs regarding fundamental theological—and, especially, moral—questions. Did Francis really believe, for example, that it was permissible for Catholics to receive Holy Communion if they had divorced and entered into second marriages while their first spouses were still living? The answer is yes. But so, of course, did his sainted predecessor John Paul II, who reversed the previous discipline that had subjected such couples to a kind of de facto excommunication, and permitted them to receive Communion on the condition that they refrained from sexual intercourse. In Amoris laetitia, an apostolic exhortation issued in 2016, Francis was candid enough to acknowledge that universal compliance with this norm was unlikely and urged offending couples to go to confession. For this he was accused of being a heretic who did not believe that marriage was a sacrament.

What did Francis really think about other questions related to sexual morality? The surviving evidence is inconclusive. In interview after interview, he gave the impression that he did not quite believe that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” as the catechism puts it. In his autobiography, published in January, he expressed support for nonmarital civil unions for same-sex couples, whom he described as “people who live the gift of love.” Under Francis, the Holy Office gave tentative permission for vaguely defined nonliturgical blessings of same-sex marriages, but after the prospect was rejected by several bishops’ conferences, the Vatican insisted that these were simply blessings of individual persons, of the sort that anyone could request spontaneously. In private, Francis could be more caustic; on one occasion he is said, albeit by a critic, to have remarked that bishops must be neither right-wing nor left-wing, before adding: “And when I say left-wing, I mean homosexual.” There was, he is reported to have said in another closed-door meeting, “an air of faggotry in the Vatican.”

[Michael J. O’Loughlin: Why Pope Francis’s recent decree shook the Catholic Church]

On the subjects of abortion and gender theory, which he once compared to nuclear weapons, he was less ambiguous. On these and many other issues he did not deviate from his predecessors. Despite widespread (and misguided) expectations to the contrary, he did not abrogate the norm of clerical celibacy or permit the ordination of women to a hypothetical non-sacramental version of the diaconate. Francis’s views on the environment were considered especially strident, but they were very much in keeping with those of Benedict XVI, who had been referred to in the American Catholic press as the “green pope.” His criticism of globalized capitalism and the financialization of the economy was in keeping with the broader tradition of Catholic social teaching that began with Leo XIII in the late 19th century. The same was true of his responses to the major geopolitical events of his papacy. Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023, he called for a cease-fire, as popes had done on similar occasions, going all the way back to Pius XII during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

Perhaps some of Francis’s lines were drawn too starkly. His call for Ukraine to “have the courage to raise the white flag” after the Russian invasion was poorly received and later explained away.

In February, while suffering from bronchitis, Francis sent a letter to the American bishops on the subject of immigration, one that contained a veiled but unmistakable rebuke of J. D. Vance, the Catholic vice president. While all modern popes have defended the rights of immigrants (especially refugees), his predecessors had mostly written at the level of general principles. Francis went much further; in language as severe as the theological register of the modern papacy allows, he castigated the Trump administration’s immigration policy. “The rightly formed conscience,” he wrote, “cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

The letter appeared to put the issue outside the bounds of prudential debate altogether. But its stridency seemed at odds with Francis’s own comments on previous occasions. “The migrant has to be received,” he told 60 Minutes in 2024. “Thereafter, you see how you’re going to deal with them. Maybe you have to send them back, I don’t know. But each case ought to be considered humanely.” The paradox was unresolved.

Perhaps it was not meant to be resolved. Francis was the first member of the Society of Jesus to occupy the Chair of Saint Peter. As that amiable Whig historian Lord Macaulay once wrote, with a mix of horror and admiration, the Jesuit ideal is to be “inflexible in nothing but in their fidelity to the Church,” alternately “rigid” or “indulgent” according to the temperament and circumstances of the penitent. “If a person,” Macaulay said, “was so unfortunate as to be a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making him a heretic too.” One can certainly imagine Francis saying something similar.

One curious feature of Francis’s public utterances—which has gone almost entirely unnoticed in secular publications—was his surprising crudeness. This was sometimes refreshing. No pope since Leo XIII spoke more frequently of the devil. His references to the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph suggested an old-fashioned, grandmotherly piety uncommon among contemporary prelates. His final encyclical was a call for the faithful to venerate the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But his speeches were also full of references to coprophilia and colorful nicknames for his real or perceived enemies (“querulous and disillusioned pessimist”; “pickled pepper-faced Christian!”; “priest-tycoon”). And he was angrier in public than his predecessors. Even minor objects of his ire, such as priests who wore traditional clerical attire, were attacked with jokes that would no longer be permitted on American television (“And it is said that the Church does not allow women priests!”).

The established image of Francis as a kind of Catholic Dalai Lama who hobnobbed with Martin Scorsese and Greta Thunberg—a harmless mascot for a sanitized, United Nations–approved religious pluralism—was almost certainly a false one. In fact, the possibility that the Church might come to be regarded as a mere “compassionate NGO” was among Francis’s greatest fears and the theme of the first major address given upon his elevation to the papacy. It has not been realized, though not, I think, for the reasons he might have hoped. For most secular observers, the Church remains what she was before Francis assumed his office: a reactionary cult synonymous with sexual abuse.

[From the May 2015 issue: Will Pope Francis break the Church?]

It is in this area that Francis was perhaps most disappointing to Catholics, irrespective of their views on other issues. While he continued the work begun by his predecessor of addressing cases from the past, his handling of new ones was frequently slapdash.

In 2019, it was discovered that Francis’s friend Marko Rupnik, a fellow Jesuit, had absolved a woman in the confessional of the sin of having extramarital sex—with Rupnik. In March 2020, he preached a Lenten sermon in the Vatican before an audience that included Francis himself; a closed-door investigation came months later, and Rupnik was (very briefly) excommunicated. After being accused by two dozen women—including many former nuns—of a wide range of offenses, he was finally expelled from the Jesuits, but he was allowed to exercise his priestly ministry in the Diocese of Koper in his native Slovenia. A further investigation did not result in his dismissal from the clerical state.

In 2023, Francis appointed a fellow Argentine, Archbishop Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández, as prefect of the pointlessly renamed Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Fernández’s appointment was rightly considered scandalous, not only because of his infamous treatise on the theology of kissing and his mystical musings—which he claimed to have relayed from a teenaged girl—about kissing the nude body of Christ in the presence of the Virgin Mary. The archbishop himself originally felt that he was unqualified for the post, due in part to his handling of a case involving allegations of sexual abuse, which was, by his own admission, “insufficient.”

Francis’s reputation for disdaining his own authority was wholly undeserved. “Who am I to judge?” was a throwaway line from an interview conducted on an airplane; “synodality”—or “listening to the Holy Spirit,” as the pope put it—was a catchphrase, not a governing philosophy. Francis’s exercise of the papal office was authoritarian, even by the standards of the world’s oldest absolute monarchy. During his reign, Francis issued 75 documents motu proprio—that is, unilaterally, not occasioned by any party or request, and binding upon the faithful without any recourse to review or possibility of remit. Benedict XVI—“God’s Rottweiler”—released 13 such letters in his eight-year papacy; John Paul II, only 31 in nearly three decades. So far from ushering in the new era of decentralized governance heralded by his supporters, Francis’s reign was in some sense a return to the papal centralization not seen since Pius X in the early 20th century.

Nowhere was Francis’s imperiousness more evident than in his campaign against Catholics who attend the traditional Latin Mass. In 2021, Francis issued a motu proprio requiring priests to seek permission from their bishops to say the old Mass. For most Catholics, Latin Mass–goers were harmless eccentrics who happened to be responsible for an outsize number of vocations to the declining priesthood; for Francis, they were vectors of theological contagion who had to be contained at all costs. Two years later, the pope decided that bishops themselves (many of whom had responded to the motu proprio with a shrug) had to seek permission from Rome for the ancient rite to be celebrated in their own dioceses—permission that was almost never forthcoming. The last years of his papacy had something of the atmosphere of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; once-thriving Latin Mass parishes are now the “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Perhaps this escalation of ecclesial hostilities was inevitable. Francis leaves behind him a Church in decline (not least in Latin America), one in which neutrality is less tenable. In the coming decades there will be far fewer ordinary men and women in the pews who simply say the responses and tithe, or middle-of-the-road, time-serving clergy; it will be a church of engaged ideologues with mutually exclusive understandings of the faith and its most basic tenets. On the verge of schism in Germany, the Church seems to be approaching a kind of Götterdämmerung (to employ a Wagnerian metaphor that Francis himself might have favored). But this transformative event—the terrible, sublime moment of clarity in which the old gives way to the new and the incorrupt Church emerges purified of her shams and errors—is unlikely to come soon.

I’m reminded of those lines of Hölderlin:

It’s not yet

Time. They are still

Unbound. And the indifferent don’t care

About godly matters.

Let them puzzle it out

With the Oracle. Meanwhile, during the festivities,

I’ll take my ease thinking of the dead.