Pope Francis (1936-2025)

Pope Francis (1936-2025)

Of all the tasks a writer may attempt, evaluating a Pope is perhaps the hardest. The Papacy, as I have tried to emphasize elsewhere, is above all a personal and historical institution: it incarnates the messy, human side of the Faith. It is not a thing suited to pristine abstractions, even doctrinal abstractions. 

A Pope is first and foremost a human person; which is to say, an individual substance of a rational nature; which is to say, an entity defined and constituted by numerous relations, personal and familial and social and cultural. A Pope, though, is a person whose relations have been radically extended in a way that is, in a genuine sense, supernatural; who relates to others throughout the world in ways that go beyond the ordinarily human into the realm of the sacramental and the eternal. A Pope's relations encompass the whole world, and enter into practically every realm of human life and interaction, from the familial to the cultural to the political to the diplomatic to the economic to the mass-media and back again. 

Because of this, there is almost an infinity of ways one can analyze an individual Pope and pontificate. There are, at the very least, as many modes of analysis as there are people in the world. Historical analyses are no more valid, in themselves, than the simplest personal anecdote; and this, in turn, does not take away from the most inchoate sense a person may have of the state of the Church, the world, or a life, and the impact of the Pope on that. Popes cannot be understood solely in ideological and political terms: but for all that, they are legitimately political figures who may well have much to do with the triumph or defeat, success or failure, of particular ideologies and political parties and movements. They are international diplomats, with a unique ability to intercede between nations; and they are judges, presiding over the world's largest non-state justice system, and administrators, presiding over the world's largest non-state charitable organization and the world's oldest continuous bureaucracy. And then, of course, they are Fathers, and Shepherds, and intercessors before God, and the rulers of the rulers of this age, and poor sinners who will one day stand with us all before the judgment seat of God. 

Popes can be evaluated legitimately based on any of these things; and in all of them, their records are likely to show normal human inconsistencies, as well as the influence of their own personalities, historical events and conflicts, their advisors and subordinates, and the bureaucratic, political, and religious systems in which they participate. 

There are, to be frank, a lot of terrible takes on Pope Francis, takes that are ignorant or mendacious or malicious or outright stupid. Most of them fail, like most journalistic writing today, simply by imposing a simplistic, highly-colored narrative, based primarily on mass-media symbols, partisan conflicts, bullshit pseudo-intellectualism, and/or private emotion, onto this vast network of relationships and acts. All such takes, without exception, are false. Pope Francis was not the Progressive Pope; he was not the Dictator Pope; he did not preside over the Catholic Church's irreversible decline; he was not a plotter dedicated to power at all costs; he was not a Trumpian revolutionary; he was not a frustrated liberal; he was not the last humane figure in a world gone mad; he was not the death blow of the Imperial Papacy, or Vatican 2, or progressive Catholicism, or the End of History, or anything else. As they have since the very beginning of his pontificate, the soi-disant intellectuals of our frankly pathetic intellectual-cum-journalistic culture continue to lie. 

I don't want to add to these takes; I wish, in fact to denounce them, and will by the end of this essay. 

There are also, of course, any number of encomia, religious and secular, appropriate to the passing of such a significant figure, reflecting on his accomplishments, his character, and the positive personal impact on all of the above on many persons. The present essay also does not belong to this genre. As will become clear, a significant portion of this essay consists of reflections on Francis' weaknesses and limitations as a Pontiff, and the conflicts by which his Papacy was marked. I loved Francis very much, and tried my best to make others love him; but as Chesterton pointed out long ago, it is always dangerous merely to whitewash the weaknesses of any person, since it is often on such weaknesses that a proper understanding of their strengths depends. 

For my own small part, then, I will be proceeding primarily from an abstract, historical perspective, supplementing such analysis with thoughts on Francis as a person and his importance for the Catholic Church of the 21st century. Though I will make a number of comments and preliminary conclusions, the principle intended utility of this essay is to provide various frameworks and contexts through which, I think, Francis can be fruitfully considered: and in which he should be considered, at greater length, by others. I will not attempt a true theological evaluation of Francis, let alone attempt to conclude what his narrative meaning is for all of history for all time.

This is, then, by no means a "definitive take" on Francis; it is not intended to, nor could it, detract from any genuine perspective on the Pope. 

Context & Background

To understand Pope Francis' pontificate historically, it is important to understand his place in history. For Francis was above all things a historical Pope; a Pope who will forever be identified with the events of his pontificate, with the phase of history that has been called, not incorrectly, "the end of the End of History," which Pope Francis himself called "a change in era" and "a Third World War fought piecemeal." But of course, the so-called "End of History" was in retrospect a rather short era, and largely an illusory one; and even at its height, the beneficent and peaceful Pax Americana was neither so peaceful nor so beneficent, to those who lived under it, as was claimed by those who profited from it.

The first thing to recall about Francis, then, is simply that he was an Argentinean: that is, a man from the so-called Global South, from the so-called Third World, and more specifically a man from Latin America, which has for centuries been treated by the great power to the North as a kind of Imperial backyard, where anything could be legitimately done without outside scrutiny. 

A great deal of American commentary on Francis, from the beginning of his pontificate to the present, has focused on his alleged anti-Americanism, which, it was often implied by American commentators, emerged somehow simply and inevitably from his Argentinean background. This is, to anyone with the slightest knowledge of Argentina or Latin America in general, the height of absurdity. Pope Francis did not have a particularly negative of view of America as a country; like most Latin Americans, especially educated and intellectual Latin Americans, he had in some ways far too admiring a view of America. A perusal of his words and actions during his one and only visit to the United States, in 2015, should correct that impression permanently.

America has been, for the continent to the south, not only an Imperial hegemon, not only a frequently threatening bully, but also and emphatically and above all a positive image and model and comparandum--to a far greater degree than any other portion of the world. There are profound things that unite all Americans, North and South; not least of which are the colonial experience, and racial politics, and mass immigration, and Catholicism. Latin Americans have always been far more aware of these similarities than Americans; and far more aware that what America is, they could have been, or perhaps still could be. 

Argentina in particular has long had a particularly intense cultural and political kinship with America, a fixation on their neighbor to the North as an analogue and model, one that, in the view of many of its intellectuals, it failed to live up to. People around the world have participated in American culture and looked up to America as a model; but this fervor of imitation has been particularly strong in Argentina, and still is. If one reads, say, Borges, the great Argentinean writer and a sometime acquaintance of Pope Francis, the Americanism that emerges is, from my perspective, frequently exaggerated to the point of near-absurdity.

At this moment, the President of Argentina is an American-style economic and social libertarian, of a sort that was, about twenty years ago, very prominent in American media and the intelligentsia, but which was never in reality anything but a tiny minority in the United States and which now has virtually no influence at all, whose favorite authors and economists are all Americans and who has in the past aspired to make the dollar the national currency. Of course, as both of these examples suggest, the view of a thing produced by such a frenzy of imitation (what Girard called mimetic rivalry) does not frequently lead to a particularly accurate, and certainly not to a greatly detailed viewpoint on a place or person or nation; and this relative ignorance and naivete about the details of American society and culture and politics was certainly present in Pope Francis, sometimes pointing in positive and sometimes in negative directions.

For all that, however, what Pope Francis had, what he could not but help having given his background, was a basically accurate view of what America is: that is, as I have again and again emphasized, first and foremost a hegemonic global power. To the extent in which Pope Francis was legitimately suspicious of America and Americans, it was not, I think, because of any particular cultural or political prejudice--his love for many American writers and thinkers, from Thomas Merton to Martin Luther King, is well known--but from his simple awareness that America is powerful, and therefore Americans are powerful. And if there was one thing central to Francis' view of the world, from his early life in Argentina to the present day, it is a profound suspicion of the powerful. 

The American Empire, though, has from its beginning been grounded in large part in the performance of not being an Empire, of being merely one nation like any other; and Americans, especially powerful Americans, ground their own status similarly in the performance of not being powerful, of not being influential, of being merely one culture and government among many. It is, therefore, not surprising that many Americans viewed Pope Francis's treatment of their own country with suspicion and fear.

Pope Francis was an Argentinean; he was not an Italian, despite the frequent narratives to the contrary. He was the children of immigrants, however, in a country defined, like the US, by mass immigration; and that is of great importance for understanding his perspective on the world, and in particular his perspective on the mass migrations of our age. 

In political terms, Pope Francis was not particularly radical in his treatment of migration; his ideal was orderly, regulated legal immigration driven primarily by humanitarian concerns. Yet what drove many people crazy, what made him in the view of many a destabilizing force in debates over immigration who threatened to upend all polite and conventional and legal norms, was simply that in dealing with migration, he looked at it first and foremost from the perspective of the migrants themselves. This, again, he could hardly help. He simply knew that a society and political order could be threatened by mass migration, but also that a society could certainly survive it and even be built on it. And he knew why migrants migrate, and what migrants suffer: and he knew that many migrants do not survive.

Pope Francis was a Jesuit. This is treated by many, quite correctly, as key to his personality and pontificate; but seems most commonly analyzed based on views of the Jesuit Order that are, to put it frankly, stupid as hell, seemingly based largely on 19th century shocker novels and 20th century Seventh Day Adventist Youtube videos. Jesuits are not, generally speaking, plotters obsessed with power at all costs, let alone well-coiffed friends of the powerful, or radical progressive intellectuals. A few Jesuits have been those things; but this is not what defines either Jesuit spirituality or Jesuit mission.

The Jesuits were an order founded in and for crisis--in the great crisis of the Protestant Reformation. They are, as everyone knows, a militant order, founded by a former soldier. What that means, though, is often taken in rather deceptive directions. It is certainly true that as a militant order, Jesuits have always prized organization and order and obedience. It is just as true, though, that as a militant order they have embraced flexibility and mission and cultural adaptability. It is true that as a militant order they have viewed aesthetics and theology, frequently, as means to more important ends. It is also true, though, that as a militant order they have embraced education and academic study as among the most crucial means to character formation and mission alike.

These are all, though, rather secondary to the true Jesuit vocation. At the heart of the Jesuit order, I would argue, is a simplicity and sentimentality that is as common among soldiers as among Jesuits. The core of Jesuit formation is not a boot-camp-style brutalization and disciplining and breaking-in, but the Spiritual Exercises: and the Spiritual Exercises have as their goal the intensely personal and emotive and imaginative association of individuals with Christ.

If his Jesuit background illuminates anything about Francis, then, it should be the paradoxical combination in him of subtlety and ruthlessness, on the one hand, and simple, sentimental devotion and child-like faith on the other. These two sides of Francis were, and are, frequently taken as incompatible, and pitted against each other. For many of his enemies, his emotive faith and love of people were mere cynical shows, masking a radical progressive theologian and schemer obsessed with power; for many of his friends, his insistence on hierarchy and obedience, his harsh criticisms, his efforts at personal control, were simply suppressed, replaced by nothing more than a kindly, gentle grandfather.

These two sides of his character, though, are in and of themselves absolutely compatible, and absolutely Jesuit. To have a goal, to pursue every means, intellectual and communicative and personal alike, to that goal, to impatiently remove every obstacle to it, but to have that goal be grounded ultimately in a simple and emotive devotion to Christ and Mary and the Church and human persons: this was the Jesuit in Francis. Francis was an intensely pious and simple and emotional person in his relations to Christ and Mary and his beloved people and his beloved poor; but, like a good Jesuit, he had a mission.

The Reformer

And what was Francis' mission? Like a good Jesuit, it did not come from him, but from the Pope and the Church and the people.  

It is very deceptive to see Francis as a radical or a revolutionary, or even a particularly original person. More than any Pope probably since Paul VI, Francis was a Pope who came into office with a clear mandate: one that came, not from himself, but from the conclave that elected him, and (more importantly) from his predecessor, Benedict XVI. 

This mandate is usually put in the form of "Curial Reform": but this is a rather deceptive way to put it. Perhaps a better way to put it would be "Papalization," "universalization," or even "centralization": an indication, if any was needed, of how absurd the narratives that saw Francis as an end to a so-called "Imperial Papacy" truly are. In this, Francis is a quite recognizable type of Pope: a reforming Pope, one of many, and in many respects like his predecessors in that role. 

Eventually, Francis himself referred to one goal of his reforms by the term "synodality": a much-misunderstood concept if ever there was one. For many journalists and other soi-disant intellectuals, "synodality" was merely an odd neologism expressing their own vague list of Good Reform Concepts: decentralization, democracy, procedure, tolerance, progress. 

For Francis, though, as he again and again emphasized, synodality represented nearly the opposite of modern parliamentary liberal democracy. It was, rather, a return to a far older idea of leadership: one, I might add, that has a great deal more to do with the original concepts of democracy and populism as we find them in the ancient world, and as such embedded from the beginning within the Church. 

If I could put the concept of synodality most simply, it is the idea of the direct relationship between the Leader and the People: a relationship not mediated through institutions or representatives or structures of even etiquette, but through direct, personal contacts at every level and with every person. As Francis himself put it, there was in the Church no room for interest groups or majority rule or any of the central concepts of liberal procedural states: instead, there was simply the holy people of God, "walking together," and together, led by their pastors and teachers, responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

This is a vision with deep roots in the Catholic Church; expressed in antiquity most obviously through the mass meetings in which bishops were elected, which did not vote by number, but by acclamation, and aimed at, not majority rule, but spontaneous and miraculous unanimity.

Hence Francis' insistence on everyone participating in some way, however small, in the Church's decision-making processes; but hence, also, his insistence on the obedience of everyone to his own commands and wishes, which for him (as for any Jesuit) expressed once decided the authentic will of the Holy Spirit. The Papacy, it cannot be too often emphasized, is historically much more a charismatic and populist institution than a conservative one. 

If Francis represents anything at all in the terms of the Church's history, then, it is certainly not the progressive Catholic vision of a "democratization of the Church," or even a decentralization in any modern political sense. Far from enacting decentralization of authority and action into sub-universal institutions such as bishops' conferences or dioceses, Francis throughout his Papacy, and particularly in his synodal processes, insisted on the participation of every individual in singular, universal processes instigated and led by the Pope. Everyone must be involved in the Church's mission, and hence local participation is necessary: but everyone must participate directly in the Church's universal mission, and do what the Holy Spirit commands, and so must hear directly from, and directly and immediately obey, the Church's universal authorities. 

Considered most simply, this vision of Francis represents a return to the Ultramontane Papacy of the 19th and early 20th centuries: men who are in most cases Francis' personal heroes as they (ironically) are also to his bitterest enemies. The Society of Pope Pius X claims to be devoted to Pope Pius X, a man who execrated and condemned everything they stand for: but so is Pope Francis, and with rather better reason.

The Ultramontane Popes, like the Popes of the Gregorian reform, were populists and centralizers, who demanded that Christians everywhere listen to them and obey them and participate actively in the mission they set. Far from being content to operate only on the universal level, these Popes set up Catholic Action groups and diocesan groups and mission groups and every other sort of institution at local levels, and then delivered frequent messages to these groups on the most local issues.

The Popes immediately before and after Vatican 2 represented at least a relative contrast to this. It cannot be emphasized enough that what sets John Paul II and Benedict most apart from the majority of historical Popes, and certainly from the Popes immediately preceding them, is that they were both academics and theologians. Their vision of reform, then, was to a much greater degree centered on the Church's intellectual heritage, on theology, ecclesiology, and ethics, considered mostly in abstract and universal terms. This was, as I have emphasized elsewhere, a great and largely successful revolution, and one that cannot be undone. 

The "problem" that went by the rather confusing name of "Curial corruption" can only really be understood in relation to this larger vision of Francis and those who commissioned him. Seen in these terms, it was not primarily a matter of institutional corruption or malfeasance so much as a larger and more basic conflict--a conflict with its roots well before Vatican 2, but one that had festered and grown through the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict. 

Pius XII, the last great Curialist Pope, was the Dictator Pope if one ever existed; but since Paul VI went down in shame and ignominy and universal execration for having dared to disagree publicly with a Papal commission he himself had appointed, Popes have been living under a shadow: a shadow that defined Benedict XVI's Papacy more than any other. This shadow has little in itself to do with the Second Vatican Council, or the Roman Curia, or any such thing: it simply has to do with modern institutions and their natures. 

The problem here is not primarily that the Curia is or was corrupt in a conventional sense: though it often has been. It was more that the Curia operated like a typical modern governmental institution, which is to say, conspiratorially and technocratically. It was most fundamentally that the Curia did not really serve the Pope, let alone always obey his commands.

Benedict XVI, it should be remembered, resigned after the so-called Vatileaks Scandal, where his private butler was found to be passing documents to outside actors. What defined his Papacy, however, was a far more pervasive sense of impotence: as he purportedly expressed it to a visitor, the sense that his power did not really extend beyond the doors to his office. As Pope Francis himself expressed it in discussing the conclave that elected Benedict, it had a great deal to do with the fact that the Curia was run by Italians, who did things their own way, as they had always done them, and resented the intrusion of "foreign Popes." On other occasions, he (somewhat less politically correctly) invoked such terms as "the gay lobby" and "frocciagine" to describe the secretive sub-cultures of the Curia. 

Such closed, insular circles, focused on their own concerns and interests, are not necessarily corrupt in any way that would scandalize anyone in modern secular governments: but they are certainly not particularly helpful instruments for a Pope interested in conveying and enabling the immediate, charismatic will of the Holy Spirit. 

By most accounts, John Paul II to a large degree worked around the Curia, enabled by his extraordinary, epochal facility with languages and mass media. Benedict, however, a shy, gentle scholar, could not really do so. He was a longtime worker in the Curia, and knew many things; and be had, and has, his circle of devoted disciples, scholars and intellectuals and young men, who helped to communicate his message and his reforms, and who at last gave him the information that led him to resign.

According to Francis himself, when he first visited Benedict after his own election, Benedict presented him with a box filled with "information" on the Curia. His mandate, then, was perfectly clear: fix it. 

The mandate of the Cardinals and bishops of the world was a bit less clear, but also expressed frustration with the same basic sense that the Curia was not at their service, the service of the Church's purported leaders, but a separate, self-interested (largely Italian) power block of its own, concerned largely with itself. And they, too, wanted him to fix it.

Institutional reform is a very tricky thing, about which it is all but impossible to draw universal conclusions. The evaluations of Francis' record as a reformer vary about as widely as the evaluations of him on other fronts. A true evaluation of what he accomplished, and what he failed to accomplish, will likely take another Pontificate, or perhaps a century or two, or perhaps the Last Judgment.

What does have to be understood, though, is Francis' basic method and vision of reform; and how a great deal of the complaints made about him flow directly from that method and that vision.

One of the most insightful things I have read about Francis' pontificate came in an interview to a Jesuit; one of many such interviews given to Jesuits through his Pontificate. In it, he mentioned that one of the first things he thought of after his election was the Pope who had suppressed the Jesuit Order in the 18th century; and the account (likely slanted through Jesuit source) that this Pope had been dominated by his Curial advisor, who made all decisions (including the fateful one to suppress the Jesuits) for him. It is overwhelmingly likely that in recalling this historical incident, he was analogizing it to the more recent plight of Benedict XVI, who had more recently and similarly been said to have been dominated by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone. And considering these examples, Francis resolved: that will not be me.

Reform in the Francis sense, then, implies first and foremost a lack of trust: in institutions, and in people. The reputation Francis gained in Argentina, the reputation they got him elected, was as a reformer in a similar sense: an austere, rather dour populist on the outs with both most of the hierarchy of Argentina and his own Jesuit Order. 

Much of the hatred expressed for Pope Francis, from the beginning, came from people who found themselves on the receiving end of this distrust. At the top of this list were the institutional, Curialist clerics who were frequently the targets of his barbed criticisms (particularly in his annual speeches to the Curia) and his reorganizations and reshufflings and financial takeovers of Vatican institutions. 

More ideological and theological conflicts got much more attention during Francis' reign in the press and on the Internet, and still do; but it seems to me that, to this day, the bulk of public, especially journalistic bad blood towards Francis flows directly from Curial and institutional insiders. 

"Morale in the Curia is bad," journalists and intellectuals with friends in high places tell us; "people feel discouraged." "Francis is abusing the rule of law," they tell us, reading emails from their friends. "He is centralizing power too much." "His style of governance is too dictatorial," they say, eating lunch with the same friends. "He bypassed the Secretariat of State entirely on this document...can you believe it?" 

As I have tried to convey elsewhere, contemporary journalism on powerful institution relies more than ever before on personal, off-the-record contacts with powerful people and their aides and associates; and a sine qua non of such relationships is, frequently if not normatively, what used to be called discretion. John Allen, one of the most important American Vaticinists, as much as admitted this, saying quite accurately that journalism requires maintaining contacts, and maintaining contacts requires (at least from time to time) not reporting on things when your contacts ask you not to, and making sure, when they ask, that their perspective is passed on and represented in mainstream reports. 

There is no better example of this than the wondrous Cardinal Becciu, the flamboyantly, extravagantly corrupt Sardinian cleric whose actions and fortunes have become so deeply and inextricably bound up with the successes and failures of Francis' pontificate. Cardinal Becciu, it should be clearly stated, is corrupt; he is, to abuse a phrase, as corrupt as the day is long. Whatever kind of corruption one would like to think of, he is involved in it; including stealing money from the Vatican and sending it people he likes, creating and running fake charitable organizations, wiretapping the Pope, getting his enemies ousted, spreading false rumors, manipulating the media, and so on and so forth. Becciu once held a position of great responsibility and trust as Francis' sostituto, and in that position did a great deal to obstruct Francis' economic reforms of the Curia, possibly including instigating Francis himself to get reformers fired, and possibly even including clandestinely helping and encouraging the Australian criminal case that drove Cardinal Pell, Francis' initial choice for chief economic reformer, out of the Vatican. 

After a rapid and stunning fall from grace, however, Becciu was forced to relinquish his responsibilities and privileges by Francis himself and finally convicted by the Vatican courts for financial fraud and other abuses. Though in general terms I try to avoid drawing such judgments from the outside, merely from the publicly available evidence and his own comments, Becciu is absolutely, without question, guilty. Not only that, but, again speaking as someone who is generally reluctant to wade into such things and based purely on publicly-available data, the process against him followed exceptionally normal and reasonable standards, and resulted in a straightforward conviction on the evidence.

Nevertheless, in both the principal outlets of the Catholic media, and even more manifestly in the mainstream American and Italian media outlets, Becciu is portrayed--to this day--as a persecuted and unfairly treated person, and the process against him as a kind of "Medieval" Vatican "witch-hunt." Why is this? Becciu, it should be said, is what we might call a "non-ideological" person; he has no particular theological agenda, conservative or liberal. He has no close associations with conservatives or traditionalists, or again with radical progressives. He is simply an Italian, a Curialist, and an institutionalist; and a man with friends. And these friends have protected him and supported him, and do so to this day.

It is for this reason, above all others, that evaluating Francis as a reformer requires a certain degree of discernment. Francis' task, as he himself saw it, was to bring the Curia under Papal control; it was not to ensure the smoother running of institutions, or balance the budget, or create more logical workflows among various departments. That this process involved, necessarily, angering and pushing aside and excluding powerful, influential people with friends should be obvious; that it also involved, unfortunately but quite naturally, angering and pushing aside powerful and influential people who were not in any clear sense corrupt, who were in fact at times good people who merely happened to be powerful and not in a position to be immediately trusted by the Pope, should also require no great amount of explanation. But after all that, did Francis succeed as a Curial reformer? 

This is a difficult question to answer. Certainly, Pope Francis established a new constitution for the Curia, set up any number of new structures, reshuffled any number of offices and duties and personnel. Some of these new institutions have done very good work; many appear to have made little or no difference; most have yet to be tested. By all accounts, he was mostly successful in bringing the finances of the Curia under true centralized control for the first time in modern history, in the process establishing basic standards of bookkeeping and getting rid of the more informal systems of patronal funding common before. At the same time, he did not appreciably reduce the actual costs of running the Curia, and a mix of scandals and failures to invest prudently, as well as the fact that powerful people he angered reduced their donations significantly, along with more basic and long-standing structural problems, now lead to the Vatican facing a significant budget crunch in the short to medium term. 

The actual work performed by the Curial institutions under Francis' watch can only really be evaluated piecemeal. The disciplinary section of the DDF still takes longer than most victim advocates would like. The doctrinal section has produced some important documents, whose reception varies, but has generally been less active than under John Paul II and Benedict XVI: until the arrival of Cardinal Fernandez, the first head of the DDF clearly and comprehensively trusted by Pope Francis, since which time it has become very active indeed, generally to the good. The Secretariat of State has had significant diplomatic successes and has made the Holy See a real player in recent crises, negotiating, among other things, many hostage exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, but has also presided over a very controversial secret treaty with China. The Pontifical Academy for Life has attempted to reach out to secular academics and intellectuals far more, but has met with at best mixed results. The Dicastery for the Eastern Churches has had some real ecumenical breakthroughs, but also faced new challenges. The most unmitigated success, perhaps, is the Papal Almoner's office under Cardinal Krajenski. And so on and so forth.

In the end, though, any evaluation of Francis the Reformer will depend almost entirely on one's concept of the actual problems in the Curia, and the Curia's actual purpose. If balancing the budget was the main concern, then Francis was not successful. If doctrinal or disciplinary oversight was the main concern, then Francis' record is mixed.

My own viewpoint, such as it is, is that none of those things were what Benedict XVI or the cardinals at his conclave were primarily asking Francis for; and certainly not what Francis himself was primarily aiming at. Put simply, Francis' task was to break the power of internal cliques and networks and bring the Curia as much as possible under direct Papal control, financially and in every other respect. 

Did he succeed in this? This is, again, very hard to evaluate from the outside. From my own extremely limited vantage point, the answer would appear to be largely yes. Many people in the Curia and outside of it, it is true, resent Francis very much, accusing him of making all decisions himself, of making such decisions quickly and alone or in consultation with only a few trusted personal allies, of not telling the Curia in advance what he is planning to do, of not consulting the proper Curial departments, of requiring personal loyalty first and foremost, of demanding that they conform their actions to his wishes and intentions and likes and dislikes, of shuffling and reshuffling their duties and obligations, of criticizing them publicly and privately, of making their jobs more difficult. 

Such complaints very likely do reflect real weaknesses in Pope Francis as an administrator. But what they point to, if they point to anything, is a Pope, for the first time in many generations, well and truly in control of the Curia. And that, I think, is a strong indication of at least some degree of success. 

The Weaknesses of Reform

Still, there are clear weaknesses with Francis' methods and goals of reform--and additional weaknesses of Francis himself. Operating based on trust, rather than based on institutional position and vetting, means relying unavoidably on one's own instincts: which unavoidably means also one's own prejudices.

Many if not most of the clerical complaints against Francis came from this sense of being on the outside, of the sense of a closed network of Francis supporters and friends wielding outsized influence and distrusting outsiders: even where those outsiders were supposed to be the most important Curial or episcopal leaders of the Church. In this, nothing could be more characteristic of Francis than his approach to picking Cardinals: bypassing almost entirely all the traditionally important and ecclesiastically central "cardinalate sees" of Europe and the Americas in favor of picking out individual persons, often from obscure countries and unimportant sees, that Francis saw, for frequently obscure reasons based on personal contacts or scraps of information, as likely to be trustworthy.

The perspective of Francis as a removed figure insulated in a tiny circle of supporters, though, is to a large degree untrue; for by all accounts, Francis was one of the more accessible recent Popes on a personal level.

Pope Francis famously chose to live, not in the apartments of the Apostolic Palace, but in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guesthouse. He did this, by his own admission, not as a mark of simplicity or poverty, but simply to avoid being isolated. This isolation reflected both personal considerations (Pope Francis being a very social and communal man), and also more political concerns emanating from Benedict's troubled Papacy. Put simply, Benedict had been easily controlled and easily cut off from supporters and friends and ordinary people; and Francis would not be. 

By all accounts, Francis greatly enjoyed the more communal lifestyle of the Domus, which no doubt more closely approximated his life as a Jesuit, celebrating Mass and taking meals with Vatican employees and their families, visiting dignitaries, clerics, and others. By those same accounts, people frequently used this accessibility to lobby and petition the Pope, to make connections with him, to ask for favors, and, concomitantly, to make efforts against their rivals. 

This, though, is only a small sign and emblem of a much more pervasive feature of Francis' papacy. John Paul II and Benedict XVI had both been academics; they had engaged with the Church to a large extent through media, both mass media and more scholarly and journalistic commentary. They had also, as academics, expected and been inured to a certain amount of abstract, journalistic criticism--though they had also possessed more than a share of the famed academic thin skin towards such criticisms, and the urge to respond in writing. 

Pope Francis was not like this. He, like most Popes before him, favored personal contacts and personal engagement. It is unfair to say he sought out only sycophants--though sycophants certainly sought him out. As a good Jesuit, Francis enjoyed engaging personally with people he disagreed with, and in this there was no intrinsic bias towards more progressive or more conservative elements.

As his approach to picking Cardinals suggests, Francis emphatically did not merely favor people whom he personally agreed with or who personally sucked up to him; he did, however, clearly favor people who he regarded, based on his own personal contacts and connections and instincts and prejudices, as trustworthy or likely to be trustworthy. And, concomitantly, he did at least frequently pass over people who, based on those same factors, he regarded as likely to be untrustworthy. Some otherwise puzzling acts of Francis can be explained by his apparent personal distrust--based, no doubt, on his experiences in Latin America--of clerics associated with Opus Dei. 

This focus on trust, however, has its limitations; particularly when taken in as direct and personal a way as Francis apparently did, and certainly in a hierarchy the size of the Catholic Church, where personal contacts are unavoidably limited and even personal prejudices can only get anyone so far. When combined with Francis' basic status as a reformer, and the accompanying active distrust of powerful, institutionally-networked people both inside and outside of the Church, it could lead, at times, to real problems. This is the red thread passing through nearly all the genuine scandals of Francis' papacy, including most notably the Zanchetto affair (where a priest personally acquainted with Francis but accused of sexual harassment and assault of seminarians in Argentina was given a job at the Vatican), Francis' early relationship with Becciu before he was "found out," and any number of other associations with doctrinally or morally questionable figures in the hierarchy. 

There is, after all, a strong advantage in institutional means of vetting: and that is that where institutions are well-set-up and staffed with good personnel, they allow for evaluations of personnel on a much larger scale and on somewhat more abstract and objective terms. Francis was a good man with, I think, generally good instincts: but he was by no means an infallible judge of character. Nor, of course, could he possibly run the entire Curia by himself, let alone the entire Church.

It is for the same reason that Francis possessed such frequently prickly and adversarial relationships with his "critics." Like many previous Popes--his personal hero Pius X perhaps most of all--Francis did not generally appreciate the kind of abstract, reactive, ideological, simplistic pseudo-intellectual criticism upon which modern journalism and mass media, particularly on the Internet, thrives and feeds, like delicious beans on toast. 

In theory, and even to a large extent in practice, Francis appreciated debate and constructive criticism. As a Jesuit and Papist, though, he could not help regarding many of the actual things said about him in print and behind his back as both disloyal and impious; and as a deeply direct and personal man, he could not help being frustrated by the mere fact that criticisms were made of him, not to him, behind his back and in print and to the public. Francis was not by all accounts a particularly vindictive man, and rarely if ever, I think, self-consciously took personal revenge on his critics. He certainly did not trust them, however; and as a man who made decisions based on his personal instincts and personal trust, such things had their consequences.

It would be easy to overemphasize Francis' personal response to criticism, though; for the simple reason that there is little or no evidence that Francis ever read or engaged with most criticisms of him in the mass media. Famously, Francis made a promise to the Virgin Mary in the '90s not to watch television, and kept it faithfully (with the exception of a few extraordinary events) to his dying day. Similarly, there is no evidence Francis ever spent time on the Internet; purportedly, important emails were printed out for him by his aides. While certainly criticisms were brought to his ears by such aides and by others, Francis seems to have generally paid them relatively little attention when not backed up by personal contacts. 

A more important factor, I think, was merely the presence or absence of such personal contacts, and the kind of honest, respectful personal engagement Francis craved. Put simply, critics of Francis among the hierarchy did not speak to Francis, but about him; and in so doing, they gave up most chance of their perspectives being actually heard and responded to or even taken into account. It would be vastly exaggerative to say that people who talked directly to Francis always got what they wanted; but they were at least seen and acknowledged, even in their critiques. People, however, whether clerics or laymen, Catholic or non-Catholics, who merely sat back and wrote blog posts or tweets or academic essays or journalistic analyses or gossiped among themselves about how he was ruining the Church were not heard at all; and to the extent they came to Francis' attention, their critiques were rarely if ever respected.

Two excellent examples of this dynamic, I would suggest, are the affair de dubia, and the remarkable and successful intervention of Cardinal Ambongo into the affair de Fiducia supplicans. 

In the first instance, when Francis released the document Amoris Laetitia, a lovely theological meditation on romantic love and marriage that also included discussion on the possibility of divorced and remarried couples receiving communion in specific cases under the guidance of a priest as part of a process leading hopefully to their full repentance, many clerics and public intellectuals alike responded with open outrage and condemnation. Several such clerics, after issuing a great deal of public criticism, sent in four dubia to the office of the DDF, putting their viewpoint into four (rather polemical and not particularly well-constructed) questions. They then continued to issue public criticisms and statements, and published these dubia on the Internet, and waited. They are waiting still.

On the other hand, a number of years later, when Francis released a document, Fiducia Supplicans, saying that priests could offer informal, non-liturgical, ad hoc blessings of people involved in illicit sexual relationships, but not the unions themselves, many conservatives in both Africa and the West reacted with horror, based largely on second-hand and inaccurate and ideological reporting on the document by the Western press, which largely presented it, absurdly, as an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Many hundreds of pages were immediately produced, on the Internet, by critics of the document, few of which had any effect at all or ever impacted Francis in any way, even indirectly.

Cardinal Ambongo of the Congo, however, having worked closely with and supported Francis for most of his pontificate, and also not being a born fool, did what none of Francis' clerical critics ever seem to have thought to do before, and flew to Rome to meet with Francis directly. There, Cardinal Ambongo expressed, directly and in person, the concerns of many African bishops about the document, its meaning, its reception, its mischaracterization by the press and by members of other religions, and its likely effects on the standing and reputation of the Catholic Church in Africa. 

Francis, though, did not respond to this criticism with anger. Instead, he immediately allowed Ambongo to draft, in direct consultation with the head of the DDF, a document clarifying the document's meaning and allowing the Churches in Africa to largely, as a matter of general policy, dispense from its terms. This Francis did, not reluctantly and grudgingly, but by all accounts quite willingly, endorsing the results with his own authority and accompanying it with public praise for Ambongo and the African Church as a whole. He followed this up, also, with several successive public clarifications of the document's meaning and implications, as well as personal comments in interviews and speeches making it clear that he still considered homosexual acts to be sinful and denied the possibility of blessing illicit sexual unions outside of marriage. And Cardinal Ambongo continued, by all appearances, to enjoy close personal contacts with Francis and the Vatican.

In some cases, as I will touch on below, the criticisms of Francis made behind his back and in print and on the Internet were wrongheaded, impious, and foolish, and made by wrongheaded, impious fools. Yet this was by no means always the case. There can be little denying that Francis did at times possess hostile or strained or merely distant relationships with clerics who were good men, with reasonable, constructive criticisms of his actions, or even with good, constructive suggestions for how to carry out his ideas and achieve his goals. Many such important suggestions and criticisms were not heard during Francis' pontificate, for the simple reason that good clerics were not in a position to make them, or Francis was not in a position to receive them. Many misunderstandings arose that could have been easily dealt with by simple personal contacts and explanations, but were instead allowed to grow into public scandals. Conflicts emerged that were not only avoidable, but had little or nothing to do with Francis' actual beliefs and goals, and so served no real purpose for anyone.

Most crucially, people who could have been highly fruitful collaborators with Francis in his tasks as Pope instead ended up being largely fruitless critics or obstacles or bystanders. An enormous amount of energy was wasted critiquing and attacking and suggesting and explaining and debating and hashing out and clarifying and balancing and even just trying to understand the Pope by people who might, given a little more effort to bridge ultimately trivial or even merely apparent gaps, have put that energy to much better use actually working with and under the Pope. 

Francis does not bear the sole or even, I think, the primary responsibility for most of these squandered potentials. Many people--even or especially clerics--should have tried much, much harder to fulfill their obligation to listen to and obey the Pope; they should have worked to understand him and to adapt their own personal proclivities and perspectives and prejudices to his; they should have listened to the Church, and not to the crazed, impious middlemen; they should have expended their efforts working with him and under him, and not against him. 

When all is said and done, though, there is no question that not only Francis' systemic goals, but also his personal limitations, weaknesses, and sins played a significant role in the human wastes and tragedies of his Papacy; and that should be as clearly stated by his supporters as much as by his critics.

Closeness, Compassion, Tenderness

I have given this much space to a consideration of Francis' weaknesses, not primarily to evaluate his personal responsibility (a task best left to God), but rather because, as I suggested above, his weaknesses as a Pope and a person are deeply, and to an extent inextricably, intertwined with his strengths, and necessary to properly understand them.

Francis, by all accounts, was elected to be a reforming Pope, an outsider from the "ends of the earth" to get the Curia in order. He was not elected to be a charismatic man of the people; but that is, of course, how he ultimately was viewed by most people around the world, and even how he may have had the greatest impact. 

By Francis' own accounts, he was himself taken entirely by surprise both by his own penchant for the crowds he encountered in St. Peter's Square and around the world, and by his enthusiastic reception in by them and the press. In Argentina, Francis was certainly seen as a populist, known for his attachment to so-called "street priests" and his own penchant for walking the streets of Buenos Aires by himself to visit his flock in small groups or person-to-person. He was certainly not seen as someone likely to match John Paul II in his appeal to the mass media and the crowds in St. Peter's Square. And yet, it turned out Francis loved being among the crowds, greeting them, speaking to them, blessing them, touching them, both in Rome and everywhere else he travelled; and he ultimately died, appropriately, a matter of hours after touring the Square one last time in the Popemobile.

Even in this, though, there is a helpful distinction to be made between John Paul II and Francis, illuminating both. John Paul II was both a trained actor and a trained academic; he was above all a man of grand, truly theatrical gestures, gestures designed to be seen and registered on a stage at a great distance, a public speaker of a kind rare since the rise of the microphone, capable of projecting his voice and his actions and of mastering a crowd with or without technology. He was also, however, someone who understood well the power of modern mass media, and was quite capable of looking directly at the camera when his close-up came. He had, then, charisma of an indelibly 20th-century sort. 

Francis, though, was different. He did not speak particularly loudly, nor were his gestures particularly theatrical. He did not pay a great deal of attention to video cameras, or to props or surroundings, or anything else. Even on a stage, he spoke conversationally, looking down at his paper or back up at his audience, with vivid, emotive gestures that suggested discussion around an Argentinean or Italian dinner table more than an actor on a stage.

This, though, was the remarkable thing that Francis had, and that few if any political or ecclesial figures of my experience have had: the ability to speak directly, not to a crowd, but to each individual within it. Rather than being larger-than-life, he seemed to be able to bring everything down to his own intimate, personal scale: even the bulk of the country of East Timor, gathered in a single place to hear him speak. 

I saw Francis twice in person, both times during his early pontificate in 2014: once at a Papal Mass, once at an Audience in St. Peter's square. Both times, distance and space seemed to dwindle to insignificance. There was no more a sense of distance between me and Francis celebrating Mass on the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica than between me and my parish priest at Daily Mass in a small chapel in North Carolina. When Francis waved at the crowd, he waved at me; when he looked at the crowd, he looked at me. Every gesture, every word, conveyed simple, direct contact. His tour around St. Peter's was not a performance for a crowd, but an indefinite series of personal encounters: a baby blessed here, an old woman shaken hands with here, a disabled person caressed gently there. What I recall most vividly, though, is him being handed a beverage by a random member of the crowd close to me; and him taking it quite naturally, and thanking the person, and taking a sip through the straw, and handing it back. And this, it is needless to say, is not something I can imagine any other public figure of my lifetime doing.

There is purportedly a saying current in Rome: that people came to see John Paul II, to hear Benedict, and to touch Francis. Like many such popular sayings, it encapsulates a basic truth much better than long essays such as this. 

John Paul II lived during the great period of 20th century history, in a dry light most likely the greatest period of collective human achievement in the history of the human race: when vast, centralized economies, led by vast, centralized bureaucracies, planned and built public works dwarfing the mountains, logistical networks spanning the globes, mass-media communications and ideologies holding the hearts of billions, weapons that could destroy the world in a few minutes. In response to an overwhelming world of size and scale and power, a world that to many made the Church seem not so much false as small, John Paul II showed how great it truly was; seeming by his words, his gestures, to embody both the heroism of man and the fatherhood of God, summoning crowds vaster than armies to call on the name of Christ, and showing by contrast the men ruling modern states, suddenly, as if in a flash of lightning, as pale, shrunken, inhuman dwarfs.

Francis, though, never appeared particularly great, or particularly grand: even when leading millions in prayer or action. The qualities he exemplified instead he himself expressed very directly in his oft-repeated listing of the characteristics of God: closeness, compassion, tenderness. I followed as closely as possible, via video and text, Francis' journeys around the world during his pontificate: and the number of moments in which he, in tangible, human gestures, acted out and embodied these qualities towards particular individuals and whole peoples, are virtually infinite. When I look back on his pontificate, I suspect it is these gestures, more than anything else, that I will remember: and these moments embody the heart of Catholicism better than many thousands of pages of theology.

As Chesterton said of another man named Francis, it is given to very few poets to incarnate their own poetry. This, Pope Francis, by a singular grace of Almighty God, achieved. 

The Magisterium and the Media

Pope Francis, though, did not merely act out his beliefs on the tenderness and compassion of God: he also spoke and wrote about them, through many thousands of pages of encyclicals and homilies and Apostolic Exhortations and motu proprios. 

There are, as I began this essay by remarking, many possible perspectives on Pope Francis and what he accomplished; many different angles from which future generations of Catholics may view him, as he fades inevitably into the Church's deep past. As I, a historian myself, have gestured at so far, I think the most natural way for historians to categorize Francis among the Popes is simply "reformer": with all that that has generally implied in the Church's history, positive and negative.

Historians and institutionalists, though, do not often play the largest role in defining a historical figure's legacy: let alone a Pope's. The words and deeds of a Pope are never merely their own, never merely belonging to contemporary thinkers and journalists. Everything the Popes have said and done becomes part of a great tradition, a tradition which men and women and children pore over for many generations, from which they draw both abstract, metaphysical doctrine and daily sustenance for the struggles of life. Within this tradition, the original contexts within which Popes operated, the relationships that defined them, even the most titanic conflicts and scandals, are very often entirely forgotten, remaining only as trivial minutiae for historians and smart kids. What remains is a Pope's contributions to the Church and the Magisterium.

For most of his contemporaries in the West, I suspect that Francis' personality, his media image, the extreme events he lived through, and the conflicts he engaged in with his critics overshadowed almost everything else, including his actual words and writings. This is particularly true, I suspect, in an age when even so-called intellectuals are frequently barely literate. 

Considered in retrospect, though, particularly in the perspective of centuries, I highly suspect that what will be remembered most about Francis will be his Magisterial writings.

This may well seem surprising to those who have mostly or entirely interacted with Francis through mass-media, where the narrative was always of a rather unintellectual Pope prone to embarrassing (and perhaps calculated) "ambiguities." 

I have long since given up trying to make sense of people who find Francis ambiguous: it is up to God, and not me, to decide upon the precise balance of stupidity, ignorance, and malice in such assessments. 

In all fairness, however, if all one ever saw of Francis were his comments in interviews--or rather, small clips of him from these interviews taken out of context--then I can at least understand the impression. Francis was, as I have again and again already emphasized, above all a direct and personal man, who interacted, not with crowds or with cameras, but with individual people. He thus had a particular penchant for face-to-face interviews, both with individual writers and with the larger bevies of journalists on Papal planes. 

And the important, indeed crucial, point, to be grasped is that when Pope Francis spoke to interviewers, he spoke to the interviewers. He did not speak to the cameras, or to the hundreds or thousands or millions of unknown people who might be watching through them; let alone the thousands or millions more who might see a short clip of his interview on the Internet or cable news later, or hear about it from someone else. 

As a mostly media-illiterate older man who did not use computers or watch television, he was, perhaps, to a large extent simply incapable of the kind of smooth, sound-bite-ready media performances enjoined upon public figures in our accursed age; but his incapacity went far beyond that. 

When he talked to interviewers and journalists, he talked to them as people; only could talk to them as people, and not as representatives of constituencies, or tubes to convey his message to the world. And as anyone should know who engages in such personal contacts, anyone who has ever tried to talk to religion or politics or ethics or Catholicism with people not overly familiar with them, one cannot help doing a great deal of simplifying, of translating, of reaching for and finding common ground and common frames of reference. This Francis did constantly, naturally, largely without thinking: and, by the accounts of those who interacted with him regularly, random secular comedians and journalists alike, generally quite successfully. Many millions of people got from these fragmentary, chance conversations, not a deep understanding of Catholic doctrine and ethics, but a very clear, positive impression of Francis as a man, what the Catholic Church stood for in the world, and at least genuine hints of what it was all about, not least of all through Francis' profound, personal attention to them and their concerns. 

Here, as elsewhere, Francis' greatest strengths and weaknesses as a Pope alike come from the same basic gift: that he looked at persons, and talked to persons, and caressed persons, and paid attention not at all to the simulacrums that define modern mass-media and modern life.

Nevertheless, when I express my annoyance with people who found Francis merely ambiguous--or perhaps even conspiratorial, seeing him, because he spent an unavoidably significant amount of his time talking to secular progressives in mass media, merely as a secular progressive in disguise--it is above all because, in focusing on these unavoidably partial and fragmentary interactions, they generally showed no awareness whatsoever of the thousands and millions of words in which Francis actually attempted to clearly and comprehensively explain himself, his views, his commitments, and his teachings to the Church and the world. And if one (as I have) actually reads some of Francis' thousands of homilies, his thousands of speeches to political figures and clergy and youth, one gets a very clear and very unambiguous sense of the man and what he stood for. As a homilist, Francis mostly lacked Benedict's elegance and theological breadth; but what he lacked in breadth, he more than made up for in clarity and economy, making and then underscoring his few, profound points for all to understand.

I highly, highly recommend Francis' homilies, which are not only an excellent model for structure, style, clarity, and economy, but also give perhaps the clearest look into Francis the man and the pastor, and his fundamental message for his flock. 

Francis, though, was not merely a pious homilist and pastor, but a great thinker and Magisterial teacher; a reality too frequently obscured by the unfair contrast with the more abstract and academic writings of his great predecessor Benedict XVI. Francis did not merely give interviews, or even merely deliver homilies. He wrote many hundreds of pages of encyclicals and Apostolic Exhortations, profound, intelligent pages which the soi-disant intellectuals seem to have either not read, or else not been intelligent enough to understand; but which, properly appreciated, constitute a profound and lasting gift to the Church and the world. 

I am, first and foremost, a Church historian, which means that I have read many thousands of pages of Magisterial writings, beginning with the Church Fathers and extending through the great Papal encyclicals of the 19th and 20th centuries. I have for many years had a particular interest in the 19th and 20th century tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, beginning with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and extending through John Paul II's Centisimus Annus and Benedict XVI's Caritas in veritate. 

And after reading through all the above, I feel obliged to say that by any possible standard, and any possible point of comparison, Francis' social teaching not only stands up to previous entries, but represents a significant encapsulation, application, and expansion of the tradition, both broadening it beyond politics and economics to address fundamental philosophical and anthropological issues, in the process tying it more directly than ever before into the Church's mystical and devotional traditions, and also applying its insights to taken in the manifold, extreme, and highly particular abuses of modernity. 

Francis' social teaching brings together the cosmic concerns and direct moral condemnations and commands found in the Church Fathers with the more modern academic-theoretic insights, analysis, and recommendations of modern Pontiffs; in a very real way, he completes the task begun by Leo XIII, tying the Church's Social Teaching fully into its tradition and life and demonstrating once and for all how the Church's economic doctrines and concerns emerge naturally and necessary from its pastoral, theological, and even devotional commitments. 

Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that Francis' writings constitute a completion, not merely of the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, but of the centuries of European and global consideration of political and economic organization and reform more generally. Idiots (which is to say, intellectuals) frequently accused Francis of being a communist: when in fact his writings show little or no knowledge even of Marxism, but a deep and pervasive knowledge of the Church's tradition. Yet for all that, Francis is a true heir to the traditions of social and economic reform that began with the Enlightenment and reached their height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

I suspect, rather sadly, that the emerging world of the 21st century will have little place for these traditions and the concerns that underlay them. Leftism, and all the profound theoretical and practical concern for justice, the weak, and the suffering that went with it, survives, where it survives at all, largely as a parodic media culture; and the concerns for freedom and cultural distinctiveness and individual responsibility that animated more classical and nationalistic liberalism have degenerated into the mere worship of power long since. Francis' thought, however, possesses profound resonances with all these great modern traditions: profoundly affirming cultural distinctiveness and traditional authority, opposing the elimination of differences, the "hegemony of one idea," "ideological colonization," and all the technological and political trends accompanying them, while at the same time centering his thought precisely on the dignity of the individual person and his or her personal and social and communal fulfillment and accompanying liberation from violence and pride and tyrannical power. Those still animated by such concerns, or even merely nostalgic for them, would do well to turn to Francis.   

Laudato Si was badly misrepresented by the media as a document on Global Warming; what it actually is is the most thorough denunciation of modernity in its base anthropological, ethical, metaphysical, dimensions ever offered by a sitting Pope, taking in but surpassing the theses of the great reactionary Popes of the 19th century; as well as a triumphant reclaiming of the cosmic dimensions of Catholic theology and social thought, driving out the machine-gods of modernity and once again situating the Church's economic and political doctrines firmly within a hierarchical natural order and cosmos presided over by God. Reading it, all of modernity drops away like a bad dream; and one easily imagines its insights being taken up and amplified and applied in some future age to bring a great harvest.

Fratelli Tutti is, if anything, an even more breathtaking work: an attempt to expound Catholic doctrine on the dignity and value of human beings precisely through applying it to all aspects of social and cultural and economic organization across modern history across the world. Though the litany of specific denunciations of modern abuses is long, Francis' greatest accomplishment is his ability to ground this negativity in a deeply positive vision of, not just human beings qua individuals or qua the abstracted human race, but qua the actuality of human life and relationships, uniting the metaphysical vision of the human "ousia" found in the Fathers with the actual diverse networks and lineages of historical and cultural and political and economic relationships under the deceptively simple rubric of "fraternity."

His last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, is also, properly understood, a great Social Encyclical. His account of the personal love of Christ for each human person is, again, breathtaking: uniting in one the theological, the devotional, the personal, and the political and economic. It contains, I think, the key to his teachings as a whole, the key to his Pontificate and his personality: the belief that Christ loved us not merely in the abstract, as a collective or a mass or a crowd or a demographic grouping, but directly, attentively, emotionally, face to face, in depth and in detail, with his whole heart. And so did Pope Francis.

I urge everyone who can to read these documents, and then reread them, and then try their best to apply them to the life of the Church and their own lives: and I suspect, as I said, that people will be reading them for many centuries to come. The political, economic, and social debates of the early 21st century are, for the most part, extraordinarily parochial, limited, unreal, and mostly just damn stupid; to read Francis, however, is to enter a larger, truer world, where direct, immediate, even tragic personal responsibilities lead naturally to the urgent consideration of the true breadth of possibilities and parameters of social and economic organization within a cosmos of meaning at the center of which is the beating heart of Christ. To receive that vision and internalize it is simply to be free: and to have at least the chance of freeing the world. 

The Mutiny of the Middlemen

In this essay so far, I have endeavored to show how it is that Pope Francis found himself in close contact and harmony with some in the Church, and in situations of misunderstanding and conflict with others. This is, to an extent, always and unavoidably a feature of the role of the Pope, as a historical, personal, and therefore conflictual leader of the Church Militant; but it is for that always and everywhere a tragedy. The Pope is an emblem and means of unity, though a unity is neither passive nor pacific, but active and personal and emphatically goal-oriented. At the best, the Pope imparts to the Church the sort of unity there is in an army marching in the same direction; at worst, the Church has appeared more like an army in active mutiny and civil war. Francis, like most Popes, has found himself somewhere in the middle. And, like previous Popes, his own mistakes, his own limitations and weaknesses, even his own sins, have played a sizeable role in generating those conflicts.

Nonetheless, I could not, personally, write an essay on Pope Francis without addressing the outsized role played in his Pontificate by what I would call "the mutiny of the middlemen": that is, the constant and consistent attempt, from the very beginning of his pontificate, by various coteries of Catholic intellectuals, to paint Francis as unreliable at best and evil at worst, to destroy all trust in him and all active listening and obedience to him, and to seize for themselves all the power and influence and trust and authority inhering in his office and person.

This problem should be stated clearly; and it is not a problem with Pope Francis. It is a problem, rather, with the current structure of modernity, of modern mass-media, and above all of Catholic mass-media: and the direct, intrinsic conflict between this structure and the divinely-instituted structure of the Catholic Church.

This has been a real and genuine Crisis in the Church, profoundly akin to and derived from the Crisis of the Church in the West in the 1960s; and it has in no reasonable sense been Francis' fault, but the fault of the middlemen themselves.

Let me explain, once again, what I mean by middlemen. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the Catholic Church, theologically and historically, can be imagined most simply as a network of communication aimed at transmitting a transcendent truth intrinsically beyond human language or understanding. Christ, transcendent truth in person, communicated this truth (not merely verbally or in writing, but comprehensively and personally) to his Apostles, who in turn communicated it to their own successors to the present day. This truth is, in the ordinary course of things, communicated via these successors of the Apostles, the bishops together with and under the Pope, through their own words and deeds and sacramental acts and through their authorized representatives the priests of the Church. 

At any given time, though, there are any number of people not paying direct attention to the directly-authorized communicators of God, who must be dealt with by, or at least can most easily be reached by, other people, middlemen with no formal, permanent, publicly-authorized status in the Church: or, in other words, the rest of us. This is, of course, not merely an unforeseen flaw in the plan of the Church, but an essential element of her nature as a communicative network, transmitting God to and through anyone and everyone, and certainly through laypeople as essentially and necessarily as through priests and bishops and the Pope. Such communications of God, however, are necessarily subject to, and, as it were, downstream from, the essential communicative act embodied in the Church's authorized, public hierarchy and the sacraments they enact. 

In the modern world, however, the simple reality--the essential crisis, as it were--is, as I have very often repeated, simply that most people, most of the time, do not even attempt to engage with the Church's authorized teaching or authorized teachers. Instead, they get many or most of their ideas and even practices of Catholicism as things pre-digested, pre-molded, interpreted and narrativized and slanted and not infrequently distorted, by middlemen: which these days means, alas, alas, not family members or friends or respected community leaders or old Catholic ladies, but self-appointed lay intellectuals on the Internet.

I am, obviously, a self-appointed lay intellectual on the Internet, and I very much mean to include myself in the generalization when I say that, pound for pound, I can think of no grouping of people more likely, both intrinsically and statistically, to be vice-ridden, weak, deceptive, corrupt, ignorant, heretical, schismatic, and simply evil than lay intellectuals on the Internet.

Far before Francis, American Catholic intellectual culture already contained many charlatans and fools, and has for a very long time. I don't think anyone would deny that it has gotten worse in the last ten years, however; for reasons that, in their essence, have little to do with Francis, but rather with the acid effects of the Internet and smartphones and symbolic politics and Biden and Trump and the Pandemic on people's basic intellectual and personal functioning and virtues. 

I was Catholic under Benedict for long enough to see the disgusting, idiotic attacks made on him by both the mainstream media and progressive Catholic intellectual ecosystems. But for all that, under Benedict, the "new" Conservative American Catholic Internet-o-sphere was on the rise; and they made a great show of being in support of the Pope, even as many of them actively denied anything he had to say on politics or economics or Vatican 2 or any other pet topic. 

Anyway, the middlemen in America did not like Pope Francis much; though some of them did, or claimed to. Generally speaking, secular middlemen, journalists and intellectuals--who still constitute, for a huge proportion of the Catholic population, their effective priests and bishops and explainers of the Faith--liked Pope Francis, but systematically and pervasively distorted everything he said and did, bending it all to their own preferred, overriding narrative of a benighted, backward Church doomed to inevitable decline but perhaps able to be saved or at least kept going a while longer by a "progressive Pope" always, inevitably about to change Church teaching to bring it up to date with secular progressive American intelligentsia thought. The ever-fading remnants of the previous generations of "progressive Catholic" media, having long since been reduced to mere appendages of secular journalism and academia, simply repeated these narratives wholesale, adding nothing.

On the other hand, the majority of "conservative" Catholic middlemen, "faithful" Catholic middlemen, "devout" Catholic middlemen--or, in other words, the entirety of the alternative media structure, television and print and increasingly Internet, built up to take the place of the previous progressive and liberal Catholic media under John Paul II and Benedict XVI--did not particularly care for Pope Francis. Some merely despised him; others came to hate him with a profound, overriding, and deeply personal hatred; too many descended into open schism and heresy and apostasy.

What goes around comes around; and the general media relationship with Francis has ebbed and flowed significantly throughout his Papacy. With his illness and death, the mainstream, respectable middlemen have generally come around to a more or less respectful, and intermittently personally loving, stance to Francis, without necessarily arriving at any much greater degree of comprehension. At times in his pontificate, however, nearly the whole of respectable American Catholic media culture seemed in open revolt against Francis: a true mutiny of the middlemen, almost matching that against Pope Paul VI in the 1960s. 

In truth, this comparison is more instructive than it might at first seem, even or especially because many of the middlemen revolting against Francis did so, purportedly, in defense of unchanging Catholic doctrine and tradition. 

I have heard so many American Catholic intellectuals over the past ten years say variants of the same thing: namely, that they realized that under John Paul II and Benedict XVI they had been committed to an extreme and unrealistic Ultramontanism, but now had realized that the Pope was merely a man like any other, who should be listened to only sometimes, but at other times merely grudgingly obeyed or even actively ignored lest he be the cause of scandal. I can think of no statement with which I more profoundly disagree; but the remark nevertheless represents a profound testament to the deeply problematic ways in which many Catholics, and particularly intellectual middlemen, have learned to relate to the Pope. 

Personal commentary is always difficult to argue with: but I can fully say that my own Ultramontanism has only grown more extreme under Francis, and that not despite but because of his obvious personal limitations. As much or more than any of the soi-disant Catholic intellectuals and middlemen of our day, I can say that, personally and natively, I have very little in common with Pope Francis; that his personality and prejudices and proclivities present many points of obvious conflict with my own, that, at least initially, I shared very few of his concerns or perspectives, intellectual or otherwise, on the Church, theology, politics, or the world. 

It is precisely for this reason, though, that I have found Francis' pontificate so immensely important and positive and transformative, personally and intellectual. Francis has criticized me, challenged me, led me--and I have at least tried to listen, to respond, to obey. I have tried to love him; and this is, in the final balance, the whole damn point of the Papacy, and indeed the Catholic Church.

As a natively self-enclosed intellectual, I can fully understand the temptation to treat the Pope as a symbol of the things with which I am obsessed: a kind of fantasy alter-ego embodying and vindicating my own internal intellectual life, my own concerns and proclivities and frustrations and hopes and fears and desires, my own bright ideas and brilliant theses and incredibly important plans for the Church and the world. I can even understand how many American Catholic intellectuals came to treat Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI like this, and how they managed to keep their eyes squeezed shut just enough to ignore all the obvious conflicts between their own political and economic and cultural and theological thoughts and goals and those of these two liberal academics. 

In just the same way, in the 1950s and 1960s, very many American Catholic intellectuals and journalists and middlemen, indeed nearly all of them, succeeded in treating Popes John XXIII and Paul VI as living embodiments of their own very different visions of reform and intellectual and cultural assimilation and progress in the Church and their own social and political and economic programmes for the world. In the case of the middlemen of the 1960s, the dodge became impossible on the day Paul VI released Humanae Vitae; and resulted in a howling wave of execration and condemnation the likes of which the Church has not seen since the Reformation, accompanied by organized mutinies of nearly every respectable Catholic institution and media outlet in America. 

In the case of Pope Francis, and in keeping with the generally less intellectual and more symbolic nature of our own time, the reaction seems to have been more general and diffuse, relying more on the vibes of a Jesuit Pope from South America with a penchant for saying vaguely progressive-sounding things, accompanied by endless conspiratorial narratives about footnotes and forthcoming changes in Catholic doctrines and Pachamama, than on such trivialities as actual Papal documents and actions. 

The mutiny is, however, in both cases ultimately inspired by the fundamental, structural features of modern society and the psychological characters of the intellectual middlemen who inhabit it, in direct contradistinction to the structures and characters on which the Catholic Church on earth depends. Most fundamentally, the Pope is there to teach, to govern, and therefore to be listened to and obeyed; and that is a very, very, very difficult thing for people whose livelihoods, personal habits, and often entire senses of self are invested in what they themselves say and think.  

As I said, I can certainly sympathize with both this general psychology and the more specific reactions involved. What I forbear to justify, though, what I wish with all my heart and mind and strength to object to, to reject, to condemn and execrate and anathematize, is the idea that the discrepancy between intellectual's idealized image of the Pope and the Pope himself is in essence a bad thing, a shame, that it represents a failure, a falling-short, in the Pope and the Church and perhaps even God, rather than in the intellectuals themselves.  

That the Pope is a human person is not a bug, but a feature of the Church. To prefer one's own fantasy vision of the Papacy to the actual, real person of the Pope is as fundamentally perverse and disgusting and damnable as preferring one's own fantasy vision of a woman to one's own actual, real wife. The mindset in which one is disappointed by the actuality, the reality of another human person, in contradistinction to one's own understanding and ideas and vision and goals and hopes and desires, is, in the fallen state of humanity, perfectly understandable and perhaps inevitable; but it is nonetheless the precise inverse of love. If one feels this way about a woman, one does not love the woman, but oneself. And if one feels this way about the Church, one does not love the Church, but oneself. 

The Church is a sacrament of love: and one cannot love a fantasy, no matter how gauzy, or a personal intellectual vision, no matter how profound: one cannot even, in the final balance, love the Church's theology or doctrine or structure or ethics or Magisterium. But one can love the Pope; and that is why he is there.

Of course, many of these people did, and do, claim to love the Pope; though many of them are honest enough to admit that they do not like him very much. Generally speaking, as all the practical doctors of the Church have affirmed, when one loves, but not likes, someone, it can only be the result of vice, or at least imperfection in virtue and charity. 

Still, passions like anger, even anger at a Pope, can themselves be the result of virtue, and occasioned by defects in the person to whom one is trying to relate: and this, more or less, has been the constant refrain of Francis' intellectual critics since the beginning of his pontificate. The question rests, then, essentially on the truthfulness and love found in the reactions of American Catholic intellectuals to the Pope, and therefore their fundamental status as grounded in virtue or vice.

Perhaps the most common argument against Francis made by his critics, since the very beginning of his pontificate, has always been that not merely one, but so many of the mavens and authorities and up-and-comers and dowried socialites and sinecured apparatchiks and censors and rhetoricians of American Catholic intellectual life do not like him. Most of the time, this has the primary, somewhat Chekovian force of "He is a bad man. How do I know? I do not like him. And neither do my friends." 

Still, one cannot deny that, in the "American conservative Catholic" institutional media landscape built up in the last few decades, as a self-conscious alternative to the previous institutional media landscape, many people did not like Pope Francis. Many people widely recognized as intellectual commentators, journalists, and authorities on tradition, liturgy, theology, politics, and current events from a Catholic perspective, viewed him as a dangerous, disruptive force, a dictator, a Marxist, a progressive, an enemy of the true and the good and the right, someone who fundamentally failed to preach the Catholic Faith with clarity, perhaps even the Worst Pope Ever. And can so many intelligent, faithful Catholic thinkers really be wrong?

The true answer to this challenge is, of course, that made by the distinguished journalist and intellectual Michael Moon (in G.K. Chesterton's Manalive) to an assembly of distinguished doctors engaged in committing a man to an asylum: "And such doctors! Oh, my hat! Look at ’em!—do just look at ’em!"

And such Catholic thinkers! Oh, my hat! Look at em! Just look at 'em! 

The truth is, I have never found a more accurate or (one is tempted to say) more infallible correlation for distinguishing pious Catholics and decent thinkers from fools, charlatans, con men, grifters, the ignorant, the uninformed, and the impious than the presence or absence of sweeping condemnations of Pope Francis. 

The last twelve years of Pope Francis' pontificate have been (on this single polarity) an exceptionally trying time. So let me unburden my mind a little bit.

[Note: if you do not happen to have spent a lot of the last ten years reading American Catholic intellectuals you should skip all this.]

Rod Dreher is among the three or four most evil men I have encountered in my life; he is addicted to despair, hatred, and contempt, which renders him transparently miserable and unable to control his most basic intellectual and moral functions. Like most such people, he is desperate to spread his misery to everyone he meets. Everything he does and says and writes hurts himself and others, and no one should read or engage with him under any circumstances. 

Rusty Reno is my least favorite living thinker, and surprisingly high on my list of least favorite thinkers of all time; while it is at least conceivable to me that he could be a lovely man in his private relations, he is transparently unable to think logically and in a straight line for more than two or three words going, and never for an entire sentence. There is, admittedly, a certain aesthetic quality to his writings that is nearly unique in my experience: a meandering, deeply melancholy journey through one man's self-regard, prevarication, insecurity, and desire to seem cool and relevant without offending his donors, a quest to avoid saying anything at all that (alas!) usually succeeds. Matthew Schmitz, meanwhile, his sometime lieutenant, is simply an intellectual shock jock, the middle-aged, respectable, "conservative" intellectual equivalent of the teen who takes the Tide Pod challenge on TikTok. Under their tutelage, the magazine First Things has been transformed from a respectable, intelligent outlet for discussion and debate to a rag. 

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is an intellectual charlatan, an arrogant, ignorant, intemperate fool, and an active enemy both of the Church's hierarchy and of the piety and integrity and virtue of her faithful. Steve Skojec is a sad man who parlayed his bad experiences with vaguely modern, JP2-loving cultish groups into even worse experiences with traditionalist cultish groups, who by his own admission is addicted to the Internet, addicted to rage, somehow managed to build an entire Catholic media brand on the basis of hating the Catholic Church and nearly everyone in it, but who has at least recently had the intellectual and moral integrity to apostatize. Michael Voris is a con-man and sexual abuser, and was always obviously a grifter, but still managed to build an entire media empire off of getting underpaid young men in bowties to write articles attacking the Church for being gay. 

Ross Douthat makes a living off of being the "nice conservative," which means in practice making vague arguments for positions he doesn't agree with, half-heartedly explaining why maybe the latest conservative thing isn't quite as bad as progressives have heard, and rarely, but memorably, offering deeply heart-felt tragic paeans to the past glories of American WASP high culture and the economic and technological progress of the American Empire at its height presided these WASPs presided over and the accompanying stable sinecures they offered to intellectuals. For obvious reasons, he doesn't like Pope Francis; for less obvious reasons, he has gotten away with positioning himself as an authority on the Papacy and writing multiple books and numerous articles where he chides Francis for criticizing the true wonder and beauty of "growth economies" and/or failing to participate in his tragic narratives about WASP decline and/or not realizing that the future of the Church lies in sad-sack WASP-loving intellectuals with sinecures and the semi-random assortment of vaguely trendy things they happen to like and/or have recently heard about. 

I have been reading Phil Lawler regularly for probably over a decade now, and still have absolutely no idea why anyone would ever choose to hear from Phil Lawler about anything. There is another, similar thinker that also doesn't like Pope Francis, and who I have also been reading for the same period of time, who writes vague prose about why conservatism is good; but I confess I am unable to remember his name. There are also about five to ten other similar people, who for some reason continue to have their pieces linked to and/or distributed by major Catholic publications, but who I also cannot clearly remember or distinguish from each other.

Edward Feser is at least memorable and distinctive. He began as a writer of clear, straightforward, and helpful expositions of the rudiments of Aristotelean and Thomist metaphysics; but for some unfathomable reason chose to gradually transition to framing himself as a general authority on politics, morality, theology, and ecclesiastical affairs, and for some even more unfathomable reason has been accepted as such. He still ranks highly among the mostly-online worlds he inhabits for having at least the bare modicum of intellectual consistency, but appears to lack most of the intellectual virtues, beginning with humility and extending most impactfully through piety. While his absurd self-regard and self-seriousness, combined with a near-total inability to grasp, let alone respond to, any contrary point, is frequently amusing, his irascibility and obsessive insistence on litigating every comment on himself by repeating the same singular point over and over again without elaboration whenever contradicted grow wearing extremely quickly. As I said, he is among the best the American Catholic internet-sphere has to offer. 

Dr. Taylor Marshall, PhD, began his career as a failed academic attempting to make a career as a soft American-Catholic apologist who mostly produced buzzfeed-tier content like Ten Reasons Why the Assumption is Good. Realizing that the levels of income generated by this endeavor were not enough to fund his "lifestyle," he reinvented himself as the Catholic Alex Jones, a perpetually mid-life-crisised, childish-masculinist purveyer of false history, fake news, lifestyle branding, and ancient American sectarian-Protestant anti-Papal conspiracy theories masquerading as something called "traditionalism." At this point, there are so many people imitating him in this endeavor that I could not possibly keep up with them all. 

Lifesitenews is a tabloid whose standards of evidence would make the National Enquirer editors blush, which keeps a regular stable of lying parasites whose names I am thankfully unable to remember. Edward Pentin is for some reason a core, trusted American Vaticanist, which means he is obviously corrupt, biased, and dishonest and spends most of his time repeating false rumors and insinuations from his friends. Raymond Arroyo is a wannabe Fox News host whose standards of evidence and worldview roughly approximates that of other Fox News hosts.

Eric Sammons is an American Catholic Dad who (like many such dads) runs an American conservative lifestyle brand and likes to talk about Liberty, and for some reason thinks this makes him an authority on Catholic tradition, theology, and the Papacy, and licenses him to say any number of intemperate, uncharitable, and false things about anyone in the hierarchy or the Church who doesn't believe that Catholicism and American lifestyle branding are precisely the same thing. Excommunicated former-Archbishop Vigano came to America, received a deadly dose of Internet Poisoning, and kicked off a career as an Internet Writer by issuing a series of wildly overplayed (substantively amounting to little more than vague insinuations) accusations to try to force the Pope to resign, then rapidly pivoted to being a fevered doomer living in an off-the-grid bunker and also repeating anti-Catholic conspiracy theories as something called "traditionalism."

John Zmirak is, intellectually speaking, a bitter Protestant whose worldview centers squarely on the traditional Episcopalian triad of Money, Power, and Respectability; his entire intellectual oeuvre consists in bitterly and dishonestly attacking the Catholic Church and Catholicism and anyone who believes in Catholic ethics or morality even vaguely. The degree of ignorance, cruelty, and intemperance expressed in his writings is so extreme that I still, to this day, am not sure the whole thing is not some elaborate parody. 

Another argument that is often made by people like the above against Pope Francis is that if he is not a European-style liberal progressive, he would not be so frequently represented as such by his friends and supporters. This is, again, a reasonable point, except...well, what friends! What supporters!

I can certainly sympathize with those whose viewpoint on Pope Francis was entirely shaped by such people, and excuse their dislike on these grounds. Purported Catholic leaders and intellectuals, though, should certainly know better.

I will not go through the entire remaining vestiges of legacy American Catholic progressive media; that would take too long, and anyway virtually no one is paying attention to them anyway. About the only maven of a traditional-American-progressive-Catholic publication I can recall offhand is Michael Sean Winters: a progressive political journalist who for some strange reason desperately wants the Catholic Church to save the Democratic Party and has a lot of inaccurate and mostly irrelevant things to say about the Church's past and future. 

There are many more like him; and, as a sometime academic, I have known plenty of similar progressive Catholics in both academic settings and parishes. Many of them liked Pope Francis, or what they thought was Pope Francis--based, generally, on utterly absurd viewpoints on the purportedly obscurantist and benighted qualities of Francis' immediate predecessors (two utterly brilliant, economically radical, politically liberal academic theologians), Catholic theology, dogmatics, ethics, economics, and politics, the Middle Ages, America, liberalism, progress, the Catholic Church before Vatican 2, Vatican 2 itself, and so on. Similar people write popular-audience academic books and are often called upon to give expert advice to journalists, and hence still wield a remarkable amount of influence on the public perceptions of the Catholic Church and Pope Francis. While often at least minimally sincere (if absurdly posturing on self-regarding), their perspectives on the Church, as a Bad Conservative Institution inexplicably led by a Good Liberal Pope, are no less risible.

However, for the purposes of fairness, I should comment on a few of the main named people who have, on the Internet, contributed significantly to the poor reception of Pope Francis by characterizing him in such risible terms and/or using him as a bludgeon against their personal enemies. Of these I can merely say that Austen Ivereigh's ability, based on a few infrequent contacts and having once written a book, to pose as the Oracle of Pope Francis, and make that oracle say precisely whatever he himself, an American progressive intellectual, would say on any given topic, would rightly bring a blush to George Weigel's cheeks. I like Massimo Faggioli; his tweets never failed to bring a smile to my face. His attempts to use Pope Francis as an intellectual shield for his incoherent, European-style progressivism and scattershot crusade against the evils of American Conservatives have been more absurdist than successful. 

I do not really want to attack Mike Lewis; I think he is sincere in his love for Pope Francis, and tried very hard to defend him. Nonetheless, it must be said that his construals of Pope Francis' thought were rarely if ever accurate, and contributed significantly to misunderstanding of him in America; and his attempts to defend Pope Francis by attacking anyone who he thought was in any degree, even by emphasis, opposed to him or insufficiently loyal or insufficiently dedicated to praising him also often did more harm than good. Most fundamentally, Lewis' increasingly obsessive attempts to work through his own sense of personal anger and betrayal at American conservative Catholicism in the Trump years via Pope Francis has hardly been a help to those who, being unavoidably American conservatives, have to try to love Pope Francis anyway. 

And for each one of these people, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of followers; and thousands and millions more influenced or poisoned in some way, directly or indirectly, by them. Being an American Catholic under Francis has been an exceptionally trying time; not because of Francis himself, his words or his actions, but because of having to deal with an intellectual culture poisoned in very basic ways against the Pope and the hierarchy by charlatans and fools. 

[Note: normal people may now resume reading.]

If you managed to read through all that, take a deep breath and accept my apologies. 

I do not wish to give the impression that everyone, or even most people, who have ever expressed opinions, even negative opinions, on Francis has been an impious fool. The Pope is a powerful person, with a great deal of impact on the lives of many people. It is reasonable to express concern about him and his actions, particularly in private and among other Catholics. This is not, in any sense, what I have been talking about in this section. 

Nor, emphatically, do I wish to condemn those who, for whatever reason, experienced negative emotions about or because of Pope Francis, who felt, rightly or wrongly, that they did not like him, could not understand him, found him off-putting or confusing or strange or challenging or foreign or even frightening, or who felt, accurately or not, that he did not trust them, did not understand them, did not like them or people like them. Such personal and cultural disconnections and gaps and frictions are to a degree inevitable with a personal institution like the Papacy, and, as I have acknowledged, were certainly increased in number and intensity by Francis' own personality and limitations and mission. Such feelings do not necessarily take away from a proper filial piety expressed in words and deeds; and, dealt with properly, they can serve as the material for virtue and even heroic virtue. 

I will even acknowledge the strong likelihood that all the people I have just denounced, progressive and conservative and traditionalist, are not so bad as I made them out to be. It is quite possible that all of them lack all malice, and are simply sincere, ignorant fools; and of such is the kingdom of heaven. I plead the right of my rhetorical excess.

Similarly, I confess that while I am someone who enjoys consuming intellectual content, and consumes an alarming amount of it, I have genuinely high basic standards for intelligence and interest. I am not particularly impressed by most academic historians; perhaps it is simply unfair to expect professional commentators and podcasters and bloggers to live up to such standards. But I plead: am I not a blogger myself? Also plead that, in my life as a human being, I enjoy and respect the perspectives of almost everyone I meet besides professional intellectuals. I listen to the opinions of high school students and small children with delight. Insight into something is not a high bar, but the basic function of human intelligence; it merely requires a perspective and a small modicum of virtue. It is rarely the reward of years of intellectual labor; it is very commonly the reward of ignorance and stupidity. 

In this regard, I will likewise say that I think that, for any intellectual commentator or thinker, knowledge and innate smartness are not the most important things, but rather virtue; and that this is doubly true of Catholics commenting on the Catholic Church. The virtue of piety is perhaps the most valuable thing I know in such regards; and also, apparently, exceptionally rare in this day and age. Where I detect genuine virtue and holiness, I always listen with respect; even where it leads to opinions I disagree with, including opinions on Pope Francis. There are people I profoundly respect and admire who, on the whole, view Francis more negatively than I; also similar people who view him more positively and simply. And that is alright.  

This, though, this is the staring scandal of American Catholic intellectual life in the year of Our Lord 2025: that American Catholic laypeople, to the greatest degree in all of history, do not get their views of the Church and the Pope from clerics or theologians or the Pope himself, but from such intellectual middlemen as all of the above. And to be an intellectual middleman (as I certainly am), to have something interesting to say about the Church or really anything at all, one must possess at least one of these qualities: that is, either intellectual insight or genuine virtue. And the remarkable, staring, scandalous thing, is that the above thinkers, and many more like them in journalism and academia and the bowels of the Internet, and in fact nearly all respected and listened-to intellectuals who act as middlemen for the Pope and the Church, have neither! 

They have, self-evidently, neither insight nor piety; and why the hell, then, should I be expected to waste my valuable time listening to them? I could, after all, be doing many other things: I could be perfecting my recipe for 3 pepper chicken, or playing Skyrim, or taking a walk, or perhaps even reading something interesting for a damn change. Instead, I have spent hundreds upon hundreds of precious, irreplaceable hours of my all-too-short life reading thousands upon thousands of nearly identical articles in which impious fools tell me they know Pope Francis is bad and untrustworthy because they and their foolish, impious friends say he is. 

And while I have, apparently, the time and energy and attention span to read these impious fools and also Pope Francis himself, the reality is that the vast majority of people do not and cannot; so that what such middlemen have in essence done is to steal from God's people the pastoral guidance and care and wisdom that God himself wished to impart to them through his vicar, getting them to trade away a valuable inheritance of faithfulness for an exceedingly spoiled mess of pottage. They have sought to replace the teaching of the one authorized by Christ with their own teaching, their own authority, their own ideas and thoughts and values and projects and ideologies and self-interests and endless, mindless chatter.

In short, every time the Pope spoke or acted, every time God spoke or acted through him, people rushed in to distort, to deny, to occlude, to obstruct, to prevent anyone from listening or receiving or trusting or hoping or loving or obeying. And this is quite simply to oppose the work of God in the world, and do the work of the Devil. And that is something that I, for one, forbear to overlook, or ever forget. 

As I began this section of my essay with a quote from G.K. Chesterton, I will end it with a quote from Pope St. Leo IX, writing to the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius in AD 1054: "You are so blinded by your shameless, incautious arrogance that you do not notice who you are, and what you are doing, and to whom you do it. In the proverb of the people, when someone tries to spit on his own Head, how quickly it falls on his face!"

For the most troubling, disquieting note about treatments of Pope Francis by American intellectual middlemen, positive and negative, Right and Left, has been not so much anger as contempt. Squabbling, petty pseudo-intellectuals, swarm and croaking (in the vivid phrase of Peter Damian, which he applied to anti-ecclesial radicals and soi-disant traditionalists of his own day) like frogs in a swamp, have related to the Pope not so much as a father as a backwards child, not so much as an authority as a confused student of their own wisdom, not so much as a judge as one subject to their evaluation and judgment and final condemnation on anything and everything. They have tried to spit on their own head; and in every single case, without exception, that spittle has ended up on their own faces, to their rightful shame. 

The Poor Church, and the Future

The conflict between Pope Francis and a great portion of the Catholic, especially American Catholic intelligentsia, was not, however, ultimately a matter merely of ignorance and vice. Intellectuals react as they did to Paul VI and Francis not just when they happen to personally dislike someone, but when someone with genuine imaginative power over and within their own psyches commits what is perhaps the most unforgiveable form of aggression an intellectual can suffer: contradicting their own carefully-worked out ideas and vision and projects, over which they have labored, into which they have invested their time and thought and energy, for which they have suffered and sacrificed, on which they have built their public reputations and private senses of self, with which they have identified. For intellectuals are, first and foremost, creatives; and creatives cannot help investing their own selves into their work. 

The reason why so many publicly and institutionally Catholic intellectuals reacted to Paul VI's Humanae Vitae with such a profoundly personal sense of betrayal is because it contradicted, not merely their own preferred policy on birth control, but the entire intellectual vision and project on which they had built their careers and livelihoods and reputations and identities as American Catholic intellectuals. The aggiornamento of the Church, its reconciliation with modernity and America, its creative elaboration and expansion and glorification, its true universalization by way of acceptance into the new, global intellectual and cultural and social and economic and political centers of the world, its beneficent entrance into the ordinary lives of modern people, and all the good that the Church could and should do for and in all those spheres, all the profound need of the world for what the Church had to offer--all suddenly rendered impossible by the insistence of an old Italian man in Rome on maintaining an impossible Medieval doctrine about sex.

There was much in this conflict that was mere misunderstanding; but for all that, Paul VI's vision was not, as it turned out, really the same as those who had looked to him as a reformer. His deeply personal vision was of fidelity, amid history, to what Christ had spoken to the Church, and what he had spoken through human nature. It was, to be sure, of creative fidelity, and of the communication of the Church's treasures to the world by any and every means, but still of fidelity first and foremost. In service of that fundamental, bedrock faithfulness, Paul VI was willing to do many extreme things, to sweep away structures and traditions, to sacrifice treasures. But if there was one thing that so many of the intellectuals who opposed him lacked, it was certainly this base sense of fidelity, and the accompanying integrity and consistency, to the point of sacrifice and suffering, on which it was based.

Similarly, the rage of so many intellectuals at Francis was not just because of misunderstanding; but because their vision was and is not the same as his..

As for what Francis' vision was, at base, he expressed it quite frequently and quite directly, starting at the beginning of his pontificate, and maintaining it consistently until his death on Easter Monday. This was of a Church not content to stay within itself, in an orderly, aesthetic shell, "holding spaces" and "maintaining structures" in culture or politics or art or anywhere else, but rather "going out of itself" to the "existential peripheries" both of contemporary society and life itself, in the process constantly altering and renewing its structures to better communicate its message and reach those it was called to reach.

It was also of the Church as a "field hospital" in an active war situation, providing immediate, personal aid to the innumerable victims of modernity, standing aloof from no one, but welcoming everyone, adapting rules and structures to the actual, immediate needs of people, and staffed by priests and bishops with "the smell of the sheep," close to "the people" and capable of communicating with them, representatives of a God of closeness, compassion, and mercy, a God who "always forgives." Perhaps most crucially, it was also of a "poor Church for the poor," a Church holding onto nothing of its intellectual, aesthetic, monetary, or spiritual riches, but freely pouring them out upon the world, giving to everyone, witnessing through martyrdom and not prestige, standing aloof from the powerful and from systems but everywhere standing with and for the forgotten, discarded victims of "throwaway culture" and an "economy that humiliates and kills," inhabitants of systematically impoverished countries and migrant workers first and foremost.

When one puts it like that, one sees, I think, most immediately and directly and impactfully, why many Catholic intellectuals--American Catholic conservatives first and foremost--did not like Francis. It was not that all of these people could not understand Francis, or even that they necessarily hated every aspect of his vision, or were incapable of sympathizing with it. It was simply that their vision--the vision over which they were engaged in laboring, and into which they had invested their own selves--was entirely different, and to a great extent entirely contradictory, to his. 

What this contrary vision is is difficult to summarize, not least without unfairly characterizing some one person or other; for of course, a whole, largely media-driven culture is likely to be much less consistent, and much more contradictory, than a single person, let alone a person of such profound personal and intellectual integrity as Pope Francis.

If, however, I were to attempt to sum up the prevailing concerns and goals of the American Catholic conservative intellectual culture in which I have participated for much of my life, it would go something like this: 

The Church's fundamental problem is that it has lost confidence in itself, in its own intellectual and aesthetic and cultural distinctiveness and identity. To attract people, it must stand clearly apart from the world, with clear boundaries between what is inside and what is outside. Within, the Church should be smaller and purer, an orderly, voluntary assembly of those personally committed to the Catholic worldview and way of life, who follow the rules and are knowledgeable about the intellectual content of the Faith. 

Not least of this commitment should be a clear, singular aesthetic vision, one defined by uniformity within the Church and distinctiveness from all that is without: a vision of transcendence expressed through the scrupulous observation of forms and words and images from the past. Those attracted to this radical, counter-cultural way of life would be the intelligent, the discerning, those yearning for commitment and transcendence, those who could best appreciate the abruptness of the Church as an island of order amidst chaos, its miraculous sameness across time and space. At the very least, the worthy ones outside--the cultured and intelligent first and foremost--would respect the Church, take it seriously, discern in it something more than the common and vulgar. Those within might be few, but what they lost in numbers and in the approbation of the foolish they would more than make up for in quality.

As I said, this vision certainly does not fairly capture all conservative American Catholic intellectuals, let alone everyone in the global Church who found issue with Francis. It does, I think, capture something, something that influences many people in the Church to varying degrees, at varying times. If nothing else, it captures the vision that I myself once held, to a great degree, upon my admittance to the Church, what I myself took away from the intellectual, conservative Catholic culture in which I was then immersed. And I have come to believe, perhaps unfairly, that this vision of is much more like the vision of the liberal Catholic intellectuals of the 1960s than it at first appeared: grounded in aesthetic preference and external acceptance above all else. 

For all that, it is not the case that everything in this vision conflicts with Francis' priorities and goals. The Church is inevitably counter-cultural in the modern world; it is inevitably distinctive, and should not be ashamed of that; it is and should be unified; it does possess intellectual and even aesthetic treasures respectable to those outside. Even many parts of the vision that are in tension with Francis' poor Church for the poor are, to varying degrees, able to be accommodated as parts and means of that vision, sub-cultures or sub-charisms.

Still, when all is said and done, it is not trivially easy to combine the pure, ordered, aesthetic Church of many intellectuals' dreams with the large, turbulent, populist Church of Francis' dreams.

It is in this light, I think, that the so-called "Liturgy Wars" of Francis' pontificate should be understood; and in particular Traditionis Custos, Francis' unexpected decision to severely restrict the exercise of the Tridentine Mass in the Church. There is a great deal I could say about this decision, personally and intellectually: merely noting that, though I was initially extremely compelled by the highly modern and intellectual varieties of so-called "traditionalism" I encountered in the American Church at their relative height under Benedict XVI, my practical experience of it has been nearly exclusively of intellectual shoddiness, childish disrespect for authority, and spiritual poison. 

I do not think, though, that Francis' decision had anything in particular to do with liturgy, which for him (as for Gregory the Great) is largely a secondary affair, an exercise of human practical reason centered around supernatural unity and the correct administration of the Sacraments; nor was it any particular fear of the disparate, infinitesimally tiny community (at its height much less than one percent of Mass-going Catholics even in the US and Europe, and more or less absent everywhere else) that happens for extremely varied reasons to prefer it. 

What I suspect angered Francis, or rather contradicted his vision enough for him to take (limited, if rather badly conceived and implemented) action, was merely the spectacle of an instantiation, however small, of this vision of an ordered, aesthetic Church of the pure, separated out from the common rabble of the global Church. As one of the more honest and intellectually-respectable traditionalists of my acquaintance once acknowledged, TLM communities, while small, are a highly American phenomenon, and even in these places are highly correlated with wealth, elite status, and professional and political power. Speaking only for myself, but in a vein that I think Francis would understand, I would say, though I am personally fond of the Tridentine Mass and have attended far more than most Catholics, that there is something intolerable to me about the idea that those people who otherwise, in their own judgment, have always the best of everything, should be able to boast that they have a better Mass as well.

Still, this is really only one very small and secondary aspect of a much larger clash; one where so-called traditionalism is more a symptom than a cause. There is nothing in Francis' vision that contradicts anything in the Tridentine Mass, let alone true Catholic tradition; and such accidental, almost personal clashes tell us very little about either thing. 

A more important conflict, I think, is simply that found in Francis' image of a poor Church for the poor, which may be otherwise summed up in the journalistic phrase "the Global South." 

Francis was the first non-European Pope in more than a millennium; and under his reign the shift of the Church's center of gravity away from Europe and towards the poorer countries of the world has accelerated a great deal. It is far from the case, of course, that the shift of the Church towards the so-called Third World means a shift towards what Americans call progressivism: the rise of Africa in the Church, for instance, will very likely mean a very strong retrenchment and reaffirmation of the Church's sexual teaching. 

The turn of the Church towards the poor, however, does certainly and inevitably mean a turn away from aesthetic uniformity, strict adherence to rules without consideration of circumstance, the treating of voluntary personal commitment and intellectual knowledge as necessary badges of holiness, and, in short, purity in all the senses in which the rich and the comfortable consider themselves pure. One small consideration in this regard that is often overlooked has to do with the Church's historically undemanding rules and generous dispensations in regards to fasting and Mass attendance: which are often complained of by the comfortable and committed as insufficiently demanding but which are, on their face, very demanding to the point of often being impossible to fulfill for the vast majority of poor Catholics, who frequently are forced to work on Sundays and Holy Days, whose work is frequently burdensome, and whose meals can be difficult to find at the best of times. 

It is in this light, too, that Francis' famed penchant for diplomacy, in the Third World and elsewhere, should be seen: a concern that is frequently, and very falsely pitted against John Paul II's "prophetic" witness against Communism. 

The alleged conflict between "prophetic" stances and diplomacy is, like many symbolic dichotomies beloved of intellectuals, in many of its most common uses merely an intolerable mixing of historical metaphors. Speaking merely as a layman, I would say that if there is one thing that the Prophets of the Old Testament certainly were not known for, it would be taking clear adversarial stances on political and ideological conflicts. Jeremiah, among others, could be very justly accused of being Soft on Babylon, in the sense that he actively undermined the Judaic war effort by demanding that the whole nation immediately surrender to Babylon, and was also not unconvincingly accused of justifying a clear, unjust Babylonian war of aggression by treating it as divine punishment for Judah's sins. Virtually all of the Prophets, indeed, could be accused of lacking prophetic insight by their habit of passing over in silence the much greater and more obvious and more glaring sins of pagans and enemies of God's people in favor of perpetual, negative harping on the sincere efforts of "devout, practicing Jews." Diplomats they may not have been in any conventional sense, but Jeremiah was certainly very eager to negotiate Judah's surrender to Babylon, and even had things to say about the political reliability of the Egyptian Pharaoh and the likely outcome of an alliance with him; and whatever they may have lacked in moderation, the Prophets' interest in the shifting alliances and eventual fates of various Near Eastern kingdoms certainly did not lack for detail. 

In truth, the Church, as much as the Prophets of Israel, finds itself at given moment embroiled in extremely complex relationships with persons and states of highly varying morality and reliability and proclivity to violence. The Pope cannot avoid diplomacy any more than Jeremiah could avoid politics; and who, at any given moment, is both most in need of and most likely to be receptive to direct, public moral censure is a complex question to which not even a Prophet can afford to be indifferent. 

However confused the general argument, the more specific application is even more muddled. John Paul II was above all a diplomatic Pope, and a canny, subtle operator, whose mastery of crowds and of public appearance helped him get away with a great deal, not just in relation to Communist governments, but frequently in regard to Western ones as well. 

Francis was to a degree, like Benedict, simply less adept at making political calculations and coming off well in the media; but his less abstract mind, and more personal focus on ordinary people and victims first and foremost, also played a significant role in his relations with governments. In the war in Ukraine--though, despite slanders, he very clearly condemned Russian aggression from the beginning--he focused far more on the victims than on the causes and goals of either side, and for this reason seemed to show a preference for negotiations and ceasefires, means to immediately stop the suffering and dying of the innocent, over more abstract issues of justice and political consequence. With the war in Gaza, this focus on the victims first and foremost, including denunciations of the bombing of civilians and daily personal calls to the one Catholic parish in Gaza, was generally taken as a political statement in itself, favoring one side over the other; but it was in truth a much more basic and human--"Prophetic" in a proper sense--thing. 

The fabled and much-controverted "China deal" should also be seen, ultimately, from a similar perspective: focused first and foremost on ordinary (non-Western) Catholics' access to the Sacraments and basic ecclesial status, and for this reason extending to the corrupt and domineering Chinese government (which Americans still, hilariously, choose to regard as in some meaningful sense "Communist") merely the same sorts of privileges once demanded successfully, on a similar blackmailing basis, by (also usually corrupt and domineering) Western governments. 

China, though, is an exceptional case for everyone in the contemporary world. Many better and more emblematic examples of Francis' relationship with governments can be found in his frequent travels to Third World countries, and to the meetings with government officials always held on these trips. In these addresses, he invariably did two things which, depending on how one looks at them, could be seen as either "diplomatic" or "Prophetic". He extended to the (frequently corrupt) heads of these small, struggling client nations every protocol and courtesy and honor extended to the President of the United States, and far more personal attention and concern. And he again and again told these men, very directly and often with pointed references to local crises and scandals, to reject corruption, to reject personal gain, to reject violence, to seek reconciliation and justice and peace, and serve their own people.

I would certainly not assert that Francis was very successful as a diplomat, or claim to agree with all his diplomatic statements or actions, but his realistic emphasis on diplomacy and dialogue, refusal to be drawn into Manichean ideological and geopolitical games, concern for justice and integrity of governments, and focus on victims are more relevant and necessary than ever in a world that continues to spiral into endless symbolic conflicts and a "third World War fought piecemeal."

These dealings with governments, though, played only a very small part in Francis' general, close relationship with the poor Church of the modern, non-Western world: a Church that Francis certainly did not create, which was planted by generations of European missionaries, which was watered and encouraged by the great 20th century Popes, but was enthusiastically sought out and greeted and listened to and touched and brought to public view in a special way by Francis in his words and deeds and travels, is a very different one than anyone in Europe or America is familiar with. 

The Church that Francis found and loved is not even really the Church of Asia or Africa or Latin America as such, certainly not a Church that has much to do with governments of such places; it is, rather, the true Church of the poor, which in the 21st century means very largely the migrant poor. The unstable poor of the modern world, perpetually falling into the holes in the global economy, migrating from place to place looking for work, gathered in cities and villages from everywhere and nowhere, raising their families in the shadow of global wealth, calling upon God: this is, to a very great extent, the present reality of the Catholic Church. 

All that modern progressives and conservatives alike have despised can be found in such places: including disorder, large families, garish colors, gender-based hierarchy, Christmas tree lights, felt banners, and even bad music from the 1970s. I remember vividly attending the Catholic Cathedral in Athens, where the morning service was a decorous affair attended by ethnic Greeks; but the evening English service was a garish festival, standing room only and packed to the rafters, of the local migrant worker Filipino community, with an entire orchestra of child performers and the crowd yelling out the same bad English hymns I was familiar with from my own upper-middle-class parish in America.

Of course it is not the case that conservative American Catholics necessarily dislike the poor, or non-Western cultures, or the Global South; but for all that, one of the visions discussed above is compatible with their present reality, and with their present respect and honor and power and status within and through the Church, and the other finally is not. And that, I think, matters a great deal, to Francis and to me.

If I have, then, after a great deal of time and thought, come to believe that Francis' vision is ultimately superior, if I have come to think that it terribly important that both individual Catholics, and the Church as a whole, choose that vision as the primary way forward into the 21st century, it is not, as I have tried to emphasize, because it is a natively appealing image for me. I am by nature an intellectual, with all the obsessiveness and desire for control inherent in the type, and much more of my own. 

My preference for Francis' vision as a path forward is also not merely, though it certainly is in part, because of the weight of his authority as Pope. It is also because of my personal experience of the Church and the world, of trying to live out the Faith in turbulent history and modernity: my very practical experience that healthy communities founded on charity are necessarily outward-looking ones, founded on mission, focused on the human needs and concerns and suffering and happiness of real persons and not idealized aesthetics or ideologized order, and necessarily oriented towards helping and caring for those without, while closed, inward-looking communities that put order and aesthetics first oppress and kill and fail even on their own terms, that they end up in nearly every instance repeating all the pathologies of broader society and adding more of their own, and that even at their very best they are not Christian communities, animated by charity. 

It is also, more trivially, because of my extensive reading and study of Catholic history, and the trivially obvious conclusion that Francis' vision is really far, far closer to the norm of Catholic and Papal history than anything found in traditionalist circles. As I have on many occasions emphasized, Francis is immeasurably closer to the Papal baseline, both in personality and even in flaws, than John Paul II or Benedict XVI, in his preference for personal contacts, in his disdain for intellectuals and academics, in his impatience with institutions and rules and forms, in his charismatic populism, in his desire to reach the people as directly and immediately as possible, in his insistence on obedience and personal loyalty. It is these qualities that, among other things, made the Renaissance, and the Counter-Reformation, and even or especially the 19th century Church so beloved of traditionalists.

Oddly enough, though, when I think of Francis, I am reminded most vividly of the clique of radical monastics who made the Gregorian Reform. No Francis could run as roughshod over previous Papal traditions as these men, who invented Cardinal Bishops merely to take the Papacy away from the Romans. No Francis could possibly make more of a mess than Leo IX, who toured Europe holding mass meetings and deposing priests and bishops in impromptu trials, who used popular mobs to enforce compliance with his decrees, who led an army of Byzantines against the Normans and failed utterly, let alone Gregory VII, who sought to depose an Emperor, who haplessly forgave his enemies and even more haplessly, almost by accident, led an army of plundering Normans into Rome. 

When I read Francis railing against self-satisfied priests and bishops for looking down on the poor, I am reminded vividly of Peter Damian, telling stories of damned, self-satisfied priests and the superiority of giving to the poor rather than to the Church. When I read his passionate appeals for migrants (accompanied by less emotional acknowledgments of the need for public order), I am reminded of Peter Damian's insistence that giving to the poor is justice, not mercy, and his declarations of the absolute right to steal from the rich to feed the poor. When I read Francis' sometimes less than precise denunciations of wars and governments and economies, I am reminded vividly of Pope Gregory VII's declaration, also less than theologically precise, that rulers are descended from those who, led by intolerable greed and by the devil, desired to dominate their natural equals, who, when they kill many people, pretend to be sorry, but are secretly glad that by their violence they have increased their reputation. There is something, even, in Francis, of the Popes who made the Crusades.

All this may very rightly frightens those rightly committed to order and reason; but, at least for me, it is a very fundamental sign of the Church's authentic Christianity, of its kinship with Prophets of Israel and with the first work of Christ and his Apostles, that it produces such men, men who alter laws to preserve justice, who change rituals to preserve faith, who set aside traditions to keep commandments, who destroy temporal peace to preserve eternal salvation, men who disobey men to serve God. 

As I have emphasized elsewhere, the Church in history is not in the final balance at all like a temporal government, aimed at temporal peace and stability, at the good administration of institutions and well-balanced budgets. It is a desperate raid on the enemy to gain a transcendent victory beyond hope, and directed hither and thither by sudden gusts of wind from on high. 

This, I think, is the one thing that ties together nearly every aspect of Francis' Papacy, from his Curial reforms to his personal interactions with crowds to his vision of synodality to his travels in the Third World. Francis desires, as he has said many times, above all else a Church that is immediately and totally responsive to the will of the Holy Spirit, that great wind that blows where it lists. When God speaks, when the Pope speaks, there must be a Curia and a synodal Church attentive and involved and ready to leap into action to fulfill the vision; not just Pope Francis' personal vision, but any vision from God enacted by any future Pope. A Church entrenched and ordered aesthetically and structurally is, among other things, not a Church easily led by a future Pope from the Third World; or, indeed, any of the sorts of great men, from anywhere, who made the great epochs of the Church, from Gregory VII to Pius V and back again. 

It is a foolish task to attempt to predict the future, let alone the future of an organization as ancient and as truly global as the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it does seem rather likely that the Church will, on a human level, find itself more and more aligned with the rising Global South, with the global poor, and less with the powers that be of America and Europe. And if this is true, Francis will appear, quite rightly, as a crucial Pope, coming at a crucial time in history.

Indeed, I highly suspect that, in retrospect, Francis will appear as a transitional Pope more than anything else. As I have argued elsewhere, the era of Vatican 2 and of John Paul II and Benedict XVI was above all an era of creativity and clarity, of laying foundations, where definitions and structures and theological and liturgical frameworks were created that can, and likely will, endure for centuries. I highly doubt Francis will in retrospect have established anything so long-lasting. What he will have done, though, is something that is in its own way just as valuable; using this foundation, showing the direction forward, not building a fortress, but sounding the charge, signaling the resumption of the great struggle of the Church in and with history, the temporal battle of the Church Militant.

Hope in an Age of Despair

We live in unsettled times: not merely, as Francis said again and again, in an epoch of change, but in a change of epoch. It is very difficult to predict what the world and its powers will be like in five or ten or fifteen years: whether there will be revolutions, or wars, or massacres, or plagues, or any other thing. 

Nevertheless, I think, when all is said and done, that Francis' most valuable message for us, both in the turbulent times in which he reigned and in the very likely even more turbulent times to come, was simply one of hope. 

I think, and I am not the first to say, that the great sin of modernity is in fact despair: and most especially the great sin of our present and near future. It is most especially the abiding sin of most of our public intellectuals: who are, when all is said and done, not great heresiarchs but mostly just men addicted to the Internet, to their cell-phones and algorithmic feeds, political campaigns and mass-media outrage cycles, and to the dream or reality of power. When all is said and done, when their visions are parceled out and worked out in practicality, most of the visions of the Catholic intellectuals of our time are not nearly as optimistic as the one I have described above. They are not finally centered on the desire for any aesthetic beauty or order within, but rather on fear of the howling wilderness without. They are visions of failure, of retreat, of souls spitefully excluded or left to their fate, of a world left behind and given over to the Devil.

This, I think, is the true heart of the most insightful critiques of Francis I have read: critiques that are to me the highest of praise. It is really true that to do as Francis did requires, first and foremost, a great, abiding hope, hope in the changing of history and the salvation of souls: even souls living in squalor, given over to the very worst things, seduced by false culture, blinded by lying ideologies, tortured by evil moralities, tossed in the trash heap, buried and entombed by their sins and ours. Francis never tired of denouncing contemporary evils, denouncing economies and governments and self-satisfactions, he never tired of encouraging people to dream, to stir things up, to make a mess, because he really and truly believed that by these things the iron laws of the world could be altered, and the direction of history changed. Most intellectuals, even Catholic intellectuals, believe otherwise; they believe in fate, as Alfred the Great said of the pagans, and not in providence, like the Christians. As a historian, I know that history is a fickle bitch, and changes on a dime from one direction to another; but Francis believed that history could be directed by God, and by the prayers of the saints.

More fundamentally, though, Francis' public and private actions expressed an enormous hope that every person possessed (as he put it) an infinite dignity, a dignity that could not be lost in this life; and that every person could in fact find their final end, and achieve salvation. Every person that he met, Francis loved, and spoke to directly, no matter how apparently far from the Church or the goodness of God. To every person he met, Francis strove to communicate with all his might not just distant approbation or disapproval, but the direct, personal love of God for them, the immediate delight of God in them. And what he asked in return was only love. 

If most people are inevitably damned, if most people outside the Church, even, living far from her, in perverse lifestyles and corrupt cultures and false religions and pagan ways of life, are inevitably damned, then Francis was wrong. If this is so, he ought to have sternly denounced those he met, the weak and poor and squalid most of all, demanded that they conform themselves immediately to the Church's rules and orders and requirements, no matter how impossible it might seem or even be for them to do so; knowing that a few, at least, might be strong enough, and so be saved. He did not do so; instead, he told everyone he met that God loved them, and invited them to love God in return, promised that God would forgive them and help them if and when and however often they came to him in their misery and weakness and despair.

In human and historical terms, it is trivially true that the world has been getting poorer for many decades now--poorer in wealth, in culture, in community, in virtue. The urge to retreat from this is very natural, to hoard and preserve all that can be preserved from the wreck, to build the walls very high to keep out uninvited guests, and let in only those capable of maintaining cultural and aesthetic and spiritual standards rather than diluting them. What Francis stood for most of all, though, was not the love of culture, of civilization, but the love of God: and therefore the love of people. 

When one looks around at the culture of the present day, the greatest distinguishing marks are the hatred of people, and the despair of relationships and projects and institutions and labors and sufferings and desires and loves. Francis' greatest testimony, his greatest witness, to the contemporary world, both within and outside of the Church, is simply that he found everyone he met, Catholic and non-Catholic, loveable, and hoped with serene confidence that everyone he met, Catholic and non-Catholic, would be saved. He certainly issued harsh criticisms of many people, called them to higher standards of conduct, called them above all to abandon their pride and despair and hatred and devote their lives to loving and to serving others, the weak and the sinful and the poor first and foremost; but even this criticism was in truth a mark of love and a sign of hope, an indicator of Francis' fundamental belief that all people, even Catholic intellectuals, would hear, and repent, and be saved.

American intellectual culture is an exceptionally strange thing; a grab-bag of cultural and religious fragments parceled out between optimistic hucksters of eternal progress and gnomic cynics brooding over endless decline. Neither group ever cared for Francis; he was too hopeful for the former, too harsh and critical for the latter. But what sane person would not choose Francis over them?

As Chesterton said well, what people need most in life is not a promise of inevitable victory; nor, I would add, the cynical consolation of inevitable defeat. What they need is something to do. Pope Francis gave people plenty to do; indeed, above all he gave those he criticized something to do. And isn't this the whole point of criticism, nay, the whole point of authority? 

As Chesterton again said of the soi-disant Anglo-Catholics of his own day, the conception of many intellectuals is not so much the Church militant as the Church pageant. A pageant is certainly ordered and organized and obedient and aesthetic and harmonious; an army, alas, rarely is, particularly not an army fighting on the front lines, an army that has taken losses, an army with casualties. But for all that an army is going somewhere and accomplishing something; and a pageant is not. The Church is going somewhere; it is an army that must fall in and march in the same direction, to accomplish a true, actual goal.

This goal is emphatically not inevitable defeat or decline, or the building of a secure fortress amidst surrounding destruction. It is the changing of history, the defeat of the forces of evil, and the salvation of all souls. It is nothing less than victory. 

We will soon have another Pope, with a different personality, who will teach us different things. This, though, will always be what Francis taught me.

Papa Franciscus requiescat in pace. Papa Francisce, ora pro nobis. Amen!