When he was elevated to the papacy in 2013, Pope Francis was widely expected to shake up the Catholic Church, to liberals’ delight and conservatives’ horror. Such ancient teachings as the Church’s condemnation of sex outside of marriage and its restriction of the priesthood to men were said to be in the crosshairs.
In the course of his 12-year pontificate, Francis managed to undermine the clarity of the Church’s teaching on several hot-button issues. But he did not change any dogmas. And with his death, he leaves behind a Church that is tired of the confusion, and a generation of young Catholics who love the Church precisely for the rules he tried to liberalize.
Since the sexual revolution, Catholic liberals have hoped for a pope who would bring the Church in line with secular social trends. This faction regarded Francis’ papal predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI as arch-conservative arch-villains. Francis was their hero, a pope who came to the throne describing social conservatives as “whited sepulchres” and “little monsters” who “like to throw stones.” Armed with papal infallibility, he could bring some overdue change.
One impediment was the Catholic teaching that dogmas, once defined, cannot be changed, even by a pope. Yet Francis found a workaround. He began with the dogma that marriage lasts until death. According to this teaching, a divorced Catholic cannot remarry unless the Church has declared the first marriage null. Liberal Catholics have long hated this rule. If Catholics could just divorce and remarry at will, wouldn’t it be easier to be Catholic?
Francis’ solution was to add a footnote to the 2016 pastoral exhortation Amoris laetitia suggesting that in “certain cases,” a Catholic who had remarried without the Church’s permission could be in good standing. Which cases? That was left unclear. As a result, pretty much everyone is free to think that their cases qualify. The episode revealed Francis’ strategy: Dogmas can’t be changed, but loopholes can be opened, wide enough to drive a truck through.
Liberals had high hopes on gay marriage, too, especially after Francis in 2013 answered a question about gay Catholics with a question of his own: “Who am I to judge?” Ten years later, he created a loophole in the teaching that marriage is an institution binding a man and a woman.
The 2023 document Fiducia supplicans authorizes priests to confer blessings on gay couples — not on their unions, exactly, but on the individuals within the unions. The hairsplitting was not impressive, either to gay-rights advocates or to gay Catholics who strive to live by the Church’s teachings. Many bishops rejected the change, either quietly or vocally.
Francis disappointed liberals on women’s ordination. He instituted two commissions to investigate the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate — the rank of Holy Orders just below the priesthood — but took no further action. Francis did not move the ball, either, on abortion or contraception. And gender theory was apparently a bridge too far. Francis called it an assault on nature, akin to nuclear weaponry.
The most complete victory Francis handed to liberals concerned the traditional Latin Mass, and it may have backfired. This ancient liturgy, supplanted in the 1960s by the simpler Mass of Vatican II, is popular among young people with a “trad” sensibility — who are attracted to the Church’s qualities of mystery and awe, and to its challenging moral teachings.
In 2021, Francis made it illicit to celebrate the Latin Mass without permission from Rome, which is routinely refused. In doing so, he made Church life unpleasant for the very Catholics who are most likely to become priests or nuns someday, or to get married and raise their children in the faith. In suppressing the Latin Mass, Francis set himself not against the past, as he thought, but against the future.
Liberals had predicted a “Francis effect” on Church attendance, a “return to parishes on a mass scale” in the words of biographer Austen Ivereigh, in response to Francis’ liberal words and deeds. Instead, weekly Mass attendance has stagnated since 2008, at around one-quarter of Catholics. Priestly vocations continue to decline. The only growth is among priests and lay Catholics who possess the very “trad” sensibility that Francis sought to eradicate. As the cardinals meet to elect the next pope, they should consider these facts.
The conclave seems wide open. The Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah is a longtime favorite of traditionalist and conservative Catholics. The younger Dutch Cardinal Willem Eijk is another strong option. Even a centrist figure such as the Italian Pietro Parolin would be welcome, provided he calls off Francis’ war on conservatives.
A pope who perpetuates that war will risk permanently alienating the ardent minority of Catholics who attend Mass every Sunday and believe the Church’s ancient teachings whether they find it easy or not. And that would be damaging indeed. Whoever emerges from the conclave should learn from the failure of Francis’ attempt at reform, which catered to those who resent the Church and punished those who love it.
Julia Yost is a senior editor at the religious-affairs news site First Things.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
