Jorge Mario Bergoglio — Pope Francis — went home to face his Lord on the morning of Easter Monday, after 12 years on St. Peter’s throne, at the age of 88.

From the start of his pontificate, Francis changed the tone of the papacy. He chose the name Francis — the first new papal name since Pope Lando (913–914). Many noticed that, by invoking St. Francis of Assisi, he was emphasizing mercy and compassion. They may also have noted the saint’s peculiar attachment to the virtues of poverty. What often gets missed, though, in glib discussions of St. Francis is that this emphasis on poverty wasn’t proto-socialism, but a fundamentally evangelical outlook: “Blessed are the poor” — and not just metaphorically poor, but the actually poor — because they don’t have riches to distract them from God.

Ultimately, Francis’s whole papacy aimed to lead the church and the world closer to the love of God, not to turn the church into a political influence organization — although, of course, loving God and one’s neighbor, if one really means it, will always have political implications.

Political commentators love to reduce everything to interests and parties. “Pope Francis is a leftist, so he’s doing this to support…” “He’s doing that because he opposes…” But the church doesn’t work that way. It’s not an adversarial Westminster system, designed to generate passionate, sometimes productive, opposition between factions.Where there is love, there are no factions, though there may still be struggles. And Francis had his share of struggles. But through everything, one principle animated all that he did:

“Let us ask the Lord to help us understand the law of love. How good it is to have this law! How much good it does us to love one another, in spite of everything. Yes, in spite of everything!”

A “left-wing” pope

In the United States, both conservative firebrands like radio host Rush Limbaugh and supportive commentators like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called Pope Francis a “socialist” for preaching a gospel of justice for the poor. The world loves easy titles for what it cannot understand — and, it seems, it understands few things more poorly than the Christian church.

Francis came from the continent that spawned liberation theology — an attempt to harness the revolutionary impulse of Marxism while avoiding its atheistic materialism, but retaining its concern for justice for the poor. At this, the movement was only partially successful. Too often, it drifted into something more like a reskinned Marxism than a vision truly transformed by the Gospel. In practice, liberation theology was frequently little more than Marxist-Leninism with Bibles, openly praising the Soviet Union and Cuba and possibly even receiving direct support from them.

The church’s concern for spiritual things forms her concern for material things. When Christians invert that order, they descend into worldly political struggles. Any political victory, however fruitful, remains ultimately temporary. To tie the church’s fortunes to those of a political party is as practically foolish as it is spiritually misguided.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis pushed back against this tendency. He steered the church between the Scylla of collaboration with the right and the Charybdis of identification with the left. This led a good portion of the Argentinean left to brand him as the enemy, while at the other end of the spectrum, Argentinean President Javier Milei would call Francis “a filthy leftist.”

To be hated by both left and right, so much the better. Still, plenty of rank-and-file Catholics who had grown up with Bibles depicting Cuba as the promised land were relieved to hear the archbishop strike a different tone. So were a large number of cardinals in the 2013 conclave that elected Francis.

How quick we all are to brand someone as being on the opposite side the moment they disagree with us. If Francis doesn’t want my socialist party to win the next election, he must be a capitalist pig. And if he doesn’t want to bless a system that gives tax breaks to billionaires while working the poor to the bone, why, he must be a commie.

Let’s listen to the man’s own words instead:

“The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies. At times, however, they seem to be a mere addendum imported from without in order to fill out a political discourse lacking in perspectives or plans for true and integral development. How many words prove irksome to this system! It is irksome when the question of ethics is raised, when global solidarity is invoked, when the distribution of goods is mentioned, when reference is made to protecting labour and defending the dignity of the powerless, when allusion is made to a God who demands a commitment to justice. At other times these issues are exploited by a rhetoric which cheapens them. Casual indifference in the face of such questions empties our lives and our words of all meaning. Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.”

“We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.”

Francis the antipope

Of course, the church is not free of parties either. Like any human society, it suffers from selfishness and dissension, and so it has factions. In heaven, there is no partisanship — save for one incident.

Non-Catholic readers may not be aware that there is a growing community of people who are attached to an older form of the Roman Rite. The Roman Rite is the liturgy used by the majority of Catholics worldwide, excluding communities that follow other ancient liturgies, such as the Greek Catholics — including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — and others, like the Copts. Until Pope St. Paul VI published the current revision in 1970, the Roman Rite was celebrated almost exclusively in Latin.

Many harbor a mostly aesthetic and cultural attachment to the older form: the language, the bells and smells to which they or their ancestors were accustomed before the Second Vatican Council. For others, however, the Latin liturgy represents a bulwark against everything wrong with the world and the modern church — an antidote to the priestly worldliness and quiet atheism which they detect at the heart of today’s Catholicism.

This latter, dissident faction divides into two further groups. For some, loyalty to the Latin mass and to Catholic tradition requires disobedience to the pope. This is the position of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), the largest dissident group. Others go further still, rejecting Pope Francis’s legitimacy altogether. They regard him not only as a false pope but as a false Catholic. This position, known as sedevacantism, has been growing especially in online communities.

Pope Benedict XVI tried to reach out to these groups of Christians by allowing the older Latin liturgy to be used as an “extraordinary form” of the Roman Rite, while the 1970 Missal — still officially in Latin, though almost always celebrated in the vernacular — remained the ordinary form. This move helped ease tensions and enabled individual priests and laypeople to break away from groups like the SSPX and return to full communion with the Roman church.

After his election, however, Francis saw the Latin mass community morph into a full-scale internal opposition party to his papacy. This was especially true in the US, which has long taken an independent tack in its relationship with Rome — a tendency once condemned as the heresy of Americanism. Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the US was a center of theological liberalism, often resisting the perceived dogmatic rigidity of the Vatican. Now that the Vatican has become more open to modern currents of thought and has expanded the liturgy into the vernacular, the roles have, in some respects, reversed. In 2018, Francis remarked that some of the most virulent attacks against him were coming from America.

Francis provokes these “traditionalist” Catholics because of his attempts to soften certain practices — something they regard as unsound or even heretical. Note that in principle, the doctrines of the church cannot change, because they come from Jesus — not from the authority of the popes, who could later revise what they had previously decided. Yet the application of doctrine to pastoral practice leaves many secondary decisions open to the pope.

One example case to illustrate this principle is the male-only priesthood. Jesus ordained only men as apostles. Ancient tradition maintains that the church has no more power to confer the sacrament of holy orders on women than it does to celebrate the Eucharist with rice cakes instead of wheat, or to baptize with beer instead of water. (Both of these have, in fact, been attempted at different times in church history.) This is a matter of divine law — which sometimes does deal in details this fine, because it is positive law.

But there is no divine law against allowing women to hold positions of authority in the Roman Curia. These roles, while traditionally filled by priests, do not inherently require priestly ordination. In 2022, Francis enabled laypeople (and thus, women) to head offices within the Vatican bureaucracy. In this way, he sought to open up the church in the ways it could be fruitfully opened — and made more equal — without compromising a jot or tittle of divine law.

Does that sound like a difficult task? Of course. But so is every task that requires balancing two things that are both real values — rather than caring only about one and giving lip service to the other.

Francis earned a lot of suspicion from the Latin mass crowd for putting women in positions of power. Likewise, he earned their ire for a range of other decisions, including:

• Allowing, under certain circumstances, divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
• Calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality.
• Permitting priests to say a prayer of blessing over gay couples.
• Calling for the abolition of the death penalty.
• Suggesting that the existence of non-Christian religions may be positively willed by God.

At its most extreme, traditionalist rhetoric branded the pope as approving adultery and sodomy, rejecting the moral teaching of the church and even denying the truth of Christianity itself.

I think my fellow Catholics who are rightly concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy need to take a deep breath, perhaps log off of social media for a while and ask themselves: Is the Pope Catholic?

And yes, bears do still poop in the woods.

In reality — and much to the dismay of liberals who would have liked to see the church’s stance on these things changed — Francis consistently taught:

• That the church does not have the power to redefine marriage.
• That the church does not have the power to redefine human sexuality.
• That both individuals and states may, in some cases, use lethal force when the protection of human life demands it.
• That Christians have a duty to share the Gospel with the whole world.

As Francis told a somewhat disappointed gathering of representatives of nuns who had hoped he would open the door to ordaining women deacons: “We cannot go beyond revelation and dogmatic expressions … We are Catholics.”

Francis’s thirst for justice for the poor and forgotten defined his papacy. So too did mercy toward those who — like all of us — fall short of the Gospel’s demands. The principle that “truth is an inseparable companion of justice and mercy” grounded his ministry. Francis never compromised on the truth, even as he sought every possible way to meet people where they were and “become all things to all people.” In doing so, he embodied the principle so beloved by Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Pope John Paul II’s doctoral supervisor:

“The church is intolerant in principle because she believes, and tolerant in practice because she loves; the enemies of the church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe, and intolerant in principle because they do not love.”

For the first seven years of his pontificate, Francis continued Benedict’s policy of forbearance toward these traditionalist groups, even as they attacked him for extending mercy to others. In 2020, he consulted bishops around the world by letter, and from their responses, he concluded that the policy had failed. Given an inch, activists within the traditionalist movement had taken a mile, and the older form of the mass had become, in many places, a hotbed of agitation against not only Francis’s leadership but the Second Vatican Council itself.

Francis was forced to take repressive measures to forestall this growing schism. He prohibited diocesan priests from celebrating the older form of the mass without explicit permission from their bishop and from the Vatican, and he directed bishops not to authorize new groups devoted exclusively to the form. In addition, he required existing groups to use designated chapels rather than parish churches. These measures, while necessary, unfortunately caused a great deal of pain to a number of faithful Catholics.

Francis did not live to see the end of this new brand of Catholicism — a movement that, in truth, functions as a form of Protestantism. It has adopted a kind of sola scriptura hermeneutic that locates tradition in the texts and decrees of dead popes (to be interpreted, in the end, by the private reader) rather than in the living magisterium of the Apostolic See.

To the world, Latin-mass Catholics — both dissident and obedient — may seem like an extreme minority to be dismissed rather than encountered. Yet I recall how Francis, during the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016, reached out even to the SSPX. He allowed their priests to validly hear confessions and, later, to witness marriages — a conferral of sacramental jurisdiction that Rome had long withheld.

That gesture did not immediately produce reconciliation. But it has not been forgotten. Perhaps some future pope will preside over the full reconciliation of the SSPX and other dissident traditionalist groups with the Roman church — hopefully soon.

Putin’s Pope

The principled mildness of Pope Francis ruffled far more feathers than just those of traditionalist Catholics. Never was this more obvious than when, in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Francis refused to take sides in the way many expected. He condemned the invasion — even breaking protocol to express his displeasure to the Russian ambassador directly — but he also declined to reduce the conflict to a morality play or to cheerlead the Ukrainian war effort, even as nearly every other voice in the West seemed eager to do.

They called him “Putin’s Pope” for not calling for more killing.

According to Catholic just war doctrine, a defensive war can be waged — but only under very strict conditions. The infinite value of human life necessitates that fighting be permitted only in the most extreme circumstances. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church outlines:

• The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.
• All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
• There must be serious prospects of success.
• The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

​Ukraine may well have had reasonable prospects for a partial success in the spring of 2022, when the nation was riding high after repelling the twin Russian assaults on Kyiv and Kharkiv. But once the hopelessness of driving the invaders out of Kherson Oblast became apparent that autumn — and especially after it became clear that the promised 2023 summer offensives would yield only blood and mud — the moral calculus changed. 

In a February 2024 interview, Francis committed political heresy by calling on Ukraine to display the “courage of the white flag:”

“The word “negotiate” is a courageous word. When you see that you have been defeated, that things are not going well — having the courage to negotiate. And you are ashamed, but if you continue like this, how many dead will there be then? And it will end up even worse … Negotiation is never a surrender. It is the courage not to bring the country to suicide.”

It took courage just to say it. Francis knew full well what the reaction would be. Ukrainian and European leaders accused him of betrayal, of cowardice, of moral blindness. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, insisted: “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail.” Poland’s foreign minister scoffed: “How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army?”

Events came to prove Francis right. Russia proved far more economically resistant than Western sanction hawks had hoped. Its autarkic economy might not be booming, but it is now certain that Russia is capable of maintaining its war effort far longer than Ukraine or NATO can stand. As Fair Observer’s Atul Singh and Glenn Carle noted at the time, the scales were already tipping quite heavily by the end of 2023. Yet most Western leaders and pundits kept their heads in the sand well after that point.

It was Francis’s moral clarity that allowed him to see the truth early, and his Christian fortitude that enabled him not to join his voice with the greatest and loudest number.

In 2024, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was still saying that it was in Washington’s “cold, hard, American interests” to “degrade the military of a major adversary without committing American lives to the effort.” That’s a lovely euphemism for “the more Russians die, the better for us.” A good proportion of the educated public believed that.

Of course, that means a similar number of Ukrainians dying — or far more, if you count civilians. Russian and Ukrainian lives are both cheap to McConnell. They’re both cheap to Putin. But they weren’t cheap to Francis, who begged, bled and wept for every single one of them. That’s the kind of man he was.

Just as he refused to sanctify political violence abroad, Francis refused to let the church become a proxy battlefield in the culture wars at home. Whether speaking to nations at war, to the disillusioned poor or to the self-styled defenders of orthodoxy, he told the same truth. The world is now so much the poorer for want of his apostolic guidance and steadfast witness.

I pray that the widowhood of the church will be short and that Francis will enjoy a worthy successor sooner rather than later. I have very little to say in speculation about who that might be or what name he might take. But I do know that then, as even now, Jesus will watch over His church and inspire the whole world with His example of love — a love that “does not insist on its own way” but “bears all things,” that finds its victory in patient suffering, and yet conquers all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.