‘This Moment Is Critical.' Whither Progressive Christians After Pope Francis?

New York Times

24-04-2025

For 12 years, Pope Francis was the most powerful Christian on the world stage, using his voice to elevate the poor and the marginalized.
Millions of progressive Christians in the United States, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, considered him to be a powerful counterweight to a rising conservative Christian power. He was the magnetic center for their values.
His death on Monday leaves behind a question gnawing inside their minds.
In a world without Pope Francis, where their values feel particularly vulnerable, where do they go from here?
'This moment is critical now,' Bishop Sean W. Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said. 'For those of us who want to embody the Sermon on the Mount, and the Beatitudes, and the love that Jesus showed in the world, this is now more important than ever.'
Pope Francis stood in contrast to a brand of Christianity that has increasing power in the United States. It is mixed with nationalism and, according to Bishop Rowe, is 'not only fundamentally not Christian' but 'also dangerous.'
'We have to begin to step up and communicate this message in ways that are winsome and compelling,' he added. 'Politics are certainly co-opting Christian language and the Christian story. It is now ours to take that back.'
President Trump has embraced a strain of right-wing Christianity that questions the separation of church and state, and its adherents largely backed the president's agenda. His vice president, JD Vance, is a Catholic convert who has used his interpretation of Catholic theology to justify the president's crackdown on immigration.
Many conservative Christians, including Protestants, viewed Pope Francis skeptically. To them, the pope was soft on doctrinal matters, and risked pushing all of Christendom to surrendering its core teachings. 'Francis will go down in history as the pope of liberal gesture — the vicar of equivocation,' R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in the evangelical magazine World on Monday. 'Just when his church needed a firm hand and intellectual firepower, he responded with a shrug.'
But other Christians across denominations, who saw Pope Francis as their moral compass, feel a new sense of urgency with his passing.
Rev. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader and ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination, said the loss of Pope Francis meant others must carry on his mission to the marginalized.
'We must now say, 'I am Pope Francis,'' he said.
Pope Francis 'was an embodiment of who I see Jesus to be whenever I read the gospels,' said Rev. Donna Claycomb Sokol, pastor of Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church in Washington. 'I think about him kissing the feet of women in prison after washing them. I think about how he was consumed with visible joy whenever he was with a child.'
As the cardinals prepare to gather in Rome for the conclave, she wondered whether any of them could stand with the voice Pope Francis did. 'Or is Pope Francis one of a kind?' she asked. 'What will they gravitate toward?'
The question is particularly acute for progressive Catholics. Denise Murphy McGraw, who worked to mobilize fellow Catholic voters for Kamala Harris last year from her home in upstate New York, worries about a younger generation of Catholic priests who have become more conservative.
'We are not getting that same sort of adherence to the Beatitudes, and that social justice that many people grew up with,' she said.
Sister Jeanne Hagelskamp joined the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods almost 50 years ago because she wanted to spend her life working with the poor.
In response to Pope Francis' attention to climate issues and his call in 2015 for nuns and priests to 'wake up the world,' the women in her small community in Indiana began working in earnest on environmental policy, most recently supporting a bill that would preserve forests in the state.
That local work will continue, Sister Hagelskamp said. But she struggled through tears as she described what it meant to lose Pope Francis.
'He was an international figure that could talk about the things that most need to be talked about,' she said. 'So we've lost our voice, we've lost that public voice.'
Now, she said, people like her must step into the gap, at the precise moment that her country's cultural atmosphere and political powers have turned against them. 'We know it's not always welcome,' she said. 'Yet we think that's what God calls us to do.'
Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics who met frequently with Pope Francis at the Vatican,
drew a contrast between two moments of Catholic witness in the news in recent weeks. The first was Pope Francis' visit last week to Rome's main prison, an annual tradition. This year he was too frail to wash the prisoners' feet, as he has done in the past to commemorate Holy Thursday, but he met with dozens of inmates.
The second moment was the visit by Representative Riley Moore, a Republican from West Virginia, to the prison in El Salvador where the United States wrongly deported a Maryland man with no criminal record. Mr. Moore, who is Catholic, smiled for a photograph in front of a cell containing several prisoners, giving two thumbs up to the camera.
'The two pictures could not be more different, the two different paths in Christianity,' Father Martin said. 'One says we accompany people, no matter who they are, and the other says we turn our backs on them and mock them.'
The loss comes at a fraught moment for the once-robust tradition of progressive Christianity. Mainline Protestant denominations, which attract many progressive Christians, have seen their numbers and influence decline steadily in recent decades. The papacy is also open at the same time as the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the global Anglican Communion.
The percentage of Americans who are Catholics seems to have stabilized in recent years, but liberal Catholics are less likely to go to Mass and almost no new priests in the United States describe themselves as progressive.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, went to Mass on Monday night with her husband, who is Catholic. After her sermon at the inauguration prayer service when she pleaded with Mr. Trump to have mercy, many Christians have turned to her as a moral pillar.
Now, that voice is gone, and she is grieving. Not just the loss of Pope Francis, but of what feels like a whole nation and moral universe, she said. Still, the job is to hope, she said.
She pulled up Pope Francis' speech to Congress in 2015. ''Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of people,'' she read out loud.
Her voice wavered, and then she paused to reflect.
'Whatever happens in the rest of my lifetime or yours, some of us have to keep a candle burning. We can't let this go,' she said. 'Someday the pendulum will swing back.'