Pope Francis's illusions

New Statesman​

21-04-2025

Photo by Vatican Media viaWhen the cardinal electors made him Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio later said, they gave Rome a bishop from the very ends of the Earth. They chose him because he spoke of a place even further away than that. In March 2013, in the final meetings before the doors shut on the conclave to select the 226th successor to Saint Peter, Jorge Bergoglio talked about the moon.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the man who would become Pope Francis told his fellow cardinals about the Mysterium lunae. The first Christians looked into the night sky 20 centuries ago, and saw, in a world shrouded by darkness, a great light. Look at the moon, they said, and you see the Church. It's only by her illumination – her teachings, her sacraments, her holiness – that we can see at all. But like the moon, none of her beauty belongs to her. It's borrowed grace, reflected light. It's an illusion. Without God, it would be nothing at all.
In all the years since, the Church remained; the mystery and the light. And at the heart of it sits the figure of the pope: remote, untouchable, as enigmatic and inhuman as the surface of the moon. His powers and responsibilities are so vast, wrote one theologian in 1986, that it is a job it is humanly impossible to succeed in. A quarter-century later, that theologian had confirmed in practice what he'd predicted in theory, and Benedict XVI became the first pope in eight centuries to resign. Adrift before the Church's internal corruption, helpless before her steady decline, Benedict's papacy ended in defeat.
His successor made it clear he intended his own would end differently. Francis's speech about the Mysterium lunae told the story of a Church cleansed and renewed, restored to the light from which it had come. It was a return to first principles, summarised as 'a poor church for the poor'; expressed, first and most clearly, in gestures: Francis took a hostel room over the apostolic palace; a wooden chair over a throne; a silver cross over the traditional one of gold. Modelling a different kind of leadership to that of his predecessors, Francis intended to break the cycle of decay. What unfolded next was very different. The story of the Francis papacy – from his election on 13 March 2013 to his death, aged 88, on 21 April 2025 – was a story of illusions.
The first revealed was Francis's own. In November 2013, he released Evangelii gaudium, 'The joy of the gospel', the founding charter of his papacy. It was a lengthy reiteration of the speech that, eight months before, had made him Pope. The Church exists to evangelise, Francis wrote. Every aspect of Catholic life, from the curia downwards, had to be recentred around this task. The temptation to retreat into subcultures must be resisted, he said: Christians are called not to avoid the world, but to convert it.
Francis hoped his leadership might augur an age of renewal for the Church. He presided instead over an era of decline. Over his time in office, the secular West grew ever more secular. In Latin America, the church's long retreat before evangelical Protestantism turned into a rout. In 2010, nearly four out of every five of the Pope's fellow Argentinians identified as Catholic; by 2020, that figure had dropped below 50 per cent. The future of Catholicism now looks like her distant past, the Church of the third century: strong in Africa, weak almost everywhere else. Francis did not instigate the decline; his papacy was defined by it nevertheless.
And as Francis subverted the hopes of others, history subverted his. The Pope called Catholics to go to the margins just as believers were, across much of the West, marginalised themselves; strengthened ties with Christians outside the Church as her internal divisions deepened; expounded an optimistic, missionary vision of the Church to a shrinking, embattled flock. Hannah Arendt eulogised John XXIII as a Pope who was also a Christian. Francis was, at his best, an even stranger prodigy: a pope who was also a human being. But whether this was a good thing depended on who you asked.
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Catholic conservatives had long believed the Church did not change; under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they convinced themselves that popes didn't either. To theological supremacy they augmented a kind of personal cult: the bishop of Rome as universal friend, seer and epistemic authority, a correct-answer-machine on Vatican hill. Then came Francis: loose-lipped, imprecise, concerned more with the failure of Christians than the errors of the secular world. And men who'd turned the Pope into an idol were horrified to glimpse, beneath a white cassock, feet of clay.
The existential crisis which ensued poisoned Catholic internal life: imbued even the smallest reform with apocalyptic import. But Francis's method of advancing reform – through footnotes, private letters, proxy and diktat – played its own role in turning inevitable clashes into unbridgeable divides. If the Roman fiat could no longer preclude Church teaching being challenged, neither could it single-handedly change it. In the vertical, clericalised Church the Pope had grown up in, dictatorial methods were par for the course. But the Church Francis led was different: less deferential, often lay-led, decentralised, fractious. In such a context even a pope has to convince his enemies, not just defeat them. And if Francis believed opposition to his reforms was confined to a tiny, unrepresentative elite, he was, like his opponents, the victim of an illusion.
The traditional pattern of ecclesial conflict – liberalising laity, conservative pope – had been established in the aftermath of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council. (Vatican II was a controversial meeting of more than 2,000 bishops and thousands of observers, auditors, sisters, laymen and laywomen to discuss the future of the church. It may have laid the foundations for the modern papacy, but it also set in motion the conflict that will define Pope Francis's legacy: should the church modernise in tandem with the world, or stick to its inherent conservatism?) Under Francis, the council's legacy was again contested; across the world, the two tendencies renewed their struggle. But some time in the half-century since, their positions had quietly reversed. A string of episcopal and lay rebellions had, in the late 1960s, rendered Paul VI's reiteration of the Church's prohibition of artificial birth control a dead letter. In 2023, recalcitrant bishops from the Global South rendered Francis's proposed form for blessing same-sex couples moot.
In other respects, the Franciscan papacy saw the patterns of conflict set in the past half-century break down entirely. As the true scope of the abuse crisis in the reign of Francis's predecessors became clear, trust disintegrated between clergy and bishops; laity and hierarchs. The ensuing divide cut deeper than any dispute over doctrinal or liturgical reform. It was a challenge Francis only ever partially met.
Under his aegis, reforms which had seemed impossible with his predecessors – notably, the centralised complaints system Vox Estis – were gradually introduced. In his public apologies, his meetings with survivors, in public and in private, over many years, Francis initiated a cultural change which is likely to prove more significant still.
But where his achievements were landmarks, his failures were perverse. The man who spent endless hours listening to survivors was the same one who repeatedly pulled strings to keep perpetrators from justice. When the American cardinal Ted McCarrick was found guilty in a Vatican trial for sexual crimes against adults and minors, Francis demurred to hold McCarrick's closest collaborators to account: then, he promoted them. The man from the ends of the Earth had gone further than any Pope before him to tackle the abuse crisis. It was, too often, not far enough.
The problem with Francis, however, ultimately reached far beyond him. Across a half-century of cover-ups, the list of those responsible is implausibly vast. The roll call of the complicit, both clerical and lay, by omission, inaction or silence, is longer still. Under the weight of that failure, the institutional trust underpinning Catholic life began to collapse. In some ways, the ensuing vacuum was filled by an universe of online influencers; a magisterium in every mobile phone.
In what remains of Catholic Europe, the symbols of the faith – if not the substance – decorate the banners of the post-fascist and populist right. Across Latin America the Church staggers backwards into its authoritarian past. And in the United States, the marriage of convenience between Catholic conservatives and republicans deepened, under Trump, to a spiritual union. And it was in America, the wealthiest part of the Church, that offered the bleakest vision of the faith's decay.
Over Francis's penultimate year in office, President Joe Biden, a Catholic of 80 years practice, presided over the destruction in Gaza of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Biden's support for gay marriage, abortion and IVF may have read as rather uncatholic, at least to traditionalists. But adding to that, Donald Trump's vice-president JD Vance offered the equally a-doctrinal racial demagoguery and libertarian agenda of Silicon Valley. (Vance and the Pope met the day before Francis's death.) Both Biden and Vance made political capital of their faith. But in a post-Christian nation, what they gained from their Catholicism was conditional: their faith could be public, but never lived.
They represented in their persons the fantasies Catholics had fed on for decades: delusions of permanence and plasticity, of relevance, power, popularity, control. And the two men bear out the truth of the saviour's warning; that those who love the things which perish will one day perish themselves. In this sense, the Pope's lack of influence over his flock was a token of the greatest gift he leaves Catholics: he had taken their illusions away.
But against such a backdrop, Francis' most admirable commitments – his stubborn, lonely solidarity with the marginalised and forgotten – seem amongst his most futile. A Pope who asked for refugees and migrants to be welcomed with an open heart dies as hearts are hardened towards outsiders across the west. A Pope who reversed a century of compromise with capitalism, restating a choice laid down two millennia before – to serve Mammon, or to serve God – dies at a time when the ultra-wealthy enjoy unprecedented power and prestige. A Pope who spoke incessantly of peacemaking dies as the world descends into war.
If Francis was defeated in his efforts to shape the world; defeated in his attempts even to direct his Church, it was because popes can preach, appeal, convict – but not compel. The power of the papacy is, in this sense, like the light of the moon: a beautiful illusion. Saint Peter's throne is also his prison cell.
Some considered Francis's gestures – the wooden chair, the hostel room, the cross – as hollow: power playing at humility; an image, not a truth. This was less a mistake over Francis than about his office. The life of a Pope, like the life of any Christian, is directed towards realities which cannot be seen. Every act he takes is a gesture; images which illume truths; a hand pointing to somewhere past the limits of our sight.
Not long before Francis's death, it was revealed that he had called the Catholic parish in Gaza every evening since the bombardment. It was an action that seemed, somehow, out of place in the world as we know it. As the news reports and the negotiations and the bombs continued, the calls did too; a kindness and a mystery. Like a light falling on us from somewhere else, very far away.
In the suffering of the Church in Gaza – a suffering Catholics had sponsored, supplied, justified, blessed – Francis encountered the defeat of his hopes for the world, and the only hope for the future of his Church. It was an antidote to illusion: 'A poor church, for the poor'. It could never be administered. It could only be lived. To be poor, in the world as humans have made it, is to be weak; to suffer; to die. It is to share in the passion of Jesus Christ, the crucified God. It is to be defeated. And yet, somehow, not to fail.
In 1971, a young theologian gave a lecture on the crisis in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger talked – as Pope Francis would decades later – about the moon. For millennia we contemplated the Mysterium lunae, Ratzinger said. In the 20th century we arrived there. We walked on the moon. And on the other side of mystery all we found was dust. That's painful, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI said: losing our illusions always is. But God speaks through everything; our defeats, perhaps, most of all. A lesson, if we look for it, is written in the dust: in the end, only the light is real.
[See more: The myth of progressive Catholicism]
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