The moment Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires embraced the name of Francis, the doctrinal direction of his papacy was largely decided. Following St. Francis of Assisi, the new Bishop of Rome would uphold three guiding principles: “the preferential option for the poor,” “the care for our common home,” and “the commitment to the culture of the encounter and to peace.”
But well before developing these doctrinal principles in his papal encyclicals, The Joy of the Gospel (2013), Laudato, Si (2015), and Fratelli Tutti (2020), from the very first day Pope Francis introduced a new personal and pastoral style that set the radical tone and surprising pace of his pontificate. Rejecting Vatican pomp and to remain more accessible, Francis decided to set his living quarters in Santa Marta, the Vatican’s guesthouse, rather than in the Apostolic Palace, arriving there carrying his own briefcase.
Francis ended his first open press conference with the accredited journalists, many of them non-Christian, not with the usual papal blessing but asking them to pray for him. Returning from his trip to Brazil, barely a few months into his pontificate, Pope Francis famously said: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
Many conservative Catholics were scandalized by Pope Francis’ response. If the Pontiff cannot judge, who can? But Pope Francis responded as Jesus did when confronted by teachers of religious law with a woman who was caught in adultery. Upon hearing “Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone,” the accusers slipped away one by one. (John 8:1-11). For Pope Francis, “mercy” and “forgiveness” are the most divine and most Christian of virtuous dispositions.
“The God of mercy, he is never tired of forgiving. We are the ones who are tired of asking for forgiveness, but he does not tire.” Of his priests, he asked them to “become shepherds who smell like sheep.” He condemned any form of “theological narcissism,” which places the ecclesiastical institution above the people of God, forgetting that the Church of Christ is to be “a servant Church.” He wanted his Church to literally open its doors and go onto all the plazas and squares of the world to become a field hospital, curing the wounds of a broken humanity. Pope Francis reserved his harshest words for the officials of the Roman curia, who acted as “courtesans” of a “self-referential” ecclesiastical court.
His prophetic words of critique had a wide resonance because of Pope Francis’ own actions. His first outing in the city as Bishop of Rome was to a prison to encounter inmates and wash their feet ritually during Holy Week. His first outing outside of Rome was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, to practice the culture of the encounter and to make visible the harsh plight of African and Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees reaching by boat the southern shores of Europe.
The defense of the human dignity of our immigrant and refugee “brothers and sisters,”, “the poorest of the poor,” who through no fault of their own are forced to flee the inhuman consequences of war and failed states, of ecological crises, and of a globalization of indifference, became the untiring prophetic message of Pope Francis, reminding everybody to open their hearts and governments to build bridges instead of walls and fortresses. As an alternative to the globalization of indifference, he called for a globalization of fraternity.
In The Joy of the Gospel, he insisted that “the economy kills,” not by exploiting workers, but rather by “discarding” all those persons it cannot use as productive labor. In Laudato Si, he reminded us of our moral obligation to care for our common home and to protect the beauty of creation, insisting once again that the poor are the first and most vulnerable victims of our humanly induced ecological crisis.
In Fratelli Tutti, he expressed his advocacy for a globalization of fraternity in stark prophetic terms, insisting that global challenges demand global responses which neither the world capitalist system nor the world system of nation-states seem able to provide on their own. Written during the global COVID pandemic, Pope Francis lamented: “For all of our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”
But Pope Francis’ prophetic and radical critique soon encountered a fierce resistance from traditionalist critics within the Catholic hierarchy, within the priesthood and within the laity who made unambiguously clear they believed to be more Catholic than the pope and forged a well-organized vocal resistance to his authority. In an age of polarization, Pope Francis became an unusually polarizing figure.
It is still too early to evaluate the ultimate legacy of Francis’ pontificate. Following his key philosophical principle that “time is greater than space” he always insisted on the need to open processes which may come to fruition a long time after we are gone. From the polarization caused by the two Synods on the Family (2014-2015), Pope Francis may have learned that it would be unwise for him to legislate for the entire global church on what he considered to be disciplinary issues within the hierarchy of truths of the Gospel.
As a Franciscan Jesuit, he came to discern that more time was needed for a process of communication and reciprocal listening at all the levels of the global church and that the task of the Bishop of Rome was not to legislate through synods but rather to initiate a new Synod on Synodality. If this process of “walking together” becomes institutionalized, it could be the most long-lasting ecclesiastical legacy of Pope Francis.
Nobody knows who is going to be Francis’s successor and what kind of new direction he will give to his pontificate. But after encountering the last five Popes, from John XXIII to Francis, all great Catholic Popes and great global leaders, each uniquely placing their emphases on different aspects of the pluralist Catholic tradition, we can be almost sure that the next Pope is likely to continue the Catholic legacy in his unique personal way, leading the global church as the Bishop of Rome, while also continue working, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “for the advancement of humanity and of universal fraternity.” (Caritas in Veritate.)
Cover photo: Argentina’s cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, elected Pope Francis I, appears with cardinals at the window of St Peter’s Basilica after being elected the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013 at the Vatican. (Photo by Filippo Monteforte / AFP)
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