I’ve been reading some of the conservative Catholic commentary on Pope Francis’s legacy and what is hoped for in the temperament and attitude of the next pope. It is hard not to be struck by how grudging—or even openly contemptuous—their assessment of Francis and his papacy is. Perhaps that isn’t surprising given the rancor Francis often encountered from some hierarchs during his life. In his appraisal of Francis at First Things, the former Philadelphia archbishop Charles Chaput was dismissive, writing that “the intellectual excellence to sustain a salvific (and not merely ethical) Christian witness in a skeptical modern world was likewise absent.”
But there has also been a discernible shift in how the late pope’s critics characterize his theological and political acumen. His intelligence and wisdom were usually judged to be vastly inferior to that of Benedict and John Paul II, who were cast as paragons of orthodoxy and philosophical sophistication. Francis’s off-the-cuff remarks—especially “Who am I to judge?”—were seen as inept blunders by a theological lightweight. The rejection by the African bishops of Francis’s approval of blessings for same-sex couples was celebrated as an overdue rebuke of a pope in over his head.
In death, however, Francis is often being cast as the stereotypical crafty Jesuit who was advancing a subversive agenda by indirection and stealth. First Things editor R. R. Reno characterized Francis as an “operator” in the Jesuit tradition. “The effect of this formation is a holy single-mindedness, which often produces an impatience with impediments, even those created by moral and religious duties.” At The Catholic World Report, theologian Larry Chapp went further. In his judgment, Francis was a “master manipulator who counted on [the] media…in order to bypass the entire ecclesial apparatus and speak directly to ‘the people.’” Francis was determined, his critics argue, to undermine the teachings of his two predecessors and thereby return the Church to the uncertainties and evangelical failures of the post–Vatican II period. All of that chaos had been reined in thanks to the strong and steady hand of John Paul II and Benedict, only to be let loose again by Francis—or so his most outspoken critics claim.
The politics of conclaves are notoriously opaque. Will the cardinals choose someone who will continue along Francis’s path of more lay involvement in Church governance and a softer approach to culture-war issues? Or will they elect someone who will reverse the supposed wayward drift created by Francis’s surprising pronouncements? Along with other Catholic journalists from across the ideological spectrum, I participated in a Wall Street Journal 2013 symposium just before the conclave that elected Francis. “What to Look for in a New Pope” was the question we were asked to answer. John Paul II’s biographer George Weigel longed for a “culture warrior” to take the throne of Peter, as did Mary Eberstadt (author of Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution). Needless to say, they were disappointed by the conclave’s choice. National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters was remarkably prescient in his call for a pope who would identify “more closely with the poor.” Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist, was also close to the mark in hoping for a pope who would “journey constantly to the outside,” while tempering the “somewhat abstract and cerebral” approach of Benedict and John Paul II. For my part, I quoted the philosopher Charles Taylor. The Church often proposed “too many answers choking off questions and too little sense of the enigmas that accompany a life of faith; these are what stop a conversation from ever starting between our Church and much of our world,” Taylor had written. As it turns out, I think Francis invited just such dialogue (a term ridiculed by his critics), and the Church is better for it.
The next pope should think long and hard about closing down those sometimes difficult conversations. As Francis told Weigel in a 2016 interview that touched on disputed Church teachings, “Oh, arguments are fine.” In entertaining those arguments, Francis did not reliably side with either the so-called liberal or so-called conservative position. In the Church, change needs to gestate slowly. Sometimes no decision is the right decision. In the meantime, arguments are a sign of life. The suppression of argument in the pre–Vatican II Church was a symptom of the institution’s fragility and a harbinger of its postconciliar collapse.
A fear of returning to the upheavals of the postconciliar period is misplaced. History, as the saying goes, does not repeat itself, at least not exactly. But thinking that questions about sexual morality or the role of women in the Church have somehow been settled for all time is also a mistake. To be sure, John Paul II and Benedict insisted on a certain kind of clarity when pronouncing on faith and morals. Whether that understanding won over those in the pews is doubtful. At least in the United States, confessionals remain mostly empty while the line for Communion is long, suggesting that traditional understandings of Church authority are attenuated at best. And that’s true even for the roughly 20 percent of Catholics who attend Mass regularly. Nor have most of the millions of young people who flocked to John Paul II’s spectacular World Youth Days remained in the pews. Most have not married or baptized their children in the Church either.
“The real war of Belief is with idols, not with other believers,” Garry Wills wrote in Bare Ruined Choirs of the fierce divisions in the post–Vatican II Church. Discussing the rejection of Humanae vitae by most of the laity and many of the lower clergy, Wills observed, “The defenders of ‘church’ in the narrow sense (church rulers) should think back on the ancient theological maxim that ‘firmest judgments are those most wide-spread in the Christian life’—Securus judicat orbis terrarum, as St. Augustine put it.” Wills continued:
The papalists of today must be shaken at times when they consider the difference between ‘the church’ in their sense (Pope and Curia) and in [John Henry] Newman’s or Augustine’s sense. These people [are mistaken] in their attempt to maintain a spurious consistency in recent papal documents, rather than a unity of impulse through the whole Christian body.
Wills went on to point out that before promulgating the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Pius IX “requested the bishops to consult local clergy and laity on the state of the church’s belief.” That sounds an awful lot like Francis’s hopes for synodality, an initiative his critics never tire of mocking. Let’s hope Francis’s successor has a similar faith in the whole Church, for that really is the tradition.
