Pope Francis misunderstood Catholicism’s appeal

A good man but superficial thinker, he was the Russell Moore of Rome

The excitement greeting Francis’s elevation to the papacy wasn’t misplaced. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a loveable man who had spent much of his career running through the minefield of Argentinian politics while dedicated to the celestial kingdom. Many of his critics would have done a lot worse in Buenos Aires.

And his legacy as pope? His dedication to the poor, to “the least of these”, was the opposite of fake. For that, he will be remembered well.

But Francis’s time in the Vatican was a missed opportunity. All the US legacy media obituaries hailing him as a “reformer” demonstrate the point. Francis prompted people who dislike Catholicism to dislike it a bit less — that was all it came to. Few people converted to Catholicism because of him. The Church’s decline accelerated. Its internal divides are now gulfs.

Francis downgraded yet largely maintained the Church’s social conservatism. He said “who am I to judge?” about gay people and allowed priests to bless same-sex civil unions — but didn’t change doctrine to say homosexual acts are not sinful, and in his last year used the extremely un-PC word “frociaginne”. He relaxed the rules on the Eucharist for divorcés, while keeping the Church’s (and Jesus’s) teaching against divorce.

Conservatives, notably in the US, were alarmed and disillusioned. Near-schismatic liberals, notably in Germany and Belgium, were emboldened yet still frustrated. And it’s not like this sparked vibrant theological debate.

His liberalising manoeuvres won media plaudits but no real fans. The balancing act left potential converts confused about the Church’s teachings. A strange approach, when a crucial part of Catholicism’s appeal is the idea that it is semper eadem; “the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age”, to quote its great apologist G.K. Chesterton.

The late pope’s cultural progressivism was clear as he railed against immigration restrictions, especially in Italy and the US, and restricted the practice of the Latin Mass. Francis wasn’t exactly woke. But he definitely wasn’t based.

The campaign against the Latin Mass exemplifies how Francis’s papacy went wrong. Catholicism is resurgent amongst young people in nations like France and England. It’s not suburban churches with guitars and ’60s Protestant hymns they’re attracted to. It’s the operatic grandeur yet sombre dignity of the Tridentine Mass.

It’s hard to explain Francis’s crackdown. Did he just have a dated view of what the yoof want? Or was it a political act, vandalising the Church’s heritage and future to own the cons?

Francis’s talk about welcoming immigration on a vast scale was indistinguishable from that of the NGOs and their media mouthpieces. No doubt compassion motivated his stance, but of course compassion doesn’t blast out of existence the reality that open borders would make welfare states collapse. Francis looks superficial compared to Cardinal Robert Sarah — with his statement that “it is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence” — and Benedict XVI, with his assertion of “the right not to emigrate”.

The late Pope Emeritus was gracious towards Francis but hung over his reign. Benedict looked like yesterday’s man in 2013. But, as Ross Douthat noted, his resignation was when the world became “weird”.

The shy Teutonic scholar ended up a far more effective missionary than the liberal media’s darling. Look for example at just one section of Benedict’s Jesus of Nazereth — at his masterly deployment of Jacob Neusner’s Jewish theology to skewer the liberal quest for the historical Jesus, all the while maintaining both Christianity’s difference from Judaism and respect, even love, for its father religion. Francis produced nothing remotely like it.

Francis’s closest analogue is Russell Moore in the evangelical world. A good man and a good Christian, no doubt. But a figure who, on occasion, made some atheists hate Christianity a little less, while alienating both the devout in the pews and the intellectuals who will define the Church’s future.

Photo Credit: Tânia Rêgo/ABr, Agência Brasil, Wikimedia Creative Commons