In one of his last speeches before leaving office in 2013, Pope Benedict XVI dissected the destructive liberalism that spread within the Church after the council of Vatican II. The secularism of Western culture and the media elite had seeped into the Church, he lamented.
“[T]here was the council of the Fathers—the true council—but there was also the council of the media. It was almost a council in and of itself, and the world perceived the council through them, through the media. So the council that immediately, effectively, got through to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers,” said Pope Benedict XVI. “[It] did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics.”
To this liberal influence, Pope Benedict XVI traced much of the crisis in the Church. The absorption of modern liberalism into Catholicism had produced, he said, “so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, the liturgy was trivialized.”1
Little did Pope Benedict XVI realize that his mysterious resignation would pave the way for the very liberal Church he feared and for a successor who embodies the very “hermeneutic of politics” he decried.
As the cardinals met to decide on a new pope in March 2013, the Western liberal elite began beating the drum for the selection of a “progressive” and “pastoral” churchman, by which editorialists and activists meant a politically liberal and doctrinally lax one. James Salt of Catholics United, a front group Democrats set up in 2005 to infiltrate the Church, seized on the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and demanded that the Church elect a pope from the “global south” who would “radically shift the agenda of the Church,” away from “issues of human sexuality” and toward the “imminent threat of global climate change and its effect on the poorest.”
Jorge Mario Bergoglio exceeded their expectations. From the first moment of his appearance on the Vatican balcony, left-wing Western journalists, intellectuals, and politicians showered him in praise. Customarily skeptical of the papacy, they suddenly became cheerleaders for it.
Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has explained the liberal obsession with the papacy by writing that “the struggle within the church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.”2 The liberal elite immediately sized up Pope Francis, with his transparent political liberalism and his distaste for doctrine, as falling on the right side of its self-serving understanding of that “struggle.”
That he selected Francis as his papal name was the first act to charm liberals, as they opportunistically portray St. Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of socialism, pacifism, and environmentalism. Instead of challenging this liberal caricature, Bergoglio reinforced it. He told reporters that he adopted Francis as his name because Francis of Assisi was a “man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation.”3 In truth, St. Francis of Assisi was a rigorously orthodox medieval churchman who would have regarded the liberalism of this pope with horror.
Pope Francis explained that the inspiration to name himself Francis came to him when Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, archbishop emeritus of São Paulo, Brazil, whispered in his ear moments after his election, “Don’t forget the poor.” His mention of Hummes was music to the ears of the media. Hummes has long been known to reporters as a critic of the free market with friendly ties to socialist organizations in Brazil.4 (He is also known for saying that he “didn’t know” if Jesus Christ would have disapproved of gay marriage.)
The Western media was also charmed by the opening gestures of Bergoglio, which amounted to a carefully choreographed casualness at the expense of Catholic tradition. Bergoglio declined the traditional vestments a new pope wears upon his election—a red velvet cape—and instead wore a white cassock. Before blessing the crowd, he asked the crowd for a blessing and he pointedly referred to himself not as the pope but merely as the “bishop of Rome.” As Bergoglio explained later, his use of that reduced title and his modest description of the meaning of his election (“the diocesan community of Rome has its bishop”) were intended to make non-Catholics comfortable with his papacy. “Placing emphasis on the number one title, that is, Bishop of Rome, favors ecumenism,” he said.5
Less than a year before Bergoglio became pope, in a foreshadowing of the liberal direction of his pontificate, he ran into John Quinn, the ultra-progressive former archbishop of San Francisco, at a coffee shop in Rome. Quinn is the author of The Reform of the Papacy, a book that explicitly rejects traditional teaching on the papacy, calls for Protestant-style “collegiality,” and urges the Church to adopt the politics and morals of the modern Western world. “I’ve read your book and I’m hoping what it proposes will be implemented,” Bergoglio told a pleased Quinn.6 In retrospect, Pope Francis has largely implemented it and the left-wing American churchmen that Quinn represents—the so-called seamless garment bishops—have enjoyed a return to power.
All of Pope Francis’s heterodox opening gestures after his election caused murmuring among Pope Benedict XVI’s former aides and confusion among the faithful, but it excited members of the liberal wing of the Church. The former cardinal of Los Angeles and Cesar Chavez acolyte Roger Mahony tweeted to his followers, “So long papal ermine and fancy lace!” and gushed about the left-wing political orientation of the new pope.7
Ernesto Cardenal, the Marxist activist whom Pope John Paul II rebuked, was excited by the emergence of Pope Francis. “We are seeing a true revolution in the Vatican,” he wrote.8
The openly heretical German theologian Hans Küng said he “was overwhelmed by joy” at the news of Bergoglio’s election. “There is hope in this man,” said Küng, who correctly predicted that Francis would deviate from the “line of the two popes from Poland and Germany.” It has since been reported that Pope Francis and Küng have been exchanging friendly letters and that Francis has signaled an openness to hearing Küng’s criticism of papal infallibility.9
Formerly condemned liberation theologians immediately grasped the significance of Bergoglio’s election, too. Leonardo Boff was quoted in the German press as gloating that Francis is “more liberal” than the college of cardinals realized. “I am encouraged by this choice, viewing it as a pledge for a church of simplicity and of ecological ideals,” he said.10
It didn’t take long for Boff’s confidence in this pontificate to deepen. After hearing several of Pope Francis’s first speeches and homilies, Boff put his finger on one of the most revolutionary tendencies of this pontificate: “[He] has signaled that everything is up for discussion, which not long ago would have been unthinkable for any pope to say.”11
The notoriously heterodox German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper was also energized by the news of Bergoglio’s election. As one of the most illuminating figures of this pontificate, Kasper deserves special attention. Kasper had occupied the room across from Bergoglio at the Vatican’s hotel during the papal conclave. He gave Bergoglio one of his books, a book on mercy that argued for a loosening of Church teaching and discipline. Pope Francis said that he read it happily.12 The theme of the book fit with the speech that Bergoglio gave at the conclave, which was a mishmash of progressive complaints about a “self-referential” Church unwilling to “come out of herself” and reach out to the “peripheries.”13
Under previous pontificates, Kasper’s fortunes had fallen and his dissents went largely ignored. But Pope Francis, within the first days of his papacy, rehabilitated Kasper’s checkered reputation. During his first appearance from the papal window, Pope Francis pronounced Kasper a theologian whom he admires. Not long thereafter, Pope Francis gave Kasper the green light to revive his campaign, blocked under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, to liberalize the Church’s sacramental discipline.
According to Vanity Fair, “Kasper meets with Francis every few weeks, and their conversations are casual and straight to the point.” “It was once a rule that when you went to see the Pope you had to be vested up in your cassock and sash,” Kasper told the magazine. “It’s more normal now. He picks up the phone and asks, ‘Please, can you come over?,’ and then he says, ‘Please, no cassock—come as a clergyman.’”14
After Kasper urged his fellow bishops to open up Communion lines to adulterers, Pope Francis praised his “profound theology.” The Catholic left has taken to calling Kasper the “pope’s theologian.” Kasper has long argued that the Church should democratize her teachings. Pope Francis agrees with his approach, Kasper told the press:
On the other hand when we discuss marriage and family we have to listen to people who are living this reality. There’s a ‘sensus fidelium’ (‘sense of the faithful’). It cannot be decided only from above, from the church hierarchy, and especially you cannot just quote old texts of the last century, you have to look at the situation today, and then you make a discernment of the spirits and come to concrete results. I think this is the approach of Pope Francis, whereas many others start from doctrine and then use a mere deductive method.15
Many liberal churchmen in the mold of Kasper enjoyed promotions after the election of Pope Francis. But conservative churchmen such as Raymond Burke quickly found themselves marginalized. In his first year, as the outlines of his liberal pontificate became more visible, Pope Francis dropped Burke not only from the top position on the Vatican’s highest court but also from his powerful position on the Congregation for Bishops, which vets ecclesiastical picks for the pope. In what many Church observers saw as an unprecedented slight, Burke was reduced to a ceremonial role overseeing the Knights of Malta.
Giving the demotion even more significance, Pope Francis replaced Burke on the Congregation for Bishops with one of Burke’s enemies, Donald Wuerl, the liberal cardinal of Washington, DC, who had long criticized Burke’s traditional defense of canon law. (Wuerl has become the face of the “humble” Church of Pope Francis, despite living like a vain Borgia prince. Wuerl has had a high school in Pittsburgh named after himself and resides in a palatial penthouse on Embassy Row in Washington, DC.16) The New York Times, among other publications, purred over this act of in-your-face papal politics, seeing it correctly as a major snub of conservative Catholics and a sign that Pope Francis was determined to liberalize the episcopate.17
“The pope’s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive,” the New York Times reported. “‘He is saying that you don’t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,’ said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute.”
In an interview for this book, one American priest said that the snubbing of Cardinal Burke had a shattering effect on morale within conservative priestly circles. “From then on we knew that we would have targets on our backs under this pontificate. The pope hates American conservatives,” he said.
Liberal European media outlets, for their part, rejoiced at the demotions of conservative prelates such as Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, who lost his key position as prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy. They cheered the promotion of Archbishop Carlos Osoro Sierra, dubbed “Little Francis,” to the important post of archbishop of Madrid. The German left was pleased when Pope Francis gave the large archdiocese of Berlin to Heiner Koch, who has criticized the Church’s “hurtful” approach to homosexuals and endorsed Communion for adulterers. Pope Francis made a proponent of sacramental laxity, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, secretary general of the Italian bishops’ conference. “My wish for the Italian Church is that it is able to listen without any taboo to the arguments in favor of married priests, the Eucharist for the divorced, and homosexuality,” Galantino has said, earning him a reputation as the “prototypical” Pope Francis bishop.18
The liberal media also noticed that Francis, in keeping with his claim that the Church isn’t sufficiently focused on the third world, has given appointments to liberal churchmen from obscure dioceses in developing countries with minuscule Catholic populations. In 2015, he gave, for example, a cardinal’s hat to Soane Patita Paini Mafi, an environmentalist and critic of globalization from the tiny island of Tonga near New Zealand.19 In 2016, he elevated to cardinal John Riat of Papua New Guinea, an advocate for a “low-carbon lifestyle.”20
The pope’s remaking of the episcopate in his own liberal image delighted the left, which understands the adage that “personnel is policy.” Shortly before the November 2016 election, to the applause of the liberal media, he gave a red hat to Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph Tobin. Indianapolis, an archdiocese with fewer than 250,000 parishioners, has never had a cardinal. The Associated Press called it a “surprise pick” and said that it sent a “political message” to his colleagues, given Tobin’s reputation for political liberalism: “Tobin has openly opposed efforts by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, now Donald Trump’s running mate, to bar Syrian refugees from being resettled in the state.”21
In a 2016 interview with a friendly reporter, Pope Francis acknowledged that he has been getting rid of conservative bishops by taking advantage of canon law’s requirement that bishops submit resignation papers at the age of seventy-five. Even though the pope is not canonically required to accept their resignation, Francis has promptly accepted resignations in the case of conservative bishops while letting liberal bishops linger on. With what his interviewer described as a “wide smile” on his face, Pope Francis said, “Nails are removed by applying pressure to the top… or, you set them aside to rest when the age of retirement arrives.”22
In the first year of his pontificate, Pope Francis repeatedly telegraphed to the left that he intended to reshape the Church according to its modernist expectations. At his first press conference, he delighted reporters by dispensing with the traditional blessing, explaining that he wanted to “respect the consciences” of the non-Catholics in attendance. He generated more enthusiastic headlines by using a foot-washing ceremony at his first Holy Thursday Mass in Rome to demonstrate his pro-Islamic, pro-feminist leanings. In a clear violation of the Church’s canon law—which instructs priests that Jesus Christ only washed the feet of men whom he ordained to the priesthood—Francis made a show of cleansing the feet of Muslim women at an Italian prison.23 (In 2015, he would officially change the rubrics of the Holy Thursday Mass to include the washing of the feet of women and any member of the “people of the God,” which he defines, contrary to his predecessors, as including Muslims.)
The secular chattering class was enchanted by the new “progressive” pope’s penchant for combining political liberalism with doctrinal and liturgical looseness. His deliberately casual style—appearing in selfies with a clown nose, placing a beach ball on the altar at St. Mary Major, driving around in a Ford Focus, tweeting out his left-wing musings, and so on—became the subject of innumerable articles of praise.
They also took hope from his “collegiality,” which they saw in his unusual decision to form a special cabinet of cardinals to advise him. He created an ecclesiastical gang of eight (it is now nine), which liberals interpreted as a sign that he wished to downgrade the papacy.
“Shortly after his election he named a group of eight cardinal advisers from around the world, reversing centuries of precedent that the Pope, as Christ’s vicar on earth, acts alone—and creating a model for a more collegial approach to Church governance,” observed Vanity Fair. “He has likened the ‘group of eight’ to a working group, and their meetings—several times a year—are held in the guesthouse conference room rather than an august Vatican chamber. The point is clear: those cardinals aren’t princes of the Church; they’re heads of households—a Kitchen Cabinet.”24
His appointments to the Council of Cardinals were highly revealing. He stacked it with some of the most liberal cardinals, such as Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany. An opponent of free-market economics, Marx, in a jokey reference to his name and to his socialist politics, titled one of his books Das Kapital. Marx is a supporter of Communion for the divorced-and-remarried and has called on the Church to relax her moral teachings. Exhausted by Marx’s left-wing musings, Archbishop Jan Paweł Lenga of Kazakhstan once said of him, “There was Marx, Karl Marx. And if present Marx says similar things, then there is no real difference.” 25
Marx is an outspoken critic of the Church’s teaching on homosexual acts, saying that “the history of homosexuals in our society is very bad because we have done a lot to marginalize [them].” South African Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier tweeted in reply, “God help us! Next we’ll have to apologize for teaching that adultery is a sin! Political correctness is today’s major heresy!”
Protected by Pope Francis, Marx has disregarded such criticism. As one of the most powerful members of the Church, he is using his clout to advance the agenda of gay activists. “We have to respect the decisions of people,” he has said. “We as a church cannot be against it.”
Pope Francis made an open socialist, the Honduran Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the chairman of the Council of Cardinals. The Catholic left applauded his appointment and some liberals, recognizing his power, call him the “vice pope.”26 Rodríguez frequently lashes out at free-market economics, caricaturing critics of climate change activism as greedy capitalists: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”
“Who caused the recent crisis in the financial market? Certainly not the poor. It is wealthy America and wealthy Europe that caused it. And this crisis was not made up by Liberation Theology or a consequence of the option for the poor. Those who do not criticize capitalism are wrong not to do so,” he has said.27
Rodríguez is equally liberal on theological matters. Not long after Pope Francis plucked him from obscurity and made him chairman of the Council of Cardinals, he blasted traditional Catholics in a speech in which he promised “no more excommunicating the world, then, or trying to solve the world’s problems by returning to authoritarianism, rigidity and moralism.”
Rodríguez feels safe enough behind his “vice pope” status to take shots at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, whom Pope Francis inherited from Pope Benedict XVI. Objecting to Müller’s opposition to Communion for the divorced-and-remarried, Rodríguez said dismissively, “He is above all a German Theology professor and he only thinks in black-and-white terms.”28
Müller has been the odd man out at the Vatican, clear from the fact that Pope Francis ignored his conservative counsel during the Synod on the Family. “Don’t go telling on me to Cardinal Müller,” Pope Francis joked to priests at a 2016 pastoral conference in Rome after he made a heterodox comment about marriage. According to the Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, Cardinal Müller’s advice “isn’t worth a thing” in the eyes of Pope Francis. Magister reports that Müller’s criticisms of the synod, “in spite of his role as guardian of doctrine,” didn’t even receive a serious hearing from Francis.29
After Pope Francis released Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), his apostolic exhortation reflecting on the Synod of the Family, he made a point of asking the liberal Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, rather than Müller, to present the document at a press conference. Another holdover from the Benedict era, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who is prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, has also been frozen out by Pope Francis. His recommendations are consistently ignored.30
Meanwhile, the power of liberal churchmen grows. After Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Bombay, was added to the Council of Cardinals, he began making statements in defense of gay activism, a rare position for a cleric to take in conservative India. “I believe maybe people have this orientation that God has given them,” he holds. In a letter to LGBT groups, he apologized for “judgmental” priests and told his clergy to “tone down” their sermons.31
The lone American on the Council of Cardinals is Boston Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who is a political liberal in the mold of Pope Francis. A gun control advocate, O’Malley befuddled conservative Catholics by saying after the terrorist Boston bombings that the “inability of Congress to enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture.”32
For liberals reading the papal tea leaves, these appointments carried significant meaning. Their excitement continued to build amidst reports from the New York Times and other outlets that Pope Francis, during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires, had endorsed legislation in favor of gay civil unions, an unprecedented stance for a Catholic cardinal to take during the Benedict era.
Many Catholic editors politely averted their gaze from this report, but liberals understood its import. Pope Benedict XVI had explicitly told Catholic bishops that support for gay civil unions violated the traditional teaching of the Church. When the press asked Pope Francis about this instruction, he said, “I do not remember that document well.”33 The more plausible explanation was that he simply didn’t agree with it.
Indifferent to Benedict’s conservatism, Bergoglio would often ignore or relativize documents from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that conflicted with his vision for the Church. After becoming pope, he urged other religious to adopt the same attitude. In 2013, he shocked the faithful by telling a group of priests and nuns from the Caribbean and Latin America, who were visiting Rome in June of that year, to follow his rebellious example and disregard correction from the Church’s doctrinal office.
“Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine [of the Faith] will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing,” he said to them. “But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward… Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up.”34
Long critical of the Church for “narrowness” and “rigidity,” the left thrilled to the rhetoric of a pope willing to echo its anti-Catholic invective. The pope’s irreverent asides made it clear to liberals that he disliked conservative Catholics for many of the same reasons that they do.
It delighted the left to see the pope confounding conservative Catholics. The more he adopted the rhetoric and causes of the left, the more praise he garnered from anti-Catholic celebrities. In the words of the ribald comedian Chris Rock, Francis was the “Floyd Mayweather of popes.” “I might be crazy but I got this weird feeling that the new pope might be the greatest man alive,” Rock marveled.35
Actress Jane Fonda could not contain her excitement either, tweeting out to her followers: “Gotta love new Pope. He cares about the poor, hates dogma.” Actress Salma Hayek, a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, asserted, “Pope Francis is the best pope that has ever existed.”36
Fonda’s ex-husband, the late Tom Hayden, spoke for fellow 1960s radicals when he called the election of Pope Francis “the greatest moment in empowering spiritual progressives in decades.” “Francis is on the side of liberation theology, working from within, towards his moment,” he wrote. “His choice is more miraculous, if you will, than the rise of Barack Obama in 2008.”37
HBO host Bill Maher, speaking to Rick Santorum, the Catholic former senator and presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, chuckled over the bewilderment Pope Francis was causing. “What I want to ask is, I mean, I’m not a Catholic, I’m an atheist,” Maher said. “But I like the pope better than you do. You’re saying the pope should stick to what he knows, and I find that ridiculous.”38 When Santorum appeared on CNN, host Chris Cuomo asked him, “Why aren’t you more like your pope?”
The trendy literary community saw Francis as a fictional progressive pope come to life. The Atlantic noted the uncanny resemblance of Pope Francis to “Francesco,” the modernizing pope from the 1979 bestseller The Vicar of Christ. In that book, Francesco devotes his pontificate to left-wing political causes, sells off Vatican treasures to fight world hunger, and waters down traditional teaching where it conflicts with the sexual revolution.39
Gawker, a scurrilous, anti-Catholic (and now defunct) website, fondly began calling the pontiff “Pope Frank.” Week after week in the first year of his papacy, “Pope Frank” mollified the Western political and media elite, signaling that under his pontificate the Church would turn away from traditional teaching and toward the promotion of left-wing political causes.
He peppered his first papal exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), with familiar left-wing clichés about the need “to change the world” and “to leave this earth somehow better than we found it” while denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. He encouraged priests to operate like political activists in order to protect this “magnificent planet,” and he cast the Church as a partner to the United Nations. Throughout the document, he argued that a Church unwilling to engage in left-wing politics stands on the “sidelines in the fight for justice.”
Of particular interest to the left-wing media is that he took bitter aim at traditionalists within the Church. “Certain customs not directly connected to the heart of the Gospel, even some which have deep historical roots, are no longer properly understood and appreciated. Some of these customs may be beautiful, but they no longer serve as means of communicating the Gospel. We should not be afraid to re-examine them,” he said, offering a preview of his anti-traditionalist program as pope.
Another theme popular with liberals, decentralization, figured largely into the document. Decentralization has long been seen by the left as a means of liberalizing the Church. Instead of challenging this view, Pope Francis pandered to it. Making it sound as if Jesus Christ, who founded the Church on St. Peter, favors a revamping of the papacy, he wrote: “I am conscious of the need to promote a sound ‘decentralization;… Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others, I too must think about a conversion of the papacy [to]… help make the exercise of my ministry more faithful to the meaning which Jesus Christ wished to give it and to the present needs of evangelization… We have made little progress in this regard. The papacy and the central structures of the universal Church also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion.”
To that end, he said that he was willing to confer power, “including genuine doctrinal authority,” upon national conferences of bishops, and he vowed to undo “centralization” that “complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach.” His predecessors had always taught that those national conferences possess no doctrinal authority at all.
Though ostensibly an exhortation to engage in evangelization, the document said nothing about the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation and spoke of missionaries more like celibate social workers than transmitters of the Catholic faith.
The liberal media grasped the significance of this document, praising its “inclusive” tone and content.40 But it drew even more hope from his off-the-cuff interviews. In a series of them during the first year of his pontificate, Pope Francis waved a white flag in the culture war.
The Church is too “obsessed’ with the issues of abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, he declared in a bombshell interview in the fall of 2013.41 For liberals who view the Church as the chief impediment to the spread of the sexual revolution, these words were revolutionary. The pope was parroting one of their favorite talking points, that the Church needs to outgrow its “hang-ups” about modern sexual mores.
The interview appeared in the pages of several left-wing Jesuit publications, one of which was America, a magazine known in Catholic circles for its opposition to the Church’s traditional moral teachings and theology. The interview put to rest the false narrative of Pope Francis as a “conservative Jesuit,” which some commentators in the Catholic press had advanced at the beginning of his papacy. Pope Francis assured his fellow liberal Jesuits that he is as liberal as any of them. “I have never been a right-winger,” he said.
The interview astonished orthodox Catholics, as the pope used it to ratify the principal criticism of the Church’s most persistent critics. “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” he said, referring to the Church’s contested moral teachings. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” He would later make the random claim that the most important moral issues facing the world today are youth unemployment and the neglect of the elderly.
His aversion to the moral issues that he mentioned explained the notable silences of his otherwise garrulous pontificate. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis had not yet made a major statement on abortion, not even during his homily at a special Vatican Mass with antiabortion activists.” “I’m a little bit disappointed in Pope Francis that he hasn’t… said much about unborn children, about abortion,” Bishop Thomas Tobin said. “Many people have noticed that.”42
When Pope Francis did eventually get around to criticizing abortion, he added the false, insulting, and fashionable caveat that the Church has “done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty.”
“Although he has shown no intention of retracting the Church’s opposition to abortion, he has alarmed conservatives by taking a less forceful tone than his predecessors,” reported Reuters. After Pope Francis announced in 2015 at the beginning of the “year of mercy” that he wanted to make it easier for women to get forgiveness for abortions by not having to seek absolution from bishops, Catholics for Choice rejoiced, “This is a pope who is not stuck in the pelvic zone.”
“Pope Francis: Church Too Focused on Gays and Abortion,” blared the BBC in a typical headline from the beginning of his pontificate. Besieged by such stories, conservative Catholics expressed confusion. In their experience since Vatican II, the Church, particularly in Western countries, hadn’t shown a preoccupation with controversial moral issues but a cowardly avoidance of them.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City, in a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal not long before Pope Francis’s election, spoke about this silence of the Church on hot-button moral issues after Vatican II. He conceded that the post–Vatican II Church in America had “gotten gun-shy” on those issues.
Pope Paul VI’s encyclical opposing artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle,’” he said. The soft-pedaling started, he continued, “when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more and more like everybody else.”43
That is precisely the stance to which the Church has returned under Pope Francis. Disappointing conservative Catholics, Dolan quickly changed his tune after the election of Pope Francis. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, he oddly affirmed the propaganda of the Church’s critics by saying, “We have to do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people. I admit, we haven’t been too good at that.”
Cardinal Müller implicitly challenged Pope Francis’s caricature of an obsessed Church. “It’s not as if other bishops or Pope Benedict had constantly spoken about abortion, sexual morals or euthanasia,” he said to a German newspaper.44 But the damage was already done by the pope’s remark. Liberal politicians quickly adopted it as a rebuttal against socially conservative Catholic opponents.
Against an “obsessed” Church, Pope Francis presented himself as a font of understanding. Indeed, nothing pleased liberals more than what has become the signature phrase of his papacy: “Who am I to judge?”
“He did more with those five words than the last five popes,” burbled the pop singer Elton John. “He is my hero.”45
The inane line came in response to a question during a press briefing on Pope Francis’s trip back from Brazil in July 2013. Francis had been asked about the presence of gay priests in the Church. He brushed the issue off, saying breezily, “Who am I to judge them if they are seeking the Lord in good faith?”46
Ever since then, the press has feted Pope Francis as “gay-friendly,” a welcome contrast in its view to Pope Benedict XVI, whom liberal pundits demonized as a “homophobe” for simply upholding the Church’s perennial moral teaching and traditional priestly discipline.
For conservative Catholics, the context of the pope’s remark made it even more dubious. What had prompted it was a scandal involving a homosexual priest named Monsignor Battista Ricca. Bizarrely, Pope Francis had promoted Ricca to the highest ecclesiastical position at the Vatican bank despite an amazingly sordid past for a priest. “Pope’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Vatican bank ‘had string of homosexual affairs,’” ran a headline in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph in July 2013.47
The appointment flabbergasted the veteran Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, who established beyond any reasonable doubt that Ricca’s scandalous past included an affair with a member of the Swiss Guard, a beating he received at a gay bar, and a grimly comic incident involving the discovery by firemen of Ricca trapped in an elevator with a young male prostitute.48
Pope Francis disregarded this information and appointed Ricca anyway. Far from hurting Francis’s image as a “reformer” in the eyes of the Western media, the Ricca scandal only sealed it. Liberals were pleased to learn that Francis was not only encouraging the very gay priestly candidates whom Pope Benedict had instructed seminaries to stop ordaining but was promoting them to top positions.
While winning him plaudits from the press, the pope’s remark demoralized orthodox clergy and laity exhausted by countless gay scandals in the Church. “When the Pope rhetorically asked, ‘Who am I to judge a gay person of good will who seeks the Lord?,’ he effectively gave the green light for homosexual men to enter the priesthood,” complained Fr. Michael Orsi, a research fellow at Ave Maria Law School.49
An official at the German branch of Vatican Radio felt so emboldened by the pope’s words he decided to run a picture of two lesbians kissing as an accompaniment to an article titled “Moral Theologian: Church’s Sexual Morality Is in Motion” on its website. Vatican Radio eventually took the picture down after Catholics complained that it was scandalizing children, but that the picture had appeared at all indicated the change of atmosphere under Pope Francis.50
Conservative Catholics had hoped that Pope Francis would disband the long-discussed gay mafia inside the Church. But the Ricca scandal erased that hope.
“So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find anyone who can give me a Vatican identity card with ‘gay’ [written on it]. They say they are there,” Pope Francis said vaguely in 2013.51 Such comments suggested that he was more apt to joke about the gay mafia than eliminate it, even as embarrassing confirmations of its existence continued to trickle out. One member of the Swiss Guard was quoted in the European press in 2014 saying that Vatican officials had solicited him for sex more than twenty times. A former commander in the Swiss Guard described the Vatican as a “magnet” for gays.52 A Polish priest and theologian working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came out to an Italian newspaper in 2015 as homosexual and said that he had a gay partner. He resigned, but the “Vatican said [his] dismissal had nothing to do with his comments on his personal situation, which it said ‘merit respect,’” reported Reuters.53
“The gay mafia is so strong,” says a former seminary official interviewed for this book. The plethora of gay-friendly bishops Pope Francis has promoted “tells you where the power is in the Church,” he says.
The homosexual magazine the Advocate, out of gratitude for his subversion of Church teaching, declared Pope Francis in December 2013 its “Person of the Year.” It thanked him for signaling a lack of seriousness about the Church’s stance on homosexuality and drew hope from his earlier support for gay civil unions as archbishop of Buenos Aires:
It’s actually during Pope Francis’s time as cardinal that his difference from Benedict and hard-liners in the church became apparent. As same-sex marriage looked on track to be legalized in Argentina, Bergoglio argued privately that the church should come out for civil unions as the “lesser of two evils.” That’s all according to Pope Francis’s authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin. Argentine gay activist Marcelo Márquez backed up the story, telling The New York Times in March that Bergoglio “listened to my views with a great deal of respect. He told me that homosexuals need to have recognized rights and that he supported civil unions, but not same-sex marriage.”54
Catholics in the pews were not so wowed. On November 10, 2013, the New York Times devoted a front-page story to conservative angst about Pope Francis. Titled “Conservative U.S. Catholics Feel Left Out of the Pope’s Embrace,” the article noted that members of the “church’s conservative wing in the United States say Francis has left them feeling abandoned and deeply unsettled.”
By the time of his 2015 visit to the United States, dismay with the pope had grown to the point that the Wall Street Journal headlined an article “Conservative Catholics in U.S. Greet Pope Francis with Unease.”
“The Catholic Church… faces a growing crisis of moral consistency and credibility,” wrote pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.55 “The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination. Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more appealing to those who have rejected them.”
Conservative Catholic commentators in Latin America, whose voices were drowned out in the din of praise following Bergoglio’s election, had warned that his pontificate would prove disastrous. To these observers familiar with his tenure in Buenos Aires, the maddening incoherence and people-pleasing relativism of his pontificate were all too predictable.
“Of all the unthinkable candidates, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is perhaps the worst,” wrote Marcelo González. “This election is incomprehensible: he is not a polyglot, he has no Curial experience, he does not shine for his sanctity, he is loose in doctrine and liturgy, he has not fought against abortion and only very weakly against homosexual ‘marriage’ [approved with practically no opposition from the episcopate], he has no manners to honor the Pontifical Throne. He has never fought for anything else than to remain in positions of power.”56
Lucrecia Rego de Planas, a Catholic editor in Latin America, knew Francis from his time in Argentina and remembered his holier-than-thou poverty posturing. None of his first acts of ostentatious humility—which included the rejection of the papal apartments for a floor of the Vatican hotel—surprised her.
In a blistering letter that she wrote to Pope Francis, she recalled his habit of showboating at the expense of the Church:
When I met you during those retreats [in Buenos Aires], while you were still Cardinal Bergoglio, what struck me about you and left me disconcerted was that you never behaved like the other cardinal and bishops. Allow me to mention just a few examples: you were the only one who never genuflected in front of the Tabernacle or during the Consecration. If all the bishops showed up in their priestly frocks, because that was what a particular gathering required, you would show up in your street clothes and priest’s collar. If everybody sat in the seats reserved for the bishops and cardinals, you left the seat reserved to Cardinal Bergoglio empty and sat further back, saying “I like it here, this way I feel more at home.” If the others arrived in a car that corresponded to the dignity of a bishop, you arrived last, busily and in a hurry, telling all about whom you met on the public transit that you had chosen to get there.
When I witnessed these things—I’m ashamed to say—I would think to myself: “Ugh… there he goes again, always trying to attract attention to himself! For if one truly wanted to be humble and simple, wouldn’t it be better to behave like the other bishops, so as to go unnoticed?”57
As even his sympathetic biographer Paul Vallely acknowledged, Pope Francis has a weakness for contrived acts of humility. On his first papal trip, for example, he rebuked an aide for putting his briefcase on the plane, thus depriving him of the opportunity to look modest. He instructed the aide to retrieve the briefcase so that he could be seen carrying it, wrote Vallely:
“Where’s my briefcase?” asked Pope Francis. The papal entourage had arrived at Fiumicino Airport in Rome for the pontiff’s first trip abroad. Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been pope for just four months and was now bound for Rio de Janeiro, where 3.5 million young people from 178 countries were waiting to greet him at World Youth Day in Brazil. And he could not find his briefcase.
“It’s been taken on board the plane,” an aide explained.
“But I want to carry it on,” said the pontiff.
“No need, it’s on already,” the assistant replied.
“You don’t understand,” said Francis. “Go to the plane. Get the bag. And bring it back here please.”58
A less gullible and ideologically driven media might have questioned a pope so eager to advertise his humility. Instead, the media breathlessly reported his obviously scripted acts of humility, such as paying his own hotel bill at the Vatican after the conclave or calling to cancel his newspaper subscription. They reported on humble deeds, both real and imaginary, from the free haircuts and tours of the Sistine Chapel he ordered for the homeless to nightly ministrations that never occurred.
“Is Francis Leaving Vatican at Night to Minister to Homeless?” ran a ludicrous headline in the Huffington Post.59 No such ministry happened. But it didn’t matter. Journalists covering Francis saw themselves as propagandists first and reporters second. Out of affection for his leftism, they were determined to cast him as the first pope to notice the poor.
Barack Obama, capturing the drift of this hagiography, disguised his appreciation for the pope’s left-wing politics in safer praise for his “empathy” and “humility.” “I have been hugely impressed with the Pope’s pronouncements. He seems like somebody who lives out the teachings of Christ, incredible humility, an incredible sense of empathy to the least of these, the poor,” Obama said.60
But it was the politically correct third-worldism of the first Latin American pope that Obama found most exciting. When Obama learned that Pope Francis planned to canonize the slain left-wing archbishop Óscar Romero, a movement that had stalled under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he immediately issued a statement: “I am grateful to Pope Francis for his leadership in reminding us of our obligation to help those most in need, and for his decision to beatify Blessed Oscar Arnulfo Romero.”61
Obama also appreciated that Pope Francis was giving greater attention to left-wing politics than to theology, thereby making it easier for the left to shape politics and culture without religious resistance. As the New York Times put it, “His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable—articulated in his mission statement, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’—have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity.”
At the end of 2013, Time magazine crowned Pope Francis its “Person of the Year.” The honor reflected the liberal elite’s giddy mood about his papacy and the aid it offered to the global left.
“What makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church at all,” the magazine editorialized. “In a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church—the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world—above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were professors of theology. Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and literature teacher.”
The “healing mission of the church” was Time’s euphemism for Pope Francis’s identification with global socialism. Beneath all of its patter about his outreach to the poor lay the real reason for the magazine’s decision to honor him: he was advancing left-wing politics and liberalizing the Church after his two conservative predecessors. Many other popes had performed corporal works of mercy for the poor. But because they upheld orthodoxy and did not enlist the Church in the causes of the global left, their charity went unpraised by the liberal elite. Time had finally found a pope it could champion without reservation. “He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals,” it concluded.62
The media insisted on portraying Pope Francis as the “people’s pontiff.” But to conservative Catholics, these laurels from the media only proved his status as the elite’s pontiff. In a moment of ecclesiastical indiscretion in 2013, Philadelphia archbishop Charles Chaput let slip to the National Catholic Reporter that orthodox Catholics are “generally not happy with Francis” but that lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics who disdain Church teaching feel enthusiasm for his pontificate.
“[Church-going Catholics] are not actually the ones who really talk to me about the new pope. The ones who do are nonpracticing Catholics or people who aren’t Catholic or not even Christian,” Chaput said. “They go out of their way to tell me how impressed they are and what a wonderful change he’s brought into the church. It’s interesting to see that it’s the alienated Catholic and the non-Catholic and the non-Christians who have expressed their enthusiasm more than Catholics have.”63
Summing up the left’s manipulative attitude toward the pope perfectly, new-age enthusiast Jennifer Vanderslice said to the Guardian, “He is such a worldly and non-judgmental pope and is so dynamic. He will never change me into a Catholic but I do like the way he is spreading peace and talking about helping the poor and the less fortunate… It is refreshing to hear a pope who can strike a chord in so many people, whether they’re Catholic or not. You can take what you need and leave the rest.”64
Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist who describes himself as “lapsed but listening,” also summed up Francis’s appeal for his secular readers concisely: “He is—gasp—a liberal.” At long last, a progressive occupies the chair of St. Peter, exulted Egan: “Pope Francis has shown himself to be a free spirit and a free thinker… He talks to atheists… He calls for the faithful to ‘mess up the church.’… Francis has befuddled the guardians of dogma and medieval sexual doctrines who have long kept sunlight out of the Vatican.”65
Sandro Magister has observed that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI “were mostly popular inside the Church, even if they were harshly criticized from strongholds of non-Catholic public opinion, whereas Francis’ popularity is more conspicuous outside the Church, even if it isn’t eliciting waves of conversions.”66
“The mass media are trying to create a spirit of Pope Francis, just as they created a spirit of Vatican II,” commented Bishop Robert Morlino in the Wisconsin State Journal. “Many Catholics fell for that the first time. I hope they won’t fall for that again.”67
If anything, Pope Francis’s liberal spin on Catholicism appears to be causing Catholics, both practicing and lapsed, to take Church pronouncements less seriously. According to polling data released by Pew Research in 2016, only one in ten American Catholics said that they rely a “great deal” on Pope Francis’s moral direction. Seventy-three percent of Catholics said that they prefer to rely on their own judgments.68
Even in his homeland of Argentina, support for him is beginning to wane. In 2016, reported the New York Post, “a recent local poll revealed that Francis—the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires—has tumbled from the first to the ninth most ‘trustworthy Argentine’ in just two years.”69
According to Politico, in a piece titled “Pope Alienates Base, Sees Numbers Drop,” attendance at Vatican events has been steadily declining over his pontificate:
In 2015, more than 3.2 million pilgrims visited and attended papal events, liturgies or prayer services at the Holy See, the Vatican said at the end of December. That was a sharp drop from the 5.9 million visitors received by Pope Francis in 2014. And it was less than half of the 6.6 million pilgrims who visited the Vatican during the first nine-and-a-half months of his pontificate in 2013.70
Pope Francis calls the Church on his watch a “field hospital.” But if it is one, many of his patients appear to be dying. Pews in many dioceses remain as empty as ever. As one wan headline put it in 2013, “Pope Francis’ Appeal Not Measurable Yet in Church Attendance.”71
Pope Benedict XVI said that the crisis in the Church deepened after it followed the liberal zeitgeist. But Pope Francis rejects that view, pushing “reforms” rooted in following the liberal zeitgeist even more slavishly.
“We are not living an era of change but a change of era,” Pope Francis has said, aligning himself with the Church’s critics. “Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally… Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives—but is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened.”72
Pope Francis isn’t suppressing what his predecessor called the “council of the media” but giving new and even louder voice to it. To liberals, this signifies a “springtime” in the Church. To conservative Catholics, reeling from four years of chaos and confusion, it feels more like the dead of winter.
“It takes your breath away,” says a Church insider interviewed for this book. “Things are spinning out of control. When you go to the Vatican, you look up at the papal apartments and the light is out. That is a metaphor for this pontificate.”