Like his fellow liberal Jesuits, Pope Francis often seems to exude enthusiasm for every religion except his own. In his extreme ecumenism, he is conforming to the lowest-common-denominator culture of a post-Christian age. As Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister has put it, “Christianity matters less” under Pope Francis.1 Even as Pope Francis pours scorn upon traditional Catholicism—he regularly caricatures conservative Catholics as heartless “Pharisees”—he heaps praise upon Protestantism, non-Christian religions, and atheism.
The Western media has been enamored with the ecumenism of this pope since the beginning of his pontificate when, at his first press conference, he spoke of his respect for “non-believers.” The left-leaning Religion News Service was so struck by his lack of interest in Catholic evangelization that it asked in a headline: “Is Francis the First Protestant Pope?”2
Pope Francis is particularly quick to defend and bolster Islam, a historic adversary of the Church. He repeatedly calls it a “religion of peace,” even as Islam’s persecution of Catholics intensifies and its radical branches spread terrorism throughout the world.
“Our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence,” Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium.
Speaking to Sun TV, Robert Spencer, an expert on Islam, responded to the pope’s statement: “I don’t hesitate to say that this statement is flatly wrong, it’s misleading and it’s a shame because it gives the Christians who are being persecuted by Muslims in Nigeria, in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere no support; it doesn’t give them any help to deny and dissemble about the root cause of why they are being persecuted in the first place.”
Pope Francis hews closely to the fashionable liberal talking points about Islam. In an anticipation of his liberal papacy, he had joined the Western liberal elite in denouncing Pope Benedict XVI for a speech critical of Islam that he delivered at the University of Regensburg. Yet nothing Pope Benedict XVI said about Islam in that speech was untrue. Indeed, the violent Islamic response to his comments only confirmed their validity.
In 2014, Catholics witnessed the curious spectacle of Pope Francis commending the reading of the Qur’an, a book that his predecessors viewed as a source of rank heresy. Placing Christianity and Islam on the same level, Pope Francis said to an audience composed of Christians and Muslims: “Sharing our experience in carrying that cross, to expel the illness within our hearts, which embitters our life: it is important that you do this in your meetings. Those that are Christian, with the Bible, and those that are Muslim, with the Quran. The faith that your parents instilled in you will always help you move on.”3
In a 2016 interview with the French newspaper La Croix, Pope Francis outrageously likened the concept of jihad within Islam to the preaching of the Gospel in Christianity. “It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest,” he said.4
In a previous interview, he compared conservative Christians to jihadist Muslims: “You just can’t say that, just as you can’t say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them [fundamentalists]. All religions have these little groups,” he said. “They [Muslims] say: ‘No, we are not this, the Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace.’”5
The Islamic persecution of Christians is a subject that Pope Francis has largely avoided out of a politically correct fear of offending Muslims.
“On Islam the Catholic Church stammers, the more so the higher up the ladder one goes,” wrote Sandro Magister in 2014. “[Pope Francis] remained silent on the hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram. He remained silent on the young Sudanese mother Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death solely for being Christian and finally liberated by the intervention of others. He remains silent on the Pakistani mother Asia Bibi, who has been on death row for five years, she too because she is an ‘infidel,’ and does not even reply to the two heartrending letters she has written to him this year, before and after the reconfirmation of the sentence.”6
His references to the persecution of Christians have tended to be opaque and rare, and do not even remotely approach the urgent status he has given to such comparatively trivial subjects as climate change and amnesty.
Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, among other commentators, finds the pope’s unwillingness to prioritize Christian persecution frustrating. “I am a Catholic,” she said in July 2014. “And I mean no disrespect, but it is time for the papacy and Pope Francis in particular to start protecting his Christian flock. This month, Pope Francis preached that immigrant children in facilities around the United States should be ‘welcomed and protected.’ Your holiness, they’re in the United States. They are protected. They are being given food, and clothing and shelter. No children are being killed by the United States. Christian children are being killed in the Middle East! And while we appreciate your prayer for those in the Middle East last week, it’s just not enough!”7
After Islamic terrorists shot up the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015, killing ten journalists, Pope Francis felt the need not to defend free speech or the Christian West but to defend Islam. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others,” he said. People should “expect a punch,” he said, if they offend others.8
The pope’s comments sparked outrage in conservative circles, prompting articles about the pope “blaming” the cartoonists for “provoking the attack.” Conservatives ruefully noted that the pacifist pope, normally so eager to lecture others on the need to turn the other cheek, had finally found a form of violence that he could condone.
The Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano often runs pieces in defense of Islam and treats Western criticism of it as “blasphemous,” a claim that would only make sense if Catholicism viewed Islamic doctrines as true and divinely inspired. Catholicism never has. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of Muhammad, “He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us.” Along with countless popes, Aquinas regarded Islam as a combination of half-truths, “fables, and doctrines of the greatest falsity,” without the slightest odor of sanctity about them: “Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”9
“Religions don’t want war,” Pope Francis declared after jihadists cut off the head of a Catholic priest in France in July 2016. The motivation for that act of terrorism was baldly Islamic. The ISIS terrorist who slit the priest’s throat yelled “Allahu Akbar.” Yet the pope refused to attribute it to “Islamic violence.” “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence,” he said. He then offered an off-the-wall explanation for terrorism rooted in the “idolatry” of capitalism: “As long as the god of money is at the center of the global economy and not the human person, man and woman, this is the first terrorism.”10
Pope Francis rarely misses an opportunity to serve as an apologist for Islam or tut-tut Christians who dare to criticize it. After a jihadist almost shot up the Muhammad Art Exhibit in Texas, the Vatican condemned the event as an irresponsible exercise of free speech.11 During a 2016 visit to the Muslim Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a member of the pope’s inner circle, removed his pectoral cross, lest it offend Muslims.12
“It’s ironic that a Catholic can get a better grasp of the Islamic threat by listening to a short speech by [Egyptian] President el-Sisi than by listening to a hundred reassuring statements from Catholic bishops,” writes author William Kilpatrick, referring to el-Sisi’s comments about problems within Islam. “The let’s-be-friends approach has been in place even since Vatican II, but other than dialoguers congratulating themselves on the friendships they have made, it hasn’t yielded much in the way of results. Christians in Muslim lands are less safe than they have been for centuries.”13
The pope’s pandering to Islam has disoriented the faithful but earned him accolades from Western liberals. He is also generating praise from them for his curious sympathy for atheism. Francis is the first pope to pride himself on not trying to convert atheists to belief in God.
“When I speak with atheists, I will sometimes discuss social concerns, but I do not propose the problem of God as a starting point, except in the case that they propose it to me,” he has said. “I do not approach the relationship in order to proselytize, or convert the atheist; I respect him and I show myself as I am. Where there is knowledge, there begins to appear esteem, affection, and friendship. I do not have any type of reluctance, nor would I say that his life is condemned, because I am convinced that I do not have the right to make a judgment about the honesty of that person; even less, if he shows me those human virtues that exalt others and do me good.”14
In a 2013 interview with the atheistic ex-Catholic Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis said that he had no interest in converting him and that atheists should just follow their own consciences. Don’t trouble yourself with the “solemn nonsense” of those Catholics who expect you to convert, Pope Francis told him. “The most surprising thing he told me was: ‘God is not Catholic,’” Scalfari said after the interview.15
“God’s working in non-Christians tends to produce sacred expressions which in turn bring others to a communitarian experience of journeying towards God,” Pope Francis asserted in Evangelii Gaudium, a comment that past popes would have found inexplicable.
Scalfari told Francis that he never envisioned a pope who could embrace relativism and atheism: “Your Holiness, you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.” Pope Francis was flattered by this review of his courage and said in response, “And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”16 To orthodox Catholics, this sounded like raw relativism.
Scalfari has been playing Boswell to Francis’s Samuel Johnson. Pope Francis was so happy with his first interview with Scalfari that he had the Vatican publishing house issue it as a book. If a future pope ever revives the Index of Forbidden Books, that book may appear on the list. Many of Francis’s answers to Scalfari’s self-indulgent questions were unfathomable for a priest to make, much less a pope. (In 2016, Pope Francis gave yet another interview to Scalfari, in which he said, “If anything, it is the communists who think like Christians.” The fact that Pope Francis continues to give interviews to Scalfari makes it impossible to sustain the charge, made by some apologists for the pope, that Scalfari is misrepresenting him.)
In a 2013 homily, Pope Francis said, “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”17
HBO’s Bill Maher was so impressed by this statement that he declared, “I think the pope is an atheist” and that the pope’s emphasis on political liberalism rather than Catholic theology put him in mind of his experience with atheistic priests: “[It] made me think—I remember when I was making ‘Religulous’ and we talked to a lot of priests, and we found out that a lot of priests really aren’t believers… they do it because it’s a way to help people and they know they can’t tell the masses that it’s all a crock.”18
Pope Francis appears to entertain theological novelties about both heaven and hell. While saying confidently that atheists can go to heaven, he has flirted with theological concepts suggesting that no one goes to hell. The wicked, he told an Italian interviewer, don’t suffer punishment but “annihilation,” which means “their journey is finished.”19 On another occasion, he said that hell may be empty of all sinners, since “if you were a terrible sinner, who had committed all the sins in the world, all of them, condemned to death, and even when you are there, you were to blaspheme, insults… and at the moment of death, when you were about to die, you were to look to Heaven and say, ‘Lord…!’, where do you go, to Heaven or to Hell? To Heaven!” In Amoris Laetitia, he again suggested that no one goes to hell by writing that “the way of the Church is not to condemn anyone forever.” He has also astonished Catholics by speaking of Judas sympathetically, as a “poor, repentant man.”20
On several occasions, Pope Francis has told Protestant leaders that they should remain Protestants. “I’m not interested in converting Evangelicals to Catholicism. I want people to find Jesus in their own community,” he told a group of Protestants in 2014.21 After his late friend Tony Palmer, an Anglican bishop, expressed an interest in converting to Catholicism, he discouraged him, saying that he should remain among the Protestant “bridge-builders.” In a foreshadowing of that attitude, he had opposed the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to set up an “ordinariate” for Anglicans interested in converting to Catholicism. At the time, Bergoglio told the top Anglican leader in Buenos Aires, Greg Venables, that the ordinariate “was quite unnecessary” and that they should stay “as Anglicans.”22
The pope is not seeking to convert Protestants but to apologize to them. In 2014, he baffled the Catholic community in Caserta, Italy, by visiting a Pentecostal congregation and apologizing to it for the Church’s past evangelical activities.
“Someone will be surprised: ‘The pope went to visit the evangelicals?’ But he went to see his brothers,” he said, delighting in his maverick reputation. “Among those who persecuted and denounced Pentecostals, almost as if they were crazy people trying to ruin the race, there were also Catholics. I am the pastor of Catholics, and I ask your forgiveness for those Catholic brothers and sisters who didn’t know and were tempted by the devil.”
Sandro Magister reports that Pope Francis had planned to ignore the Catholic community in Caserta during his visit, but when the bishop caught wind of his visit to the Pentecostals the pope was forced to change his plans:
When the news got out, and was confirmed by Fr. Federico Lombardi, that Pope Francis intended to make a private visit to Caserta to meet with a friend, the pastor of a local Evangelical community, the city’s bishop, Giovanni D’Alise, was thunderstruck. He hadn’t been told a thing. Moreover, the pope had planned his visit to Caserta for the same day as the feast of Saint Anne, the city’s patron. Seeing themselves snubbed, some of the faithful threatened an uprising. It took a good week to convince the pope to change his schedule and divide the trip into two phases: the first a public one with the faithful of Caserta on Saturday, July 26, and the second in private with his Evangelical friend on the following Monday.23
The pope’s lack of interest in converting anyone has led commentator Ann Coulter to joke, “If you’re the head of the Catholic Church and your position is, ‘ah, join any church. In fact, you don’t even have to be a Christian.’ Maybe, you know, you can get a show on CNN, but maybe you shouldn’t be the head of the Catholic Church.”24
Pope Francis goes out of his way to prop up the Church’s historic opponents. Who could have imagined any other pope than this one celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation? In October 2016, Pope Francis traveled to Sweden to participate in a Catholic-Lutheran service that commemorated the beginning of Martin Luther’s revolt against Catholicism. According to L’Osservatore Romano, the idea for the joint commemoration came from Pope Francis, not from the Lutherans. (Before it, he revealed to an interviewer that “I wasn’t planning to celebrate a Mass for the Catholics on this trip” lest it undercut “the ecumenical witness.” He later changed his mind after a “fervent request” from Scandinavian Catholics.)
In anticipation of the trip, Pope Francis praised Luther, describing him as a “reformer.” He didn’t mention Luther’s sweeping rejection of Catholic doctrine and sacraments, reserving his criticism not for Luther but for the Church. “I believe the intentions of Martin Luther were not wrong,” he said.25 It has become fashionable in Vatican circles to shower lavish praise upon Martin Luther. When city officials in Rome were debating whether or not to name a town square after Luther in 2015, Pope Francis’s aides readily supported the idea.26
“Luther Was Right, Says the Pope’s Preacher,” ran a headline in the UK’s Telegraph. Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, has mystified Catholics with his paeans to Luther. The Church is “indebted” to Luther’s theology, according to Cantalamessa. In deference to Protestants, the pope’s preacher has also advised Catholics to tone down their devotion to the Virgin Mary. “Mariology in recent centuries has become a non-stop factory of new titles, new devotions, often in polemic against Protestants,” he said.27
In 2016, the Vatican announced that a Protestant theologian, Marcelo Figueroa, would edit the Argentine version of its newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Figueroa is a friend of Pope Francis. The German bishops, in anticipation of the commemoration of Luther’s revolt, called Luther a “religious pathfinder, Gospel witness, and teacher of the faith.”28 On October 13, 2016, in an event that played out almost like an Onion parody at the Vatican, a group of Lutherans presented a smiling Pope Francis with a copy of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” against the Church.29
At that event, a young Catholic girl asked the pope, “My friends do not go to Church, but they are my friends. Do I have to help them to go to Church or is it enough that they remain good friends?” Don’t bother, the pope replied: “It is not licit that you convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path.”30 Former Protestants who have entered the Catholic Church find the Vatican’s promotion of Luther absurd and consider the pope’s blunt statement—“And today Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants, all of us agree on the doctrine of justification”—false.
“The Protestant movement sparked by Martin Luther was not a legitimate reformation of the church,” writes Fr. Dwight Longenecker. “It was an open rebellion against the Catholic Church that ended not just in one schism, but in thousands. It also led to civil unrest, bloodshed, rebellion and revolution that tore Christendom apart.”
Richard Ballard, a former Lutheran pastor who now serves as a Catholic deacon, told Longenecker that the pope’s claim of theological unity between Lutherans and Catholics on the doctrine of justification is simply not true.
“According to orthodox Catholic theology, Luther did err,” he says. “Catholics insist good works (empowered by God’s grace) are meritorious and that they contribute to the process of the soul’s salvation and purification. Lutherans still cling to the notion of salvation by ‘faith alone’ and thus negate the importance of good works in the economy of salvation.”31
Lutheran leaders, meanwhile, marvel at the Vatican’s promotion of Luther. “In the 1980s no one would have believed that Lutherans and Catholics were capable of reaching an agreement on the justification question, as was the case in 1999 and just a few years ago, had someone spoken about a joint commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Martin Luther’s Reformation, many would have believed it to be impossible,” Reverend Martin Junge, General Secretary of the of the Lutheran World Federation, said before the pope’s trip to Sweden.32
In his own lifetime, Luther was condemned by Pope Leo X in scalding terms: “we condemn, reprobate, and reject completely the books and all the writings and sermons of the said Martin, whether in Latin or any other language, containing the said errors or any one of them; and we wish them to be regarded as utterly condemned, reprobated, and rejected.”
To commemorate the Reformation, the Vatican issued a document rehabilitating Luther at the expense of Pope Leo X and the Council of Trent (which condemned Luther’s theology):
To fulfill his “pastoral office,” Pope Leo X felt obliged to protect the “orthodox faith” from those who “twist and adulterate the Scriptures” so that they are “no longer the Gospel of Christ.” Thus the pope issued the bull Exsurge Domine (15 June 1520), which condemned forty-one propositions drawn from various publications by Luther. Although they can all be found in Luther’s writings and are quoted correctly, they are taken out of their respective contexts… The Council of Trent, although to a large extent a response to the Protestant Reformation, did not condemn individuals or communities but specific doctrinal positions. Because the doctrinal decrees of the Council were largely in response to what it perceived to be Protestant errors, it shaped a polemical environment between Protestants and Catholics that tended to define Catholicism over and against Protestantism.
The pope during his trip to Sweden spoke of “unity.” But in what did it consist? Mainly, a shared commitment to left-wing politics. The liberal Lutherans with which the pope met in Sweden reject the Church’s teachings on abortion, gay marriage, contraception, female priests, and many other issues. But they do agree with him on climate change, as he made clear in his remarks: “I share your concern about the abuses harming our planet, our common home, and causing grave effects on the climate. As we say in our land, in my land: ‘In the end, it is the poor who pay for our great festivity.’ As you rightly mentioned, their greatest impact is on those who are most vulnerable and needy; they are forced to emigrate in order to escape the effects of climate change.”
Pope Francis signed a joint statement with the Lutheran World Federation that gushed over the “spiritual and theological gifts of the Reformation” and committed Catholics to working with Lutherans in defense of illegal immigrants and against the “insatiable greed” of planet-destroying capitalists.
He also proposed during the trip that environmentalism be added to the Beatitudes, which caused the Wall Street Journal to remark: “his suggestion that Jesus’ words don’t merely need reinterpretation but updating was a rhetorical move only slightly less ambitious than proposing an Eleventh Commandment.”33
Previous popes would have found the idea of a pope celebrating Luther’s revolt unfathomable. In 1928, Pope Pius XI condemned the very ecumenism in which Pope Francis routinely engages, saying that it only serves to weaken the Church and compromise her teachings:
Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity?… [I]n reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed… it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it.
Future historians will find it difficult to explain how the papacy went from making statements such as that one to commemorating the Reformation. While most churchmen remained tight-lipped about the pope’s trip to Sweden, a few admitted it was inexplicable. “This pope is an indifferentist,” said a senior churchman interviewed for this book.
“We have already had an infallible response to the errors of Martin Luther: the Council of Trent,” said Bishop Athanasius Schneider from Kazakhstan during a talk in Washington, DC. “The teaching of the Council of Trent about the errors of Luther, I repeat, are infallible, ex cathedra. And the comments of the pope in the plane are not ex cathedra.”34
“We Catholics have no reason to celebrate October 31, 1517, the date that is considered the beginning of the Reformation that would lead to the rupture of Western Christianity,” said German cardinal Gerhard Müller before the pope’s trip. “If we are convinced that divine revelation is preserved whole and unchanged through Scripture and Tradition, in the doctrine of the Faith, in the sacraments, in the hierarchical constitution of the Church by divine right, founded on the sacrament of holy orders, we cannot accept that there exist sufficient reasons to separate from the Church.”35
The religious relativism of Pope Francis is complicating his relationship with conservatives, both non-Catholic and Catholic. In 2016, it appeared that the Society of Pius X was on the verge of returning to a regular canonical relationship with the Church. But the doctrinal confusion of this pontificate has caused the traditionalist group to hesitate. Bishop Bernard Fellay, the leader of the order, has said that it has been discouraged by the “great and painful confusion that currently reigns in the Church.”
As long as “errors that have made their way into it and are unfortunately encouraged by a large number of pastors, including the pope himself” persist, the order will not submit to Rome’s direction, he said.36 In the summer of 2014, the aforementioned Tony Palmer died in a motorcycle accident. In defiance of canon law, Pope Francis told Catholic officials to give the Anglican Palmer a Catholic burial as a fellow “bishop.” A witness at the funeral held in Bath, England, at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church reported how the highly unorthodox Catholic funeral transpired:
Fr. David told us that because Tony was not a Roman Catholic he had to ask his bishops permission to celebrate the requiem and though Tony’ s wife and children are Roman Catholics, permission still had to be given for the requiem. The bishop agreed but said that Tony could not be buried as a bishop as he was not a Roman Catholic bishop. However, Pope Francis said he should and could be buried as a bishop… and so that put an end to that little bit of ecclesiastical nonsense!37
When a Lutheran woman in 2016 asked Pope Francis if she could receive Communion in a Catholic Church, he again ignored canon law and told her to follow her “conscience.” The woman posed the question to him at a Lutheran church in Rome. She said to him that her husband is Catholic and that they wished to “participate together in Communion” and that not doing so had caused “hurt.” To the bewilderment of Catholics, Pope Francis at first said that answering her question is “not my competence” and then said, “I ask myself the same question.”
He then told her an odd story about a bishop who “went a little wrong—48 years old, he married, [and then had] two children”—but who would attend Mass with them. “There are questions that only if one is sincere with oneself and the little theological light one has, must be responded to on one’s own,” he concluded, thoroughly confusing Catholics.38 Later, a Vatican-approved Jesuit publication in Rome, La Civiltà Cattolica, edited by one of Pope Francis’s advisers, published an article in favor of Communion for Lutherans.39
He also confused conservative Catholics by appearing in a photograph in which he received a blessing from the archbishop of Canterbury. He had adopted the practice of receiving blessings from Protestant pastors during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires. In one famous photo, he is kneeling as he receives a blessing from Evangelicals.40
“For many Roman Catholic traditionalists, this is one hell of an ecumenical mess, sending out confusing messages about the Faith, the (Roman) Catholic Church and the uniqueness of ministry of the Vicar of Christ,” observed Cranmer, a popular Anglican blog in the United Kingdom. “Pope Francis is more Anglican than many believe, or would find it possible to admit.”41
In 2016, the Vatican announced that it would make no attempts to evangelize members of Judaism. That statement, yet another historic first under Francis, appeared in a document released by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. “In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews,” stated the document titled “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable.”42
Rabbi Abraham Skorka, one of the pope’s close friends, has said that Francis’s view of “evangelization” is aimed not at converting non-Christians but convincing Christians to embrace “social justice.” “This is the idea of evangelization that Bergoglio is stressing—not to evangelize Jews,” he said. “This he told me, on several opportunities.”43
The upshot of his many speeches and writings on evangelization is that the Church shouldn’t evangelize anyone but rather devote her energies to temporal political projects. Cardinal Walter Kasper, from whom Pope Francis takes many of this theological cues, has said that the Church’s new understanding of evangelization is the exact opposite of how the word is used in common speech: “In strict theological language, evangelization is a very complex and overall term, and reality. It implies presence and witness, prayer and liturgy, proclamation and catechesis, dialogue and social work… which do not have the goal of increasing the number of Catholics. Thus evangelization, if understood in its proper and theological meaning, does not imply any attempt of proselytism whatsoever.”44
Liberal politics, not the salvation of souls, preoccupies Francis’s Vatican. In 2016, a reporter asked his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, “What are you most concerned about in today’s world?” In his reply, he didn’t mention a single spiritual issue. He talked instead about refugees, victims of exploitation and “war,” “conflicts, violence, human rights violations, environmental degradation, extreme poverty, the trade and trafficking of arms, corruption and sinister commercial and financial plans.”45
At a time of rampant loss of faith and morality, he gave an answer that could have been given by the head of the United Nations.
The only religious group whom Pope Francis dares to critique are fellow Catholics. They come in for frequent scoldings from him for their “rigidity.” On numerous occasions, he has blasted them for adherence to the “law.” In 2016, he even described them as “heretical” for not appreciating his loose interpretation of Catholicism. The essence of Catholicism, he said strangely, lies in accepting ambiguity:
The Church never teaches us “or this or that.” That is not Catholic. The Church says to us: “this and that,” he said. “Strive for perfectionism: reconcile with your brother. Do not insult him. Love him. And if there is a problem, at the very least settle your differences so that war doesn’t break out.” This [is] the healthy realism of Catholicism. It is not Catholic [to say] “or this or nothing:” This is not Catholic, this is heretical. Jesus always knows how to accompany us, he gives us the ideal, he accompanies us towards the ideal, He frees us from the chains of the laws’ rigidity and tells us: “But do that up to the point that you are capable.” And he understands us very well. He is our Lord and this is what he teaches us.46
He has accused traditional Catholics of “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism,” without bothering to clarify the insult. Oozing contempt for traditionalist Catholics, he said they considers themselves “superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past” and that their “supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.” (Bishop Fellay has said that Vatican officials tell him that these denunciations are directed primarily at “conservative Americans.”47)
Early in his papacy, Pope Francis was captured on videotape belittling an altar boy for holding his hands together piously. Were they stuck together, he asked the bewildered boy. Another time he mocked a Catholic group for sending him a note saying that its members had recited thousands of rosaries for him.
“It concerns me; when I was elected, I received a letter from one of these groups, and they said: ‘Your Holiness, we offer you this spiritual treasure: 3,525 rosaries.’ Why don’t they say, ‘we pray for you, we ask…,’ but this thing of counting,” he scoffed while talking to some fellow liberal priests and nuns. “And these groups return to practices and to disciplines that I lived through—not you, because you are not old—to disciplines, to things that in that moment took place, but not now, they do not exist today…”48
With a friend like this pope, orthodox Catholics don’t need enemies.