In the “ten tips to happiness” that he offered during a 2014 interview with the Argentinian weekly Viva, Pope Francis gave as the first tip: “live and let live.”1 That permissive spirit explains why the mainstream media often calls him the “cool” pope.2
Pope Francis belongs to a generation of priests who saw themselves as people pleasers keen to “understand the contemporary world.” Pope Francis often makes it sound as if the Church’s moral theology should be put up for a popular vote. “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the ‘fragrance’ of the men of this age,” he has said.
Historians have established that bad popes of the past committed mortal sins. But Francis is the first pope to bless sins. He has become notorious for giving scandalous advice to Catholics in adulterous relationships. In April 2014, it came out that he had placed a call to an Argentinian woman who had written to him about her adulterous relationship. The woman, Jacquelina Lisbona, was ecstatic over receiving his phone call, in which he introduced himself as “Father Bergoglio” and informed her that she could receive Communion “without problems.” When she told him that her local priest objected to her reception of Communion, Pope Francis replied, “There are some priests who are more papist than the Pope.”3
The “cool” Pope was also a cool uncle, according to Francis’s niece, María Inés Navaja, who told the press that when she entered a marriage without the blessing of the Church, her uncle congratulated her. She said, “He listens a lot, but doesn’t judge, and never tells you what you have to do. I remember when I told him that I couldn’t wait to [get married] in the Church, that I was a grownup now and I was going to get married in a civil marriage; he answered that ‘it’s the best news you’ve given me.’”4
According to Francis’s close Argentinian friend, Oscar Crespo, who met with Francis in 2015, the pope made a similar comment to him about a mutual friend’s adulterous relationship. When Crespo asked the pope if that friend could receive Communion, he replied, “Just tell her the Pope said that she can.”5
In 2015, Pope Francis announced that he was liberalizing the Church’s annulment procedures, pushing through permissive changes that canon lawyers have described as the most significant alteration to those procedures in four hundred years.
“It’s a sweeping reform; it’s a dramatic reform,” said Chad Pecknold, a theologian at Catholic University. “It’s a reform which essentially takes away the whole judicial process for deciding whether a marriage was null or not.”6
Liberals inside and outside the Church cheered the changes, describing them as “pastoral” and a “Catholic version of no-fault Catholic divorce.” But some bishops were astonished at the laxity of the changes, noting that they eliminate most of the safeguards in place to prevent the abuse of the annulment process.
Asked by a reporter at the cable channel EWTN if Pope Francis’s changes could result in a rash of phony cases, Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin replied: “That could happen. That is the sort of thing that has been happening for 50 years in the United States and the tribunals. In the name of mercy, in the name of a kind of accommodation to people who can become very pushy and very insistent, the truth has been the casualty. If that kind of an abuse were to be prevalent as these new regulations go into effect, that would simply be a continuation of what has been the case for 50 years.”7
“Relations between Pope Francis and the canonical-legal community are strained,” says canon lawyer Michael Dunnigan in an interview for this book. “Most of the Holy Father’s references to law and lawyers are negative, and he seems to see the law as almost the antithesis of mercy. Most canonists, by contrast, see the law itself as pastoral. Indeed, I would say that the Church of Christ is unintelligible without its juridic aspect. The reason is that, without law or a juridic principle in the Church, it would be difficult or impossible to speak coherently about the rights of the faithful or the constitution of the Church.” For all of his talk of “collegiality,” Pope Francis inserted these changes into canon law autocratically.
“The Holy Father engaged in very little consultation before promulgating his reform. For such a far-reaching revision of the law, one might have expected him to consult broadly with the Roman Curia, pontifical faculties of canon law, and professional associations of canonists. However, he did not do so,” according to Dunnigan.
Another canon lawyer interviewed for this book says, “He is not winning points with canon lawyers, for sure.” This priest recalled a conference of canon lawyers at which one stood up and asked, “Why does the pope hate us?” “There was a lot of anger among canon lawyers, with all of his unfounded novelties and his attacks on ‘doctors of the law’ and so forth,” he continued.
Speaking to a group of priests and nuns at a pastoral conference in Rome in 2016, Pope Francis outraged Catholics by declaring that “the great majority” of Catholic marriages are invalid.8 His inflammatory remark was apparently offered by way of explaining his permissive annulment practices. But the comment generated so much backlash—a columnist for the Spectator called it “disastrous,” while a columnist for the New York Times called it “ridiculous” and “irresponsible”—that the Vatican decided, scandalously, to falsify the transcript of the meeting and change “great majority” to “a portion.”9
The undoctored transcript, however, reveals his true thoughts. He had been saying for many years that a majority of Catholic marriages are invalid, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper: “I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid,” said Kasper in 2014.10 (Catholic commentators dismissed this story at the time as wild “hearsay,” but it turned out to be, if anything, an understatement.)
Pope Francis made other peculiar comments at that pastoral conference in Rome, indicative of his idiosyncratic take on Catholicism. He mused that as archbishop of Buenos Aires it was his practice to refuse to preside at “shotgun” weddings. He didn’t make it clear why the desire of a couple to provide an illegitimate child with a married mother and father constituted an unworthy motive for marriage.
He added that he considers priests who don’t baptize these illegitimate children to be “animals.” It was an unusually harsh comment to make about priests who are simply following canon law, which instructs them to delay baptism until there is a “founded hope” the child will be raised by practicing Catholics. (In the first year of his pontificate, showing contempt for this provision of canon law, he baptized the child of an unmarried couple at the Sistine Chapel. He has said that he would even baptize “an expedition of Martians.”)
The pope was also remarkably blasé about couples living together before marriage. He said the majority of couples in Buenos Aires taking marriage preparation courses were living together but that he didn’t consider that too worrisome. He told the priests at the pastoral conference not to press such couples to marry. “They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature,” he said.
He even praised some of these premarital relationships and implied that it didn’t matter whether these couples got married in the Church: “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity.”
To orthodox Catholics, the juxtaposition of these remarks with his claim that most sacramental marriages are invalid was deeply unsettling. He appeared to be saying that premarital relationships can confer real grace upon couples while “most” sacramental marriages do not.
At the same pastoral conference, he said that traditional Catholics rely too much on “clarity of doctrine” and what “should be.” “We want a doctrine that is as certain as mathematics—this doesn’t exist,” he said. They should instead be “welcoming, accompanying, integrating, discerning, without putting our noses in the ‘moral life’ of other people.”
That last gibe seemed calculated to delight the media, as it often lectures the Church on “staying out of people’s bedrooms.”
His comments had a demoralizing effect on priests, some of whom complained that his denigrations were making it harder for them to fulfill their apostolates. “Please, Holy Father: Enough of these ad hoc, off-the-cuff, impromptu sessions, whether at thirty thousand feet or at ground level,” wrote Monsignor Charles Pope from the archdiocese of Washington, DC. “Much harm through confusion has been caused by these latest remarks on marriage, cohabitation, baptism, confession, and pastoral practice… the impact hits priests hard, and I cannot deny a certain weariness and discouragement at this point.”11
“I will be happy when this pontificate ends,” says a priest interviewed for this book. “I have stopped paying attention to what he says. It is too painful.”
Even as the pope demoralizes faithful priests, he makes a show of extending sympathy to lapsed ones. In 2016, the Vatican announced that he had made a special visit to priests who had broken their vows and started families, almost romanticizing their decision: “the young men in question took the difficult decision to leave the priesthood despite opposition in many cases from their fellow priests or their families after serving for several years in parishes where loneliness, misunderstanding, fatigue arising from their many responsibilities prompted them to rethink their choice.” Opponents of a celibate priesthood greeted the announcement with enthusiasm.
The centerpiece of this permissive pontificate has been the pope’s liberalizing Synod on the Family, which was a pretext to weaken the Church’s sacramental discipline. Toward that end, he stacked the synod with proponents of situation ethics and dissenters from the pontificates of his predecessors.
A product of his team of ghostwriters and hand-picked delegates, the synod’s preliminary report spoke of the “positive aspects” of premarital cohabitation and homosexual relationships. It praised the “precious support” homosexuals find in their relationships and condemned the Church for not turning “respectfully to those who participate in her life in an incomplete and imperfect way, appreciating the positive values they contain rather than their limitations and shortcomings.”12
The pope’s rattled aides scotched that draft after it generated significant backlash. But it remains a highly relevant document of this pontificate, as it reflected the unvarnished opinions of the pope and his advisers. The significance of the document was not lost on the left.
“For the LGBT Catholics in the United States and around the world, this new document is a light in the darkness—a dramatic new tone from a church hierarchy that has long denied the very existence of committed and loving gay and lesbian partnerships,” said Chad Griffin, president of Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT rights organization in the United States, to the press after reading the document.13
“Reading this #Synod14 document, I don’t know what to say. It feels like a whole new church, a whole new tone, a whole new posture. Wow,” wrote Joshua McElwee, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, on Twitter. Vatican reporter John Thavis called the statement a “pastoral earthquake” and reported that “at least one bishop asked what happened to the concept of sin.”14
The controversial proposal at the heart of the synod—the granting of Communion to the divorced-and-remarried—was also shot down by the bishops. “Catholic bishops handed Pope Francis an embarrassing defeat Saturday by withholding support for one of his signature initiatives—a pathway for Catholics who have divorced and remarried to receive Communion—thus showing the strength of conservative resistance to the pope’s liberalizing agenda,” reported the Wall Street Journal.15
“We’re not giving in to the secular agenda; we’re not collapsing in a heap. We’ve got no intention of following those radical elements in all the Christian churches, according to the Catholic churches in one or two countries, and going out of business,” explained Australian cardinal George Pell, who called the preliminary report “tendentious” and said “it didn’t represent accurately the feelings of the synod fathers.” He added, “In the immediate reaction to it, when there was an hour, an hour-and-a-half of discussion, three-quarters of those who spoke had some problems with the document.” That document contained, he said, “a major absence,” namely, a connection to “scriptural teaching” and “church tradition.”16
These rebuffs from the synod fathers angered Pope Francis. At the end of the synod in 2015, he delivered a homily in which he excoriated traditionalists for their “blinkered viewpoints” and “closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the church’s teachings, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families.”
Pope Francis gave Cardinal Kasper, the leading proponent for opening Communion up to Catholics in a state of adultery, a starring role at the synod. In a moment of indiscretion during it, Kasper denounced the conservative African cardinals as reactionaries who had no business influencing its outcome. “Africa is totally different from the West,” he said, “especially about gays.” The synod fathers, he said, should disregard their views: “they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Kasper at first denied making these remarks, saying, “I am appalled. I have never spoken this way about Africans and I never would.” But an audiotape had captured them, and his denial disintegrated.17
Yet Kasper’s proposal prevailed, shaping Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Using vague language, Pope Francis endorsed the proposal, writing that “divorced who have entered a new union, for example, can find themselves in a variety of situations, which should not be pigeonholed or fit into overly rigid classifications leaving no room for a suitable personal and pastoral discernment.”
His advisers spelled out the meaning of the document more explicitly in interviews after its appearance. Jesuit father Antonio Spadaro, one of the pope’s closest advisers, summed up the meaning of the document bluntly: “Francis has removed all the ‘limits’ of the past, even in the ‘sacramental discipline’ and for the so-called ‘irregular’ couples: and these couples ‘become recipients of the Eucharist.’”18
To anyone who had listened closely to the pope’s off-the-cuff interviews, the outcome of the synod was inevitable. In one interview, he had complained bitterly about the Church’s prohibitions on adulterers: “they cannot be godfathers to any child being baptized, mass readings are not for divorcees, they cannot give communion, they cannot teach Sunday school, there are about seven things that they cannot do, I have the list over there. Come on!” He continued, “Thus, let us open the doors a bit more. Why can’t they be godfathers and godmothers?”
The German philosopher Josef Seifert said that Jesus and Mary must be “weeping” over Amoris Laetitia. “Pope Francis, who does not even once mention the possibility of sacrilege or peril for the soul of a person who receives Communion unworthily, tells adulterers that in certain circumstances, which are to be considered individually, it is possible for those who live in adultery or in other ‘irregular’ unions to receive Holy Communion without changing their lives, and so to continue living as adulterers,” he wrote.19
The effect of the pope’s exhortation has been an unfolding disaster, said Bishop Athanasius Schneider. It “has unfortunately, within a very short time, led to very contradictory interpretations even among the episcopate,” he notes.20
He argues that it has given aid and comfort to modernist dissenters within the Church, as bishops and priests “declare that AL represents a very clear opening-up to communion for the divorced and remarried, without requiring them to practice continence.” It shocked him that “a president of a Bishops’ Conference has stated, in a text published on the website of the same Bishops’ Conference: ‘This is a disposition of mercy, an openness of heart and of spirit that needs no law, awaits no guideline, nor bides on prompting. It can and should happen immediately.’”
A few bishops, twisting themselves into contortions, tried to present the document as consonant with Catholic tradition, arguing that it hadn’t explicitly condoned Communion for adulterers. But even those straining efforts became unsustainable after Pope Francis sent a letter to bishops in the Buenos Aires region in September 2016. The letter praised their guidelines, based on Amoris Laetitia, that authorized Communion for adulterers in certain cases. “The document is very good,” he wrote to them. “There are no other interpretations.”21 Around the same time, the diocese of Rome also issued guidelines permitting Communion for adulterers.
The sending of mixed signals has been a hallmark of this pontificate. In 2016, Pope Francis called Emma Bonino one of Italy’s “forgotten greats,” odd praise given her status as one of the most radical pro-abortion activists in the country’s history. After being arrested for performing illegal abortions, Bonino went on to become Italy’s version of Margaret Sanger. “True,” she has her critics, Pope Francis said. “But never mind,” he continued before praising her activism in Africa.22
“Sometimes it seems as if Pope Francis is determined to purge all humor from the phrase ‘more Catholic than the pope,’” said former Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes, commenting on this episode. “Is Pope Francis blind to the fact that his praise for Bonino will be used to throw the lustrous vestments of the Papacy around the shoulders of the whole abortion movement, in order to enhance the glamour of evil?”23
Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister has reported that the pope is keeping his distance from the pro-life movement, illustrated by the minimal support that he has given the March for Life in Rome. “It remains to be understood why Pope Francis cherishes such a dislike, although he has condemned abortion on several occasions,” said Magister. “In the US, the March for Life [near] the White House in Washington is already a classic. But in Rome at St. Peter’s it’s not. Pope Francis does not like to see it show up.”24
According to Magister, the pope gives short shrift to pro-lifers, barely mentioning them in publications under his control and in his audiences. March for Life attendees are used to the secular media ignoring the event. But they were surprised to see in 2014 that the pope’s own newspaper ignored it, too. “L’Osservatore Romano also practiced shunning the whole initiative, not even dedicating a single line to it,” said Magister.
Magister suspects the reason for the pope’s distance is that he prefers to oppose abortion on anti-capitalist grounds rather than traditionally moral ones: “It is in the context, of what he calls, throwaway culture. His real enemy within is not those that kill the young, innocent lives—they deserve mercy—but the international economic powers that have caused such killings out of idolatry and greed… outside of this vision of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the March for Life becomes an obstacle to dialogue with postmodernism. Not a benefit to the image of the Church, but a burden.”
Pope Francis has also kept his distance from Catholic activism opposed to gay marriage. In 2016, when the press asked him to comment on gay civil-unions legislation under consideration in Italy, he dodged the question, saying disingenuously that he couldn’t answer it “because the pope is for everybody and he can’t insert himself in the specific internal politics of a country.”25
On issues like climate change, illegal immigration, gun control, and the death penalty, he has had no problem inserting himself into the internal politics of countries. During the vote over “Brexit” in 2016, he angered its supporters by opposing it. One of his aides said that a vote to depart would not lead to a “stronger Europe.”26 After the British voted to leave, Pope Francis continued to defend his opposition to Brexit, saying, “let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, let’s try to jump-start things, to re-create.”
To applause from the media, the Vatican has steered clear of culture-war debates in Europe. As debates over euthanasia and gay marriage heated up in Europe, the Vatican fell silent, according to the Religion News Service:
Luigi Accattoli, a veteran Vatican analyst with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, sees a “new way of being pope” in the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio: “Francis doesn’t lash out against laws that violate ‘non negotiable values,’” as the Vatican usually classifies issues like the protection of life or marriage. As French bishops organized mass rallies against a law that legalized gay marriage, Francis skirted any mention of it, even during a recent meeting with French lawmakers.27
In 2015, gay marriage became legal in Catholic Ireland. It passed in a referendum not in spite of the Church but in part because of it. Adopting Francis’s “Who am I to judge?” stance, most Irish Catholic leaders sat on their hands.
“The Church’s Decision Not to Lead the No Campaign Marks a New Reality,” read one headline in the British press. According to press reports, a number of Irish priests voted for the initiative. One priest even penned an open op-ed in support of it, saying that “I am one of those clergy-persons who intends to vote yes, not to cock a snoot at the leadership of my church, or to jump on a popular bandwagon, but because I think it is the right thing to do… As a follower of Jesus, the à la carte Jew who recognized when certain laws had run their courses, I am convinced that now is the right time to have marriage equality.”28
Dublin’s archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, directed his rhetorical fire not at supporters of gay marriage but at the Church. Her teaching on marriage has been “harsh” and “dogmatic,” he said. He made a weak and apologetic plea for a “pluralist society” in which “people of same-sex orientation have their rights and their loving and caring relationships recognized and cherished in a culture of difference, while respecting the uniqueness of the male-female relationship.” A Huffington Post headline summed up the waffling character of the Church’s stance during the debate: “Irish Bishop on Gay Marriage: ‘I Would Hate for People to Vote No for Bigoted Reasons.’”29
In 2016, as Mexico debated gay marriage, Pope Francis’s nuncio, Franco Coppola, said to the press that he “had no pope’s order in the matter” and that “I could answer with the doctrine of the Church but that is not the answer I must give as a shepherd.” This undercut earlier reports that Pope Francis supported Mexico’s bishops in their opposition to gay marriage.
In 2015, Rolling Stone ran a cover story on the pope, titled “Pope Francis: The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which praised him for “scolding” conservative Catholics and drawing attention to “income inequality.” The article gloried in his utility to their hip causes. The libertine magazine also found much to approve in his past, such as the time he mocked Church leaders by saying they “want to stick the whole world inside a condom.”30
Rock stars and celebrities, excited by the progressive and permissive direction of the papacy, now visit the Vatican in droves. In 2016, Pope Francis opened up the Sistine Chapel for the first time to a rock performer, David Evans, aka “The Edge,” from the band U2.
“When they asked me if I wanted to become the first contemporary artist to play in the Sistine Chapel, I didn’t know what to say because usually there’s this other guy who sings,” he said in reference to Bono. “Being Irish you learn very early that if you want to be asked to come back it’s very important to thank the local parish priest for the loan of the hall,” he said. He thanked Pope Francis “for allowing us to use the most beautiful parish hall in the world.” “He’s doing an amazing job and long may he continue,” he added.31
An Italian Catholic organization was dismayed when Pope Francis invited the anti-Catholic singer Patti Smith to play a Vatican Christmas concert, calling the appearance “blasphemous,” given that one of her most famous lines is “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith responded to the controversy with defiance. “I will do what the f-ck I want,” she said. “I like Pope Francis and I’m happy to sing for him. Anyone who would confine me to a line from 20 years ago is a fool!”32
In 2016, Pope Francis handed out awards to actors George Clooney, Richard Gere, and Salma Hayek for their promotion of the arts through a papal charity called Scholas Occurrentes. While he didn’t mind receiving the help of these socially liberal celebrities, he drew the line at a donation from the government of the “center-right” president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, who gave the organization $1.2 million. Pope Francis made a show of returning that donation. “Critics of the Macri administration said that the pope’s rejection of the donation reflected his distaste for the president’s introduction of austerity measures,” reported the Guardian.33
In an effort to be hip, the Pontifical Council for Culture, under the leadership of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, and the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano have taken to eulogizing pop stars. As Fr. George Rutler wrote, “when David Bowie died, L’Osservatore Romano, aching to be the Church of What’s Happening Now, eulogized the genius of Bowie, excusing his ‘ambiguous image’ as one of his ‘excesses’ but then remarking his ‘personal sobriety, even in his dry, almost thread-like body.’”
Rutler also recalled the “extravagant tribute that the editor of L’Osservatore Romano paid to the crooner Michael Jackson when he died of acute Propofol and Benzodiazepine intoxication.” The headline over that story asked breathlessly, “But will he actually be dead?” and said “Jackson’s transgenderizing surgeries were ‘a process of self definition that was beyond race,’” reported Rutler. As for the charges of pedophilia against Jackson, L’Osservatore Romano opined: “Everybody knows his problems with the law after the pedophilia accusations. But no accusation, however serious or shameful, is enough to tarnish his myth among his millions of fans throughout the entire world.”34
Desperate to appear in sync with pop culture, Ravasi made use of Italian actress Nancy Brilli in a video promoting his council’s #LifeofWomen campaign. In the video, the saucy actress asks, “What do you think about yourself, your strengths, your difficulties, your body, and your spiritual life?” “The video was the brainchild of 15 professional women—all but one of them Italian—chosen by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi to advise him on the agenda for ‘Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference,’” reported the New York Daily News.35 After the video generated widespread complaints, Ravasi pulled it.
The “cool” pope often pays homage to modern feminism and criticizes his predecessors for their alleged sexism. He has said “that the feminine presence in the Church has not fully emerged because the temptation of machismo has not left space to make visible the role women are entitled to within the community.” He has also said that “women in the Church are more important than bishops and priests.”36
In 2016, the Vatican launched a magazine called Women-Church-World, which had begun as a supplement in L’Osservatore Romano, to provide feminists with a platform to criticize the Church. In its first edition, the magazine editorialized that the Church had “largely ignored” the contribution of women to the Church’s life. In its previous supplemental form, it had run an article in favor of women preaching at Masses, which canon law forbids.37
In a bow to feminist pressures, Vatican officials have said that it is “theoretically possible” for women to be cardinals and to hold such positions as the Holy See’s secretary of state. In 2016, Pope Francis announced that he would consider ordaining women deacons. He authorized the formation of a commission to study the issue. That decision was made in a typically haphazard form, after women religious had asked him at a Vatican meeting: “Why not construct an official commission that might study the question?” He replied, “Constituting an official commission that might study the question? I believe yes. It would do good for the church to clarify this point. I am in agreement. I will speak to do something like this.”38
This caused consternation among many Catholics, as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI had resisted such talk. The consternation grew when Pope Francis officially established the commission in August 2016 and placed on it a supporter of female priests.39
Nor did Francis’s predecessors ever warm to the subject of a married priesthood, another subject on which Pope Francis has sent mixed signals. He has spoken of the value of a celibate priesthood, but said that that “could change” and that the subject of married priests “is on his agenda.”
According to several bishops, he is open to reconsidering that discipline. Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke of Hamburg said Francis “made no sign of refusal” after the German bishops raised the issue with him. Brazilian bishop Erwin Kräutler, one of his close advisers, said that Pope Francis urged him to make “bold, daring proposals” after he broached the subject with him and that Francis was leaning toward letting national conferences decide the issue.40 His childhood friend Oscar Crespo told the press that during a visit to the Vatican Francis described a celibate priesthood as “archaic.” In 2016, papal biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote a piece saying that the next synod is “likely” to address the issue of ordaining married men.41 But it has since been announced that the 2018 synod’s theme will be “Youth, Faith, and Vocational Discernment.” According to Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin, Pope Francis was “keen” to discuss married priests, but “that proposal was understood to have been voted down by the majority of members on the XIV Ordinary Council of the Synod of Bishops, the body charged with drawing up the theme of the next synod.”42
The leftist press also admires the audiences that he grants to avant-garde activists. For a pope who likes to say that the “meeting is the message,” these encounters clearly hold subversive value to him. For example, in 2015, he granted the transgender activist Diego Lejarraga an audience after Lejarraga complained in a letter that the Church had “marginalized” him. According to Lejarraga, Pope Francis phoned him twice after receiving his letter and then invited him to the Vatican. Lejarraga told the Spanish press that Francis reassured him that God loves all his children “as they are” and the “Church loves you and accepts you as you are.”
From time to time, Pope Francis has appeared to reaffirm the Church’s opposition to gender theories, but his meeting with Lejarraga sent a different message. Lejarraga brought his fiancée with him to the meeting with the pope, which culminated in an embrace. The press burbled over the meeting for days, declaring that “the unexpected overture marks an important gesture of acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender Catholics.”43 The Vatican offered no clarification on the meaning of the meeting. Indeed, Pope Francis boasted about the meeting in 2016, recalling warmly that he had invited the “he that was her but is he” to the Vatican. His comments indicated that he approved of his transgenderism and his gay marriage: “I received them and they were happy… Life is life and you must take things as they come.”44
Yet when it leaked out during his visit to America that Pope Francis had met Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk imprisoned briefly for declining to issue gay-marriage licenses, the liberal elite expressed disappointment in the cool pope. But he moved quickly to win back their affection. He authorized his press secretary to spin the meeting as a meaningless gesture, akin to a random rope line greeting.45
“The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” said his press secretary. “Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.”
That former student turned out to be a homosexual caterer with his boyfriend in tow, prompting such excited reports from the liberal media as “Vatican distances Pope Francis from Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Meanwhile, the Vatican confirmed that Francis met with a gay friend and his partner a day earlier.”
Once liberals heard these reports, he returned to their good graces. As one liberal pundit put it to his colleagues, only half-facetiously, “You Can Like the Pope Again! Vatican Distances Pope from Kim Davis.”46 A grateful cast on NBC’s Saturday Night Live depicted Pope Francis in a skit untangling himself from Kim Davis’s embrace.
His former student Yayo Grassi rushed to the press to inform them that he and his boyfriend, Iwan, had received a papal blessing and that Francis, in a previous exchange, had assured him that “I want you to know that in my work there is absolutely no place for homophobia.”47
While offering a “clarification” on the Kim Davis meeting, the Vatican didn’t bother to clarify that papal remark to Grassi. It was content to let the Church’s critics think that it no longer takes its own moral teachings seriously anymore.
Such meetings have always appealed to Bergoglio. During his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he made a point of keeping in touch with disgraced clerics, such as Jerónimo José Podestá, a Catholic bishop whose radicalism led to his removal from office. “Bergoglio visited the ostracised bishop on his deathbed and gave him the last rites. He then ensured that the man’s widow, Clelia Luro, and her children were provided for—even though she was a feminist as radical as was imaginable on the Catholic spectrum, who used to celebrate mass with her husband,” writes author Paul Vallely.48
St. Ignatius established the Jesuit order to advance the “Church militant.” But Pope Francis, in a bid to be popular with the liberal elite, prefers a Church muddled. He is chipping away at Church teachings as he plays to the anti-conservative prejudices of the powerful. Francis doesn’t fear losing the good opinion of “fundamentalists,” whom he regularly caricatures as out of step with the modern zeitgeist. But he is afraid of losing the good opinion of the liberal elite.
St. Paul wrote his letters to “fools for Christ” to confirm them in their faith. Pope Francis writes letters to opponents of Christian teaching to confirm them in their errors. Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari felt so confirmed in his unbelief and relativism after his epistolary exchanges with Francis that he gushed, “an openness to modern and secular culture of this breadth, such a profound vision between conscience and its autonomy, has never before been heard from the chair of St. Peter.”49
His pontificate has proceeded almost like an apology tour, designed to allay the anxieties of the liberal elite. On his way back from Armenia in 2016, he insulted Catholics by offering a series of gratuitous apologies tailored to left-wing sensibilities: “I think that the Church not only should apologize… to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologize to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited (by being forced to) work. It must apologize for having blessed so many weapons.” He bemoaned the “closed Catholic culture” of the past and celebrated the supposed enlightenment of modern times: “The culture has changed—and thank God.”50
After this extravagant apology, the liberal Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese marveled on Twitter, “Pope Francis is speaking about gays and lesbians in ways that would have gotten anyone else disciplined, censured, or silenced ten years ago.”