Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters
After a long period of declining health which saw an increasingly debilitated Francis struggling to hold onto life, it was the demonic visitation of US Vice President JD Vance, it seems, that finally did the pontiff in. His death marks the end of a 12-year project aimed at rescuing a crisis-ridden Catholic church from irrelevance and possibly terminal decline. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, a mid-ranking Jesuit at the height of that country’s ‘dirty war’, Francis was an obscure figure to many outside Latin America when he assumed the papacy in March 2013.
The church that Francis inherited was then locked in a profound crisis and was being rapidly deserted by lifelong Catholics, even in traditional strongholds. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were staunch conservatives in both their theological and political leanings. In his efforts to stamp out the ‘heresy’ of liberation theology—a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that propelled a powerful Catholic left across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s—the strident anti-communist John Paul had aligned Rome with US President Ronald Reagan’s bloody counter-insurgency and did not flinch even when US-armed militias raped and massacred grassroots Catholic clergy. Indeed, some of his bishops are said to have provided lists of potential targets to the right-wing death squads.
Serving an apprenticeship as John Paul’s doctrinal henchman, Benedict assumed the papacy after leading a purge of left-wing clergy: his own reign was marked by hysteria around creeping secularism and women’s demand for equality in the church. Benedict pushed an early version of the ‘culture wars’, encouraging an obsessive focus among conservative clergy on sexuality, abortion rights and the traditional family. This was part of a calculated effort to exorcise the social justice focus of the liberationists.
Their successful prosecution of a war on the Catholic left endeared both of Francis’s predecessors to church conservatives, but outside these narrow circles they are most popularly associated with a series of profound scandals that, by 2013, threatened the church’s very existence. The best-known of these exploded after a series of revelations about the massive scale of clerical sexual abuse, compounded by proof that—for all their pious moralizing around sexuality—both popes had played central roles in covering up these crimes and shielding perpetrators from justice. The Boston Globe concluded that John Paul had been ‘guilty of one of the biggest institutional cover-ups of criminal activity in history.’
On its own the disclosures around massive, endemic sexual abuse rocked the church internationally, but they were compounded by shocking financial scandals. The release of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed that Rome kept tens of millions in offshore tax havens. The twilight days of Benedict’s papacy saw further, sensational revelations of the deep financial corruption at the heart of the Vatican. To take just one example from the Vatileaks disclosures, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, living in a ‘princely dwelling’ in Rome with a nun serving as housekeeper, was found to have ‘redirected tens of millions of euros from a foundation meant to support the Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital in Rome and used the funds to renovate his apartment instead’. Bertone travelled around Rome by helicopter, running up a tab of nearly €24,000 in 2012. The church’s global ‘Peter’s Pence’ charity—meant to be used ‘for the relief of those most in need’—was revealed to be a financial ‘black hole’, with nearly 70% of its collection handed over to maintain the ‘Vatican bureaucracy’. There were dozens of similar exposures.
The Politics of Church ‘Renewal’
All of this passed under Francis’s predecessors without a murmur of complaint, and it meant that he inherited an institution in freefall. There were other pressing challenges: at a time when membership was declining in the US and elsewhere in increasingly secular former Catholic countries in the West (like Ireland and Spain), across Latin America—where Catholicism had long exercised a monopoly—and in Africa, Rome faced increasing competition from evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and other sects. Benedict’s rout of liberation theology and the hierarchy’s reassertion of command only created new problems: in Brazil and elsewhere believers deserted the stale ritual of elite-led Catholicism en masse.
Catholics who clung to their faith despite the revelations looked to the new pope—an outsider, the first from Latin America—to clean house and reset the church’s crumbling foundations. Progressives within its ranks saw an opportunity not only to return to the spirit of Vatican II—to ‘open the window and let in some fresh air’—but, crucially, to take up root-and-branch reform of the church’s approach to sexuality, and correct the longstanding subordination of women in Catholic religious and lay practice.
Rhetorically at least, Francis committed himself to a vaguely-defined project of ‘renewal’: the church needed to ‘come out of herself and go to the peripheries’, to become a ‘field hospital for the faithful’. He abandoned the opulence of his predecessors for a [relatively] modest daily routine, and pledged to root out corruption and address the legacy of endemic sexual abuse.
In the end the results never matched even the most modest expectations of those who looked to Francis for reform. Francis took steady aim at the most flagrant corruption (though without touching the church’s vast accumulated wealth) and was not slow to oust church bureaucrats who stood in his way, but he was far more hesitant in facing up to the church’s history of abuse, or to its position on sexuality more generally. Survivors of sexual abuse were bitterly disappointed at his unwillingness to move decisively: Boston survivor Anne Barrett Doyle characterised Francis’s inability to deliver on his promises as a ‘tremendous disappointment’ that would ‘forever tarnish his legacy’.
Quickly it became clear that there would be no fundamental change in women’s place in the church; there were gestures indicating a more ‘compassionate approach’ to lesbians and gay men in the Church but, as one commentator has put it, ‘in doctrinal terms Francis remained firmly within the letter of existing canon law’. This massive gap between rhetoric and substance is conspicuous across Francis’s record around gender and sexuality.
While an increasingly belligerent Catholic right seethed with outrage over the occasional gestures coming out of Francis’s papacy—his willingness to regard lesbians and gay men as human beings worthy of compassion—what is most striking is the degree to which Francis held the line on Church teaching on sexuality throughout a period of profound crisis. Not only did he reject ordination for women and refuse to move on endorsing same-sex marriage: as late as 2023 Francis upheld the Church ban on contraception; his opposition to abortion led him to share the stage with far right politicians like Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, even to the point of endorsing their hysteria around declining European birth rates. Mary McAleese was clearly on the mark in insisting that, beyond rhetorical posturing, the Church under Francis remained ‘one of the last great bastions of misogyny’.
Francis: an Anti-Capitalist?
At one level, his fundamental conservativism around sexuality seems out of step with Francis’s willingness to speak out plainly on other issues that placed him in the crosshairs of the Catholic right. Their intense hostility—and in recent years his willingness to stand up to a growing far right—have led some commentators to make Francis out to be more than he was.
Francis has been mistakenly credited—in Jacobin, the social democratic US magazine, and elsewhere—with having ‘brought to the Vatican a concern for social justice rooted in the radical liberation theology of his home region’. The reality is that so long as liberation theology thrived in Argentina and elsewhere, Bergoglio regarded himself as an opponent: Francis’s ‘most sympathetic biographers concede that he “kept his mouth shut” throughout the period the [Argentinian dictatorship] was carrying out its worst atrocities, but there are indications that his actions bordered on complicity’.
Bergoglio played an important role in articulating a new ‘middle ground’ between church traditionalists and the liberationists—a kind of theological ‘third way’. As I argued in an earlier piece on Rebel, it was only after the defeat of liberation theology that opponents within the Church ‘began to endorse some of the language of the movement’ while ‘emptying [them] of their class-based political vision’. The precondition for Bergoglio adopting the role of a critic of ‘unbridled capitalism’ was the success of Rome’s counter-offensive against liberation theology.
Long before he ascended to Rome, Francis had advocated a theology of class reconciliation, of ‘persuad[ing] the rich to surrender power rather than help the poor to take control of their own destiny.’ The source for this was not liberation theology, but the well-known social teachings of Vatican II. Even John Paul had insisted that ‘the development of a more harmonious society is going to require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich.’ Francis’s articulation of this well-worn perspective stood out more conspicuously in a neoliberal world, where public discourse was everywhere saturated by the worship of market forces. One sceptic rightly pointed out that in his calls for solidarity between rich and poor and the amelioration of capitalism’s ‘excesses’ Bergoglio had ‘moved from the right to the middle not the left.’
The outlook he brought to Rome was almost explicitly a Catholic articulation of ‘third way’ politics, which enjoyed a brief shelf life in the 1980s and 90s as the Clinton-led Democratic Party in the US and the traditional parties of social democracy in Europe (Blair’s Labour) and elsewhere shifted to the right to accommodate neoliberalism. Francis’s problem was that by the time he assumed the papacy this strategy had proven bankrupt: across the globe, the 2008 crash brought harsh austerity and accelerated growing inequality: the despair growing out of this made for a volatile and highly polarised political atmosphere. That Francis’s advocacy of a ‘humane capitalism’ mark him out as a radical iconoclast on the global stage only shows how far politics have lurched to the right in the post-crash period.
A Rising Catholic Far Right
This political polarisation in the outside world reflected and gave form to internal tensions within the church hierarchy. Some of these were longstanding and mostly theological: at the top there had always been a humourless rump of traditionalists who resisted Vatican II, and who’d looked to Benedict to restore rank and order: they objected to Francis’s restrictions against the Latin mass; they were apoplectic when he met with Buddhist and Muslim counterparts; they scoffed at his washing the feet of migrants, and refused to implement his move toward blessing same-sex couples.
These tensions were most profoundly registered in confrontations between Francis and the American church, today closely aligned with Trump and the far-right. Embracing a ‘pathological worldview’ forged out of disparate, often peculiar ideological strands—a Catholic version of the ‘prosperity gospel’ that Protestant televangelists have popularised to justify getting rich as ‘the Lord’s work’, for example—they wield control over a vast ‘Catholic media ecosystem’ that attacked Francis relentlessly. The Trumpian Cardinal Raymond Burke tried his best to annul Francis’s papacy, and on the fringe conspiracy theories flourished suggesting that Frances was not the ‘real’ pope, that he was a ‘servant of Satan’—even that Benedict was alive and poised to return.
The festering disaffection with Francis’s leadership at the top of the US church both reflected and encouraged a shift to the right among (overwhelmingly white) lay Catholics who, in an earlier period, were more likely to have voted Democrat. The swing is reflected in the Trump administration, which is ‘stocked with conservative Catholics’ who make up more than a third of [his] cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Catholic convert JD Vance, whose ‘hillbilly theology’—an attempt to deploy Catholic teaching to justify mass deportations—became the target of sharp and direct rebuke from Francis.
Immigration, Genocide: A Refusal to Back Down
The same global crisis that drove mounting inequality unleashed waves of mass migration among those fleeing war and poverty: to his credit Francis went out of his way to place the church on their side. His first trip outside of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where he condemned those who’d transformed the Mediterranean into a ‘giant cemetery’ and called for a ‘reawakening of consciousness’ in a world that has ‘forgotten how to cry’. Three years later he spent Holy Thursday at an asylum centre outside of Rome, washing the feet of refugees, ‘our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from the poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be shared equitably by all.’
These were powerful symbolic gestures at a time when politicians across Europe and the US were busy ramping up anti-immigrant hysteria. They brought Francis into sharp collision with an emergent far right attempting to galvanise new forces around a reactionary agenda, and to his credit he refused to back down. But his principled approach on immigration stands out mainly because of the abject cowardice of every other major political figure over recent years. As Michael Coman observed in The Guardian, ‘As western governments have increasingly battened down the hatches and adopted draconian short-term responses to the new reality, the pope at times appeared a lonely and isolated ally of millions of vulnerable people on the move.’
More recently, his willingness to speak out against the barbarism being unleashed on Palestine—his call for an investigation into whether Israeli actions amount to genocide, his persistent demand for a ceasefire—made Francis the target of vile attacks from Zionists and their allies among the leading imperialist powers.
But among Palestinians living under the bombs in Gaza and besieged in the West Bank, this solidarity—in a context where the whole western establishment has abetted their annihilation—is deeply felt. ‘I think no Palestinian will ever forget when [in 2014 Francis] stopped his car, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem,’ pastor Reverend Munther Isaac told Democracy Now. Christians in Gaza recalled that Francis ‘used to call us daily during the war, on the black days under the bombing—on the days when people were killed and injured[.] We’re like orphans now.’
After Francis: Which Way for the Catholic Church?
As Pablo Castano has observed, it’s likely that we will eventually ‘look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church’. Institutionally, as a relic of a feudal order based on hierarchy and elite rule, on the imposition of a cramped, conservative vision of human sexuality and the subordination of women, the church is far more amenable to a social order that upholds class inequality and regards democracy as a threat.
Indeed for all its history, the church has been a pillar of class domination, performing an important ideological function in reconciling the poor and oppressed to the status quo.
Francis’ papacy represented an attempt to revive the liberal spirit of Vatican II and remake a church fit for the modern world, to clear the stench of corruption and widespread abuse. But the limitations that he himself accepted in defending the church meant that ‘renewal’ could never move beyond rhetoric or gesture.
More importantly, Francis embarked on reform in a context where the ‘humane capitalism’ that he’d long advocated was everywhere off the agenda, and where the austerity-merchants of the neoliberal era had not only overseen massive inequality and a sharp withdrawal of democratic rights, but came to reconcile themselves to pitiless genocide. In this, they prepared the ground for a challenge to their own power from the monsters of an emerging far right. As ever, the future of the Catholic church is bound up with developments in the world at large. With Francis out of the way, his enemies in and outside the church aim to capture the Vatican to aid in imposing the far right’s authoritarian vision globally. We need to resist their project at every turn.
This originally appeared in Rebel.
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