Pope Francis will be remembered for a pastoral papacy, from his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, in a simple white cassock, to his funeral instructions that his coffin not be elevated.
He was the first Pope from the Global South, the first Jesuit to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, and the first to pick the name Francis. He also named 108 of the 135 cardinals who will pick his successor.
“What a breath of fresh air he was to our Church, coming at a moment when we needed him so badly,” Father Michael Ryan, pastor of St. James Cathedral, wrote in a letter to parishoners. He and Francis embraced at the Vatican, and both embraced the concept of an inclusive, tolerant church.
Roman Catholicism has reached a fork in the road in its 2,000-year history. It can follow the reformist path of Francis, who welcomed dialogue and debate, or opt for restoration of discipline and dogma and traditional ways. Pope Francis followed a pair of disciplinarians, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who cracked down on theologians, disapproved of liberation theology, and did not tolerate ministry to LGBTQ Catholics.
Francis did not change church doctrine, but he did change attitude. “Change of process is more important than change of product: It’s deeper, it’s more lasting,” Cardinal Michael Czerny told National Catholic Reporter.
“Process” meant dialogue with folk such as Fr. James Martin, an advocate for gay rights in the Church. On Holy Thursday, Francis washed the feet of prisoners and the homeless, not cardinals. Consider the contrast. When Pope Pius XII walked in the Vatican gardens, groundskeepers were forbidden from addressing or even looking at him.
And process meant a change in personnel. Francis traveled the world,, often to places where the Church is a small minority of the population or has faced persecution. As a result, Sri Lanka has a cardinal. So do Mongolia and East Timor. Such historic sees as Milan and Paris — and Los Angeles and Philadelphia in the U.S. — are not represented in the College of Cardinals. But Francis named a cardinal from very Protestant Sweden.
Notably, Francis did not bestow a cardinal’s red hat on reactionary Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, but elevated San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy. An advocate for immigrants, McElroy was recently named Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Likewise, no red hat for Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who wanted to deny communion to Joe Biden and other pro-choice Catholic politicians.
Francis preached critically about “clericalism,” the tendency of some church hierarchs to live lavishly and cut off from the laity. He roomed in a Vatican guest house and never occupied the papal apartments. He also decried those in the hierarchy — particularly in America — obsessed with church teaching on sexuality.
As well, Francis was an environmentalist, stressing misuse of God’s creation as well as the fact that poor people bear the consequences of a despoiled Earth. He decried a “throwaway culture” and lands turned into an”ecological desert.” He wrote: “Most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentrations of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others released mainly as a result of human activity.”
In both preaching and living, Pope Francis drew parallels with St. Francis, whom he described as “a man of poverty, a man of peace, the man who protects creation.” He then posed the question: “These days we do not have a very good relation to creation, do we?”
Francis used his encyclicals as teaching documents, using his papacy to push back against such anti-imigrant politicians as Donald Trump. “Francis was a pastor, first and foremost, and a good pastor teaches,” observed Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters. In turn, Francis learned from people dismissed by his predecessors.
The Catholic Church is a conservative institution, steeped in tradition. Francis did not change doctrine but moved to make the church less forbidding. He has allowed clergy to bless same-sex unions, although not to perform marriages. He opened the communion rail to divorced and remarried Catholics as well as to the faithful from the LGBTQ community.
His death has brought vigorous debate on whether Francis went too far or not far enough. For instance, bishops in South America wanted to address the clergy shortage by ordaining older married men. Francis balked. He also vetoed any consideration of ordaining women, while giving them major administrative responsibilities. He halted a Vatican crackdown on the largest organization of American nuns and fired the German cardinal behind it. (Seattle’s then-Archbishop J. Peter Sartain was point man investigating the sisters’ “radical feminist tendencies.”)
Right-thinking Catholics gather each year at a pricey Napa Valley resort in California, under the aegis of the Napa Institute. Latin masses are said. Attendees hear from such prelates as San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordeleone. Capitalism is celebrated. The keynoter a couple years back was ex-Attorney General Bill Barr, who reintroduced the federal death penalty.
An undercurrent has been the planning for a post-Francis papacy. Australian Cardinal George Pell, a Francis critic, seemed ready for the role of “great elector” who would engineer election of the next Pope. But Pell died. A majority of cardinals appointed by John Paul II and Benedict are now over 80 and ineligible to vote. A two-thirds vote is required for white smoke to come out of the chimney.
The cardinals named by Francis come from all over the world, and don’t know each other. Mongolia and the Central African Republic are not centers of Christian thought. The prospects are for a lengthy conclave.
All the deliberations and prayers are secret. What goes on in the Sistine Chapel stays in the Sistine Chapel. As for campaigning, an old Italian joke goes as follows: One who enters a conclave as Pope will exit as a Cardinal.
The article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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