Don’t let nostalgia rewrite the real legacy of Pope Francis
From abortion to LGBTQ rights, his papacy masked deep conservatism with soft language
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I’m surprised by how quickly so many people are trying to rewrite the history of Pope Francis, who died this week at age 88. He was the “People’s Pope,” said countless headlines. Barack Obama said he was a “rare leader who made us want to be better people.” Others called him a reformer.
At some level, everyone’s going to say something nice about a religious leader who just died (and whose PR was far better than that of his predecessors). The best thing you can say regarding the Church’s policies is that Pope Francis wasn’t as awful as he could have been. The Catholic Church, as an institution, is nearly impossible to change. With centuries of dogma having piled up and hardened, it’s never going to dramatically pivot on its traditions or positions. So any push to make it slightly less awful deserves some praise. But just some.
Because on so many hot-button issues, Pope Francis only solidified the worst beliefs of Catholicism.
The name I kept thinking about this week was George W. Bush. During his time in office, he could do no right, if you were a liberal. He was a historically awful president and we’re still feeling the repercussions of many of his decisions, especially on the Supreme Court. And yet, in the light of Donald Trump, it’s easy to understand why so many people are eager to perceive him in a positive light. More than half of Democrats, in a 2018 poll, had a favorable impression of him. In 2020, there were (humorous) billboards with his face that read “Miss me yet?” Sure, he was conservative, but he was a decent guy. (Nope. He was still awful and history doesn’t absolve him of everything he did.)
My point is: Pope Francis might seem great relative to his predecessors and the image of the Catholic Church itself. In some areas, like how he addressed migrants and refugees and how he handled environmentalism, that praise is deserved. But that alone doesn’t make him a hero.
Now is a good time to remind people how he wasn’t a champion in so many other realms.
The Church, for countless people, remains synonymous with child sexual abuse. Pope Francis even implied that people who accused a bishop of covering up abuse should be dismissed unless they had concrete evidence. One obituary says “he did not impose the level of transparency or civil reporting obligations that many advocates demanded.” (As I recently posted, the push for priests to be mandated reporters—including for things they learn about during Confession—has been opposed by the Catholic Church. It took secular politicians in one state to fix that because the Church doesn’t have that level of ethics.)
Women still cannot be ordained. Pope Francis elevated women in some Church-held positions, but it was little more than window dressing. The vast majority of positions in the Vatican, including those that aren’t limited to men, are still held by men. (More than 80%.)
Despite meeting with the Ukrainian president multiple times, he said last year that the country should surrender and cede territory to Russia.
Before the 2024 elections, he falsely claimed the two parties were the same because both Trump and Kamala Harris were “against life,” adding that U.S. voters should choose the “lesser of two evils.” (Trump’s actions will arguably lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people around the world, and abortion rates will likely rise.)
Pope Francis didn’t understand the realities of abortion either. The Catholic Church continues to oppose it despite the harm such draconian policies inflict on women around the world. When the pope called the procedure an “extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense,” he simultaneously condemned “violence against women,” not realizing that forcing a woman to give birth against her will is indeed a form of violence against her. In 2019, he said having an abortion was like hiring a hitman.
What about LGBTQ issues? This is the pope who, early in his papacy, was asked about discrimination against gays and lesbians, and responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?” The LGBTQ publication The Advocate named him their “Person of the Year” in response.
That didn’t age well.
While Pope Francis spoke out against criminalizing gay sex, he also said children were better off with heterosexual parents.
He said priests could bless same-sex couples… but added that such blessings were not the same as a marriage sacrament, and that priests would not be blessing the relationship itself, and that the blessings couldn’t be given in conjunction with a civil union ceremony (much less a same-sex wedding). In that sense, it was hardly any different from blessing two men or two women independently.
He said throughout his papacy that gay men should not be trained to be priests, even if they were celibate, and only relented on that a couple of months ago; even when he did, it was to say being gay shouldn’t automatically be held against potential priests but should be one of many factors considered in enrolling new people in seminaries.
Behind closed doors, he referred to gay men using a homophobic slur. Twice.
As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni put it, “He gave me and many other gay people hope. Then he reminded us of why we never look to his church for our dignity.”
When it came to transgender people, Pope Francis was closer to J.K. Rowling than any decent human being. The Vatican says trans identities seek to “annihilate the concept of nature,” and Pope Francis didn’t challenge that at all. In fact, last year, in a document he approved called "Infinite Dignity" (Dignitas Infinita), the Church said people who subscribe to “gender theory” are merely making a “personal self-determination,” as if being trans is a choice (not true). The document also claimed that sexual difference was the “greatest possible difference that exists between living beings” (not true and in denial of any sort of gender spectrum) and that gender-affirming operations threatened a person’s “unique dignity” (not true and in fact completely backwards). By that logic, having an appendectomy or getting LASIK was also a violation of God’s perfect design because you’re altering what you were born with.
Pope Francis said trans people could be baptized, but only because he believed anyone could be baptized.
You get the idea. If this is the best the Catholic Church had to offer the world, the world can do so much better.
One final point: I’ve seen a lot of posts highlighting one particular interaction the pope had with a young boy in 2018. While visiting a poor area in Rome, he comforted a distraught child whose father, an atheist, had recently died. The boy wondered: Was his father in Heaven?
"Does God abandon his children when they are good?" the Pope asked.
"No!" the children shouted.
He replied: "There, Emanuele, that is the answer."
That sounds lovely… but only when you hear it out of context.
How did Pope Francis know the atheist father was a “good” person? Only because the child said he and his siblings had been baptized. “It is easier as a believer to baptize your children than to baptize them when you are not a believer,” the pope said. “Surely this pleased God very much.”
Think about what that means. The implication is that the father’s life wasn’t valuable to God on its own. God’s judgment depended only on whether this man allowed his children to participate in a Catholic ritual. Because he did—and we don’t know why he did—God was happy. Had he not done so, then I suppose he would deserve to burn in Hell for eternity?
While the child may have been consoled in the moment, the response sounded more like a Christian youth pastor who tries to connect with atheists by saying he also doesn’t believe in a bearded man who sits on a cloud in the sky. That form of childish theology only works on people who haven’t thought about the topic for more than 30 seconds.
The only reason this child was so distraught in the first place was because religion had led him to believe his father, despite being a good person, may be suffering in the afterlife. We should be furious at the people who lied to that boy about Hell, not praising the man who swears that boy’s father avoided it because he allowed his children to be dunked in water.
The silver lining is that the next pope will likely continue taking these baby steps rather than returning to form on the few areas where Pope Francis was genuinely a force for good. Religion News Service points out that the pope hand-picked 108 of the 135 cardinals who will vote for his successor. Given that the next pope will need two-thirds of all votes, that’s a super-majority. The odds are good, then, that the next pope will be aligned with Pope Francis rather than someone more conservative.
The next pope won’t change Catholic doctrine in any meaningful way, either. But he may upset the traditionalists nonetheless, just as Pope Francis did. That may be the best we can hope for.
I don't write Bergoglio off entirely, but I'm with Hemant on this. The Vatican's general attitude toward women, the LGBTQ+ community, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers is mostly reflected without change in Frankie, and that should surprise no one. The Catholic Church is a monolith of doctrine and dogma, with roughly 1,600 years of social inertia doing its damnedest to hold it in place. It changes only when the actions of human beings who prefer to live in the 21st century rather than the 5th force the issue.
Frankie may have moved the Catholic needle a LITTLE, but only a little, and the Curia lost its shit and resisted every minuscule step of the way. Expect the same with the next so-called "Vicar of Christ," regardless of his attitude.
Francis gave the impression of a compassionate man, and I hope it wasn't just a paint job. Judging by the reaction to his death by right wing politicians and conservative clergy, there can be little doubt as to where their actual moral compasses point, and it is not toward social justice. I have long felt that people tend to value the authoritarianism of the institutional churches far more than anything Jesus supposedly said. It is ever so much easier to march blindly along behind a set of rigid rules, than it is to take on the difficult task of thinking for one's self.