Symposium on Francis' Pontificate at Catholic World Report

Link to symposium - https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/04/22/pope-francis-symposium/

Frankie goes to heaven

The hours since His Holiness died have been intense. I’m more emotional, and far sadder, than I expected to be. I loved him: as Pope, and as the frail, fragile, beautiful, and earnest man he was. I’ve been praying for him, but stepping back from the sadness to do interviews with the media, I’ve been asked the same question again and again: “How will Pope Francis be remembered?” These interviews are short, so there’s no time for a proper answer. A proper answer would begin with, “Remembered by whom?”

In secular media, Pope Francis was the everyman hero who stepped out of the TV shows and movies of the late 20th century. He wasn’t bound by stuffy convention; his speech, like his shoes, was plain and unpretentious. He stood up to the establishment and blew the minds of the ossified old curia in Rome. He scandalized the rigid pearl-clutchers with his unconventional ideas. In the secular imagination, he was Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, or Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam.

To Catholic conservatives, he was the embodiment of 1980s theology and Church culture, resurrected like a character in a bad soap opera, dead in season 3, inexplicably back in season 4, stepping out of the shower like Bobby Ewing in Dallas. They saw his ‘vibe-first’ theology as unclear but implemented with an iron fist, clamping down on the Latin Mass, silencing critics. His humility struck them as performative; his anti-clericalism, paradoxically, as papal authoritarianism.

The first group may remember Francis as the West remembers Mikhail Gorbachev, beloved reformer, rebel, and the man who, intentionally or not, collapsed the old regime. The second group may also see him as a Gorbachev figure, but like the last loyal Bolsheviks, they regard him as someone who sought the approval of the Western liberal elite, even if it meant surrendering the Church’s identity to gain it.

My point is twofold. First, how Francis is remembered will depend entirely on who is doing the remembering. And second, that Pope Francis, from the very beginning, has seemed like a dated figure. The problems he identified in the Church were often ghosts from another era. His solutions felt like they belonged not to the second decade of the 21st century, but to the final quarter of the 20th. He was a man shaped by the 1980s. He saw the curia and the rigid ideologues he opposed as the two old white millionaires from Trading Places. He saw himself as Eddie Murphy.

Francis attacked a starched, arrogant, joyless Church, one whose priests harangued people with long sermons. I’m 51. That Church is not the one I knew. As a child of the ’80s, I went to Mass with woolly-jumper-wearing priests and folk choirs who, two decades earlier, had swayed to Peter, Paul and Mary. That Church wanted to smell like the sheep; it wanted to move past the starched, arrogant, joyless Church of the past. It was, in essence, the Church Pope Francis longed for—the very Church I grew up in, in Ireland in the 1980s.

So too with his theology, Francis often felt decades out of date. He critiqued theology rooted in abstract principles and railed against an all-male theological establishment. But theology hasn’t been an all-male discipline in a very long time. His war on abstract theology felt at least fifty years late. If you survey theological departments across the West, Francis, as ever, seemed to be preaching to (or “journeying with”) the already converted.

The arrogant Church he attacked had largely disappeared before his papacy began. The sexual abuse crisis, and the resulting public revulsion, left many priests too cowed to critique anyone from the pulpit. I’ve attended Sunday Mass in Ireland where priests, anxious not to upset or delay a restless congregation, skipped the homily entirely. In places like Canada, where disgust with the Church is so visceral that dozens of churches have been burned to the ground, Francis’ critique of clerical arrogance has been egregiously out of step.

Perhaps his war on clericalism was directed elsewhere. But here, too, there’s danger: the risk of imposing a Western lens on the Global South, assuming those churches are “where we were” fifty years ago. It’s a quasi-colonial posture, one that borders on the racist, seeing non-Western churches as merely our theological and cultural past.

Even his theological language, his deep Marian devotion, his frequent invocations of Satan, have all felt more like the lexicon of the past than the present. He seemed shaped by a particular time and place, and he stayed there, bearing both the blessings and burdens of Argentine Catholicism from six decades ago. Among the blessings was surely his Marian piety, more explicit, more intense, and more real than in any pope of the last hundred years. Among the burdens was a desire to push the Church “forward” into a vision that, in truth, had already arrived in the 1980s: a Church stripped of liturgical richness that it deemed pompous and pretentious; a theology not critical of modernity but formed by it, adopting its assumptions, then adding, with a hint of biblical justification, “us too!” A Church that broke with generations past –those portrayed as indifferent to the poor, inward-looking, clericalist – and embraced a Church with the smell of the sheep. But this Church was a novelty only in the imagination of Pope Francis. I only experienced a Church that didn’t smell of the sheep in movies, a sinister Church of actors with British accents. I heard about it in stories told by older clerics or lapsed Catholics, stories about the bad old days of an arrogant Church and I believed these stories. Like the stories I heard as a child about banshees, these stories shook and scared me, but they referred to a past, that, if it ever existed, was long gone by the time I was around.

Wider secular society loved him. Progressive culture, by its nature, is often retrograde. Consider how the French Revolution idealized ancient Rome. Its enemies exist as much in the imagination as in reality. Cultural artifacts like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Netflix’s Adolescence are the “evidence” for things they oppose. Echoing this in style and content, Pope Francis’s progressivism made him a beloved figure in the wider culture. This is not a bad thing. The record numbers of people received into the Church just two days ago at the Easter Vigil may never have had Catholicism within their “Overton Window” were it not for the “Francis Effect.” But these same people long for something radically different to wider progressive culture. They long for something eternal, something real and true. Therefore, in order to build on things Pope Francis made possible, the Church will need a very different kind of leadership, one for the second decade of the 21st century, not the eight decade of the 20th.