The secular chattering class was enchanted by the new “progressive” pope’s penchant for combining political liberalism with doctrinal and liturgical looseness. His deliberately casual style—appearing in selfies with a clown nose, placing a beach ball on the altar at St. Mary Major, driving around in a Ford Focus, tweeting out his left-wing musings, and so on—became the subject of innumerable articles of praise.
They also took hope from his “collegiality,” which they saw in his unusual decision to form a special cabinet of cardinals to advise him. He created an ecclesiastical gang of eight (it is now nine), which liberals interpreted as a sign that he wished to downgrade the papacy.
“Shortly after his election he named a group of eight cardinal advisers from around the world, reversing centuries of precedent that the Pope, as Christ’s vicar on earth, acts alone—and creating a model for a more collegial approach to Church governance,” observed Vanity Fair. “He has likened the ‘group of eight’ to a working group, and their meetings—several times a year—are held in the guesthouse conference room rather than an august Vatican chamber. The point is clear: those cardinals aren’t princes of the Church; they’re heads of households—a Kitchen Cabinet.”24
The Council of Cardinals
His appointments to the Council of Cardinals were highly revealing. He stacked it with some of the most liberal cardinals, such as Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany. An opponent of free-market economics, Marx, in a jokey reference to his name and to his socialist politics, titled one of his books Das Kapital. Marx is a supporter of Communion for the divorced-and-remarried and has called on the Church to relax her moral teachings. Exhausted by Marx’s left-wing musings, Archbishop Jan Paweł Lenga of Kazakhstan once said of him, “There was Marx, Karl Marx. And if present Marx says similar things, then there is no real difference.” 25
Marx is an outspoken critic of the Church’s teaching on homosexual acts, saying that “the history of homosexuals in our society is very bad because we have done a lot to marginalize [them].” South African Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier tweeted in reply, “God help us! Next we’ll have to apologize for teaching that adultery is a sin! Political correctness is today’s major heresy!”
Protected by Pope Francis, Marx has disregarded such criticism. As one of the most powerful members of the Church, he is using his clout to advance the agenda of gay activists. “We have to respect the decisions of people,” he has said. “We as a church cannot be against it.”
Pope Francis made an open socialist, the Honduran Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the chairman of the Council of Cardinals. The Catholic left applauded his appointment and some liberals, recognizing his power, call him the “vice pope.”26 Rodríguez frequently lashes out at free-market economics, caricaturing critics of climate change activism as greedy capitalists: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”
“Who caused the recent crisis in the financial market? Certainly not the poor. It is wealthy America and wealthy Europe that caused it. And this crisis was not made up by Liberation Theology or a consequence of the option for the poor. Those who do not criticize capitalism are wrong not to do so,” he has said.27
Rodríguez is equally liberal on theological matters. Not long after Pope Francis plucked him from obscurity and made him chairman of the Council of Cardinals, he blasted traditional Catholics in a speech in which he promised “no more excommunicating the world, then, or trying to solve the world’s problems by returning to authoritarianism, rigidity and moralism.”
Rodríguez feels safe enough behind his “vice pope” status to take shots at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, whom Pope Francis inherited from Pope Benedict XVI. Objecting to Müller’s opposition to Communion for the divorced-and-remarried, Rodríguez said dismissively, “He is above all a German Theology professor and he only thinks in black-and-white terms.”28
Müller has been the odd man out at the Vatican, clear from the fact that Pope Francis ignored his conservative counsel during the Synod on the Family. “Don’t go telling on me to Cardinal Müller,” Pope Francis joked to priests at a 2016 pastoral conference in Rome after he made a heterodox comment about marriage. According to the Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, Cardinal Müller’s advice “isn’t worth a thing” in the eyes of Pope Francis. Magister reports that Müller’s criticisms of the synod, “in spite of his role as guardian of doctrine,” didn’t even receive a serious hearing from Francis.29
After Pope Francis released Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), his apostolic exhortation reflecting on the Synod of the Family, he made a point of asking the liberal Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, rather than Müller, to present the document at a press conference. Another holdover from the Benedict era, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who is prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, has also been frozen out by Pope Francis. His recommendations are consistently ignored.30
Meanwhile, the power of liberal churchmen grows. After Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Bombay, was added to the Council of Cardinals, he began making statements in defense of gay activism, a rare position for a cleric to take in conservative India. “I believe maybe people have this orientation that God has given them,” he holds. In a letter to LGBT groups, he apologized for “judgmental” priests and told his clergy to “tone down” their sermons.31
The lone American on the Council of Cardinals is Boston Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who is a political liberal in the mold of Pope Francis. A gun control advocate, O’Malley befuddled conservative Catholics by saying after the terrorist Boston bombings that the “inability of Congress to enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture.”32
For liberals reading the papal tea leaves, these appointments carried significant meaning. Their excitement continued to build amidst reports from the New York Times and other outlets that Pope Francis, during his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires, had endorsed legislation in favor of gay civil unions, an unprecedented stance for a Catholic cardinal to take during the Benedict era.
Many Catholic editors politely averted their gaze from this report, but liberals understood its import. Pope Benedict XVI had explicitly told Catholic bishops that support for gay civil unions violated the traditional teaching of the Church. When the press asked Pope Francis about this instruction, he said, “I do not remember that document well.”33 The more plausible explanation was that he simply didn’t agree with it.
Indifferent to Benedict’s conservatism, Bergoglio would often ignore or relativize documents from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that conflicted with his vision for the Church. After becoming pope, he urged other religious to adopt the same attitude. In 2013, he shocked the faithful by telling a group of priests and nuns from the Caribbean and Latin America, who were visiting Rome in June of that year, to follow his rebellious example and disregard correction from the Church’s doctrinal office.
“Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine [of the Faith] will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing,” he said to them. “But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward… Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up.”34
The Celebrity Left’s Pope
Long critical of the Church for “narrowness” and “rigidity,” the left thrilled to the rhetoric of a pope willing to echo its anti-Catholic invective. The pope’s irreverent asides made it clear to liberals that he disliked conservative Catholics for many of the same reasons that they do.
It delighted the left to see the pope confounding conservative Catholics. The more he adopted the rhetoric and causes of the left, the more praise he garnered from anti-Catholic celebrities
. In the words of the ribald comedian Chris Rock, Francis was the “Floyd Mayweather of popes.” “I might be crazy but I got this weird feeling that the new pope might be the greatest man alive,” Rock marveled.35
Actress Jane Fonda could not contain her excitement either, tweeting out to her followers: “Gotta love new Pope. He cares about the poor, hates dogma.” Actress Salma Hayek, a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, asserted, “Pope Francis is the best pope that has ever existed.”36
Fonda’s ex-husband, the late Tom Hayden, spoke for fellow 1960s radicals when he called the election of Pope Francis “the greatest moment in empowering spiritual progressives in decades.” “Francis is on the side of liberation theology, working from within, towards his moment,” he wrote. “His choice is more miraculous, if you will, than the rise of Barack Obama in 2008.”37
HBO host Bill Maher, speaking to Rick Santorum, the Catholic former senator and presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, chuckled over the bewilderment Pope Francis was causing. “What I want to ask is, I mean, I’m not a Catholic, I’m an atheist,” Maher said. “But I like the pope better than you do. You’re saying the pope should stick to what he knows, and I find that ridiculous.”38 When Santorum appeared on CNN, host Chris Cuomo asked him, “Why aren’t you more like your pope?”
The trendy literary community saw Francis as a fictional progressive pope come to life. The Atlantic noted the uncanny resemblance of Pope Francis to “Francesco,” the modernizing pope from the 1979 bestseller The Vicar of Christ. In that book, Francesco devotes his pontificate to left-wing political causes, sells off Vatican treasures to fight world hunger, and waters down traditional teaching where it conflicts with the sexual revolution.39
Gawker, a scurrilous, anti-Catholic (and now defunct) website, fondly began calling the pontiff “Pope Frank.” Week after week in the first year of his papacy, “Pope Frank” mollified the Western political and media elite, signaling that under his pontificate the Church would turn away from traditional teaching and toward the promotion of left-wing political causes.
He peppered his first papal exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), with familiar left-wing clichés about the need “to change the world” and “to leave this earth somehow better than we found it” while denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. He encouraged priests to operate like political activists in order to protect this “magnificent planet,” and he cast the Church as a partner to the United Nations. Throughout the document, he argued that a Church unwilling to engage in left-wing politics stands on the “sidelines in the fight for justice.”
Of particular interest to the left-wing media is that he took bitter aim at traditionalists within the Church. “Certain customs not directly connected to the heart of the Gospel, even some which have deep historical roots, are no longer properly understood and appreciated. Some of these customs may be beautiful, but they no longer serve as means of communicating the Gospel. We should not be afraid to re-examine them,” he said, offering a preview of his anti-traditionalist program as pope.
Another theme popular with liberals, decentralization, figured largely into the document. Decentralization has long been seen by the left as a means of liberalizing the Church. Instead of challenging this view, Pope Francis pandered to it. Making it sound as if Jesus Christ, who founded the Church on St. Peter, favors a revamping of the papacy, he wrote: “I am conscious of the need to promote a sound ‘decentralization;… Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others, I too must think about a conversion of the papacy [to]… help make the exercise of my ministry more faithful to the meaning which Jesus Christ wished to give it and to the present needs of evangelization… We have made little progress in this regard. The papacy and the central structures of the universal Church also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion.”
To that end, he said that he was willing to confer power, “including genuine doctrinal authority,” upon national conferences of bishops, and he vowed to undo “centralization” that “complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach.” His predecessors had always taught that those national conferences possess no doctrinal authority at all.
Though ostensibly an exhortation to engage in evangelization, the document said nothing about the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation and spoke of missionaries more like celibate social workers than transmitters of the Catholic faith.
The liberal media grasped the significance of this document, praising its “inclusive” tone and content.40 But it drew even more hope from his off-the-cuff interviews. In a series of them during the first year of his pontificate, Pope Francis waved a white flag in the culture war.
“I Have Never Been a Right-Winger”
The Church is too “obsessed’ with the issues of abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, he declared in a bombshell interview in the fall of 2013.41 For liberals who view the Church as the chief impediment to the spread of the sexual revolution, these words were revolutionary. The pope was parroting one of their favorite talking points, that the Church needs to outgrow its “hang-ups” about modern sexual mores.
The interview appeared in the pages of several left-wing Jesuit publications, one of which was America, a magazine known in Catholic circles for its opposition to the Church’s traditional moral teachings and theology. The interview put to rest the false narrative of Pope Francis as a “conservative Jesuit,” which some commentators in the Catholic press had advanced at the beginning of his papacy. Pope Francis assured his fellow liberal Jesuits that he is as liberal as any of them. “I have never been a right-winger,” he said.
The interview astonished orthodox Catholics, as the pope used it to ratify the principal criticism of the Church’s most persistent critics. “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” he said, referring to the Church’s contested moral teachings. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” He would later make the random claim that the most important moral issues facing the world today are youth unemployment and the neglect of the elderly.
His aversion to the moral issues that he mentioned explained the notable silences of his otherwise garrulous pontificate. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis had not yet made a major statement on abortion, not even during his homily at a special Vatican Mass with antiabortion activists.” “I’m a little bit disappointed in Pope Francis that he hasn’t… said much about unborn children, about abortion,” Bishop Thomas Tobin said. “Many people have noticed that.”42
When Pope Francis did eventually get around to criticizing abortion, he added the false, insulting, and fashionable caveat that the Church has “done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty.”
“Although he has shown no intention of retracting the Church’s opposition to abortion, he has alarmed conservatives by taking a less forceful tone than his predecessors,” reported Reuters. After Pope Francis announced in 2015 at the beginning of the “year of mercy” that he wanted to make it easier for women to get forgiveness for abortions by not having to seek absolution from bishops, Catholics for Choice rejoiced, “This is a pope who is not stuck in the pelvic zone.”
“Pope Francis: Church Too Focused on Gays and Abortion,” blared the BBC in a typical headline from the beginning of his pontificate. Besieged by such stories, conservative Catholics expressed confusion. In their experience since Vatican II, the Church, particularly in Western countries, hadn’t shown a preoccupation with controversial moral issues but a cowardly avoidance of them.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City, in a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal not long b
efore Pope Francis’s election, spoke about this silence of the Church on hot-button moral issues after Vatican II. He conceded that the post–Vatican II Church in America had “gotten gun-shy” on those issues.
Pope Paul VI’s encyclical opposing artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle,’” he said. The soft-pedaling started, he continued, “when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more and more like everybody else.”43
That is precisely the stance to which the Church has returned under Pope Francis. Disappointing conservative Catholics, Dolan quickly changed his tune after the election of Pope Francis. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, he oddly affirmed the propaganda of the Church’s critics by saying, “We have to do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people. I admit, we haven’t been too good at that.”
The Political Pope Page 3