THE outpouring of grief following the death of Pope Francis was like a wall of noise, a practically uninterrupted blanket of praise, a seamless garment of tribute. Even his enemies fought to temper their public comments, undoubtedly conscious of the enduring Latin injunction de mortuis nil nisi bonum, that one must not speak ill of the dead.
It was only in private conversations that one could truly gauge the true sentiments of rank-and-file Catholics. One devout woman, orthodox but very much in the mainstream of the Church, confided to me that when she heard of the death of Francis on Easter Monday, ‘I couldn’t help but weep with immense relief – thanking the Lord that it was finally over’.
The ‘it’ in this context is not the awful suffering Francis had endured over 38 days in hospital, but his pontificate. This pope was one of the most divisive leaders the Catholic Church has seen for centuries, and he constantly exasperated good Catholics.
Catholics believe the Petrine ministry is endowed with a specific charism, or spiritual gifts, so a pope may serve as a focus of unity by teaching with clarity and encouraging Christians to persevere in faith. ‘Strengthen your brothers,’ Jesus told St Peter in the Gospel of St Luke (22: 32). Francis, however, was a serial heresiarch, who deliberately resorted to ambiguity to sow confusion among the faithful and subvert the teachings and traditions of the Church.
He undermined the teaching of Jesus on the indissolubility of marriage, for example, and introduced blessings for same-sex couples. He allowed a pagan earth goddess called a Pachamama to be honoured in a Roman church (it was subsequently stolen and thrown in the River Tiber by a man convinced that idolatry was still a sin forbidden by the first of the Ten Commandments). He elevated climate change ideology to religious dogma and handed over control of the Catholic Church in China to the Communists. Francis effectively did away with Hell by promoting the belief that it was empty and that only a ‘cult’ believed otherwise. Consequently, one did not have to be sorry for one’s sins to receive absolution under this pope or to be in a state of grace to receive Holy Communion.
Heterodox opinions were uniformly tolerated among the clergy, with Francis refusing to sanction even Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp when he argued that the euthanasia of the elderly was as morally justifiable as killing an enemy on the battlefield in a just war. But woe to anyone who expressed orthodox opinions too loudly. Francis brutally suppressed the traditional Latin Mass because it was attractive to such Catholics and he removed a succession of bishops from office because they dissented from his agenda. He would also sack any priest who dared to publicly criticise him.
When I was interviewed by GB News on Monday, it was put to me that Francis was a ‘humble’ man and, although I wished to be charitable, I had to demur.
Francis was an extreme authoritarian who ruled by motu proprio (of his own initiative) because such ukase-style edicts allowed him to bypass the checks and balances of normal government. In this respect, he was like a Russian czar, an absolute monarch or a mob boss, down to the throwing of tantrums and swearing like a dockyard labourer when he was slow to get his way. He wielded his power capriciously, cherry picking Catholic teaching or overriding canon law to give weight to his own prejudices. Sometimes, he would ignore the rules completely. For instance, he made covid injections mandatory for Vatican employees, even though Church teaching upheld their right to reject such medical impositions.
He used his authority to protect sinister friends from justice, such as Father Marko Rupnik, a fellow Jesuit who was accused of the serial rape of more than a dozen nuns, sometimes in quasi-satanic rituals. Rupnik was excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically) after he granted absolution in the confessional to a woman with whom he was having sex. This was an offence of such enormity under the Code of Canon Law that only the Pope could lift the sentence. Rupnik was rehabilitated and to this day is a priest in good standing who is living in a convent (where else?). It is good to have friends in high places.
Simultaneously, Francis would deride faithful priests as spinsters, mummies’ boys and pansies when they resisted conformity with a world made more miserable than joyful by its saturation in disenchanted sex and pornography. It makes one wonder if there is any truth in the unsubstantiated rumour that emerged in a German magazine some years ago that Francis fathered a son with his housekeeper in Argentina and that the child died in his teens.
The charges against Francis are so numerous that they could fill a sheet longer than the Lorsch Litany. If Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were guilty of just a fraction of them, the media would have hounded them to their deaths.
For Francis, the mainstream media have only praise. The reason for this is that they judge popes in purely secular terms. They like what they see in Francis so much that they have effectively canonised him as one of their saints – as a pope of the people and the poor, a reformer and moderniser, a pope for women, gays, the environment, for people of other faiths. But look more closely, and one will see not a pope of the people, but of the elites, not of the poor but of political systems which perpetuate poverty, a pope not just of migrants but of mass migration, even at the price of what is left of Christian Europe. Take the 2016 murder in Rouen, France, of Fr Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit by Islamists as he stood at the altar. Afterwards, Francis refused to attribute specific religious motivation to the atrocity. ‘I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence,’ he told journalists. ‘There are violent Catholics!’ True, but in the cold-blooded butchery of Fr Hamel, there was a distinction that Francis had deliberately failed to make.
Informed Catholics don’t give a hoot about the political posturing of Francis because they know it is about as non-binding on them as his favourite colour, breed of cat or football team. His political opinions matter no more than the opinions of anyone else. The political views of Francis had no lesser or greater weight than the political opinions, say, of JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, a recent convert to the Catholic faith and a man whose views would have been in diametric opposition. To impart political views is not what a pope is for, unless he is defending fundamental human rights, properly understood, or when the salvation of souls requires it. Catholics took Francis’ with a bucket of salt. In Italy, for example, the public became accustomed to doing the opposite of what he asked them to do, especially on migration, and voted for politicians like Giorgia Meloni.
The same went for his native Argentina where he served as Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires but where, perhaps significantly, he never returned as pope. He intervened in the 2023 presidential elections from Rome as much as he could, however, when Javier Milei emerged as the frontrunner. Milei was anathema to Francis, who saw him as a populist, an Argentine Donald Trump guilty of the heinous crime of describing the climate change narrative as a ‘Socialist lie’ which served the promotion of population control through abortion, which he described as ‘murder’.
Francis went all out to stop him, railing against him as a ‘pied piper’ who promised to charm the people with promises of wealth creation only to ‘make them drown’, and mobilising the Argentine Church to campaign for opposition candidates. Milei fought back by calling the Pope an ‘imbecile’ and a ‘spreader of Communism’, among other grave insults. He won the election. Rubén Peretó, professor at the National University of Cuyo, Argentina, later told Vatican journalist Aldo María Valli that Melei’s triumph ‘confirms what everyone here knows: Argentines do not like Pope Francis and do not want him’.
‘For years, when news about Bergoglio appears in newspapers and portals, administrators have been forced to close readers’ comments, most of which are derogatory and harsh. Many might have thought that the rejection of Bergoglio was widespread only among those who read and informed themselves […] it is proven that it is present in all social strata, even among the poor. Precisely for this reason, Bergoglio will never come to Argentina, because his trip would be a failure.’
The Argentinians clearly knew Francis better than the rest of us. In fairness, it is also true that Francis had many good points and that he did many good things. Among them was the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman in 2019 as England’s newest saint. The Victorian cleric might one day be proclaimed a doctor of the Church because of his theological teachings on conscience. Ironically, his writings offer some succour and encouragement to Catholics troubled by popes like the very man who made him a saint.
‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts,’ wrote Cardinal Newman in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk of 1875, ‘I shall drink to the Pope, if you please – still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’
Newman, a stalwart opponent of religious liberalism, was a prophet of our times. My guess is that he saw Francis coming.
