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By Eric Sammons

I remember distinctly the day Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope.

Working for a diocese, I was in the middle of a meeting with an older woman and a deacon. They wanted to know if they could start a support group for families with members who were same-sex attracted. The woman’s son was a practising homosexual, and she wanted to support him in his lifestyle (i.e., endorse sin). I was in the process of putting the kibosh on this idea when we were interrupted, “White smoke!”

Like most American Catholics, I had no idea who Jorge Bergoglio was, so I was open-minded about the new Francis pontificate. But before long, I was having misgivings. Only a few months into his pontificate, Francis uttered the infamous “Who am I to judge?” line, and just a few weeks later, that older woman and the deacon were back in my office, insisting that the Church had changed. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to have their pro-LGTBQ group? Even the pope was on their side now!

Picking up my kibosh where I’d left off, I explained why the group they envisioned could not be approved by the diocese, giving an explanation of what the Church actually teaches about sexuality as a rational basis. I concluded with the soon-to-become-familiar “I think what Pope Francis really meant was…” But I did have an uneasy feeling that this pontificate was going to make my job a lot harder. Little did I know.

Evaluating Pope Francis

A social convention dictates that we not speak ill of the dead. The deceased person can’t defend himself, and we are liable to hurt the feelings of his mourning loved ones.

I think we can all agree that there are times when this social convention is put aside. One of those times is when the person in question was a well-known figure who had taken on the mantle of a great responsibility and wielded power that had a profound impact on the world.

It would be not just dishonest but silly to obfuscate the sad reality:

Francis was a terrible pope.

Examples of the problematic nature of his pontificate abound, from his offhand comments, to his choice of close advisors, to his official acts. It would be impossible to list them all, but a small sampling should suffice to demonstrate the failings of his reign.

Who among us did not start to dread his travel by plane? These trips seemed to yield the most notorious sampling of his opinions, ranging from the famous “Who am I to judge?” to the denigrating “Catholics don’t have to be like rabbits”, which, early on, sowed widespread confusion about the Church’s teaching on sexuality and human life.

Then, of course, there were his many obsessive and outdated criticisms of traditional Catholics, which would have been funny for their stereotypical nature if they weren’t so hurtful to sincere and faithful souls.

Choice of Closest Confidants

They say “personnel is policy,” and the radical policies of Pope Francis were reflected in his close advisors.

He consistently surrounded himself with questionable and even downright evil men, including Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, Fr. Marko Rupnik, and Fr. James Martin. Any pope can be prone to mistakes when appointing men to high positions, but Francis seemed to delight in having some of the worst people as his closest confidants.

Scandalous Official Acts

And then there were his official acts, which are the most scandalous because they are the most authoritative. There’s Amoris Latitia, which used tortured logic to open up the reception of Holy Communion to those who were in a state of grave sin. Then there was Traditionis Custodes, which was a petty attempt to crush the very demographic in the Church that was growing, simply because it didn’t conform to his 1960s version of Catholicism.

In 2019, Francis signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration, which claimed that God willed various religions and put Islam on essentially the same footing as Catholicism. Disturbingly, we don’t even know all the details of his scandalous deal with the Chinese government, because it’s been kept secret from us.

This list could go on in saecula saeculorum. In fact, I’d wager I’ve forgotten more of the scandalous things Francis did than I can remember. On the few occasions that he said something undoubtedly Catholic, like a statement against abortion, relieved Catholics, in a special variation of Stockholm syndrome, heaped him with extravagant praise.

Those same Catholics will try to gaslight us now into thinking Francis was a great pope. Maybe they supported his progressive agenda, or maybe they’re afraid to recognise the possibility that a pope can simply be a bad one. For the latter group, it’s worth rewriting history, pretending Francis was something he was not. But his words and actions, confusing though they sometimes were, speak for themselves.

What a penance this pontificate has been for Catholics.

Not that everything Francis did was bad; we should be thankful for his efforts for peace among warring nations, particularly between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Palestine. But on the whole, the past twelve years were a disaster for the Church. It will likely take years or even decades to recover from the damage.

The Papacy Endures

Yet the papacy itself endures. The Church hasn’t survived 2,000 years because we’ve only had good and holy popes. We’ve had some downright scoundrels in our history, and a few of them seemed more like successors of Judas than Peter, yet the papacy continues to be the rock on which the Church is built. During bad pontificates, it might be hard to see the value of the papacy, but it’s essential to the Church, which is clear when we take the long view of history.

Consider Protestantism, which began with a rejection of the authority of the pope. Since then, its history has been one of division after division after division.

Protestants can’t even agree on a basic point like the purpose of baptism! The chaos that is Protestantism is what happens when you throw away the papacy.

Even Eastern Orthodoxy, which accepts in theory the idea of a limited papacy while rejecting it completely in practice, suffers from their break with Rome. Currently, the Russian Orthodox Church – the largest Orthodox church – is in schism with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. These types of schisms are commonplace in the history of Orthodoxy, since there is no head to keep the body united. The pope-less Orthodox also fall short on certain doctrinal issues as well, evidenced by their general acceptance of artificial contraception and divorce.

So, while Catholics might from time to time have to endure bad papacies (although fewer of them than one might expect), over the long term, the papal office is what has kept the Church together for 2,000 years, and will continue to keep it together until Our Lord’s Second Coming. Even when the bathwater gets dirty, we can’t throw out the baby.

We Need Not Sacrifice the Truth

Pretending bad popes are only something that could happen in the past but not today might be a well-meaning attempt to protect the papacy, but it sacrifices the truth. If Our Lord warned against the danger of scandals leading souls away from him, why should we refuse to acknowledge such things when they occur?

The Church is both human and divine. Christ purposefully entrusted his Church to sinful men, knowing full well that at times they would fail Him. But he promised that the Holy Spirit would always be with the Church, guiding her to all truth.

We trust in this promise, whether we think the current pope is doing a good job or not. The promise is a general promise that the papacy will endure and keep the Church together, not a promise that every pope will be a saint or even more than mediocre.

Having a bad pope can be good for Catholics in one sense: it forces us to better understand the theology of the papacy. During the Francis pontificate, we’ve seen Catholics deny he was pope simply because they thought he was a bad pope. He somehow crossed a line they themselves had determined a true pope can never cross.

We’ve also seen Catholics praise everything he said and did, no matter how scandalous, even when these things were clearly not Catholic. It was “party Catholicism,” akin to a devotee of a political party supporting its candidate no matter how bad he may be.

Both of these reactions to what was a trying papacy sprang from the same underlying problem: an exaltation of the papacy beyond what it is. We had such a long run of generally good popes that many well-meaning Catholics came to believe, although it was never Church teaching, that we had to follow even the opinions of popes. We became the Protestant caricature of the dreaded “papists”: the pope was practically a cult leader whom we had to follow blindly.

A bad papacy like Francis’s, however, helps combat that error. The papacy is vital and essential to the Church, but the pope is not a divine oracle to whom we must give total obsequiousness. We should be thankful that God used this papacy to help clear up that error which had been growing within the Church since the 19th century. We can truly appreciate the papacy when we better understand its purpose and how it works.

We Need to Clean Up the Mess

Pope Francis famously called on Catholics to “make a mess.” He surely did, and now it’s up to us to clean up. Pray for the soul of Pope Francis, pray for the next pope, and pray for Holy Mother Church.

Francis is dead, but the papacy endures. Thanks be to God.

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Eric Sammons is the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine.

Originally published at Crisis Magazine. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.