Farewell, Francis. Hello, Leo XIV

Well, that’s finally over.

Pope Francis died on April 21, bringing to a close a chaotic pontificate characterized by chronic confusion and polarizing polemics. The late Pope, an imprecise thinker, writer, and speaker, was known to engage in studied ambiguity and to issue pointed barbs. Over the course of his 12-year reign, he disappointed Catholic progressives, angered and alienated Catholic traditionalists, and alternately delighted and perplexed the vast majority in the middle. This is evident in how Francis was perceived in the United States, where, according to a January 2024 Gallup poll, he enjoyed broad — but not vast — popularity. His 77 percent favorable rating among U.S. Catholics, though seemingly robust, was “below average for that group.” His 17 percent unfavorable rating, though seemingly negligible, was “a new high.”

Francis’s popularity (such as it was) could be attributable to the theological laxity prevalent among U.S. Catholics, whose thinking is more secular now than ever before. According to a Pew Research survey conducted this February, prior to the Pope’s hospitalization due to a respiratory complication, among U.S. Catholics:

•  84% say the Church should allow birth control,
•  83% say the Church should allow in vitro fertilization,
•  68% say the Church should allow women to become deacons,
•  63% say the Church should allow priests to get married, and
•  59% say the Church should ordain women as priests.

A laissez-faire spirit dominates; progressive Catholicism seems to have won the battle for the hearts and minds of our co-religionists. And yet Francis greatly misread American Catholicism. “There is a very strong reactionary attitude” here, he said, deriding U.S. Catholics as “backward-looking.”

How wrong he was.

The misreading was largely mutual. To the casual observer, including the casual U.S. Catholic, Francis remained a symbol of “change” — despite not effecting any actual change to doctrine (which a pope is unable to do unilaterally).

Granted, Francis did gut and reconstitute the Pontifical Academy for Life, appointing to it doctrinal dissenters, pro-abortionists, and non-Catholics (even nonbelievers). And, early in his reign, he did call on Catholics to exercise “responsible parenthood” and not breed “like rabbits.” These generated a good deal of buzz among progressives that Francis would “revolutionize” Catholic teaching against artificial contraception. But, to their dismay, he did not roll back Humanae Vitae. He did not approve birth control or in vitro fertilization. Neither did he approve ordaining women as deacons or allowing priests in the Roman rite to marry. Regarding the ordination of women as priests, Francis issued a firm and unequivocal statement — he was capable of that on occasion! — against it, saying, “the Petrine principle has no place for that.”

So, whence came this impression of Francis as a changemaker?

The moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped out onto the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in March 2013 — dressed only in a white cassock — and asked the world to “pray for me,” the mainstream media went into panegyric mode, constructing a popular narrative of the new Pope as emblematic of a kinder, gentler Church. Their persistent theme was that he would set a “new tone” for the Church after decades, if not centuries — or millennia! — of crankiness and stagnation.

That expectation never completely waned, even after over a decade of dashed hopes. Francis’s supposedly new tone had a shrill pitch that barely registered to unattuned ears. But it soon became evident to attentive observers that this Pope possessed a sharp tongue, which he used to lash out at his flock. He handed out anathemas like they were Halloween candy. Francis skewered laymen who “constantly complain,” calling them “Mr. or Mrs. Whiner.” He lambasted the “slaves of superficiality” and the “slaves of rigidity” who “masquerade as Christians.” He called people “pickled pepper-faced Christians,” “closed, sad, trapped Christians,” “defeated Christians,” “pastry-shop Christians,” “creed-reciting, parrot Christians,” and “watered-down faith, weak-hoped Christians.” He called Catholics who focus on Church traditions “museum mummies.”

Francis scored “journalists [who] sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia.” For those of us not blessed with the same breadth of vocabulary as the Pope, coprophilia is defined as “an abnormal, often obsessive interest in excrement, especially the use of feces for sexual excitement.” Coprophagia is defined as “feeding on excrement.” Yup, the Holy Father was literally talking s**t about journos!

The Pope’s potshots also popped up in his papal documents. In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium he called out the “querulous and disillusioned pessimists” and “sourpusses” in the Church (no. 85; yes, the term sourpusses is now forever embedded in the official lexicon of the Church). He also derided the “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism,” “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism,” and “anthropocentric immanentism” of those who “remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past” (no. 94; which was a convoluted way of saying he really didn’t like traditionalists).

Clerics, however, felt the full force of Francis’s fulminations. He went after those he considered “vain” butterflies, “smarmy” idolaters, “victims of careerism and opportunism,” and “priest-tycoons.” He railed against “airport bishops” who have “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and “existential schizophrenia.” He scolded elderly nuns for becoming “spinsters” and having “vinegar faces.” He even described some seminarians as potential “little monsters.”

The “new tone” Francis was supposed to bring to ecclesial communications turned out to be even crankier than before!

This caustic approach undermined the so-called Francis effect, which Bergoglioists expected to result in a wave of new interest, conversions, and vocations. The opposite happened, which isn’t surprising. What interested inquirer — save a masochist — is attracted by insults? Over the course of Francis’s pontificate, the Church continued to lose influence on the world stage, conversions slowed to a trickle, and vocations took a nosedive.

The College of Cardinals elected Bergoglio with the mandate to reform the curia, modernize its infrastructure, and streamline procedures that have long caused the Church to move at a glacial pace. He was expected to re-affirm Church doctrine, re-ignite her missionary fervor, and snuff out the smoldering clerical sex-abuse crisis. None of that transpired. “Within a year of his election,” wrote George Weigel (April 23), “Pope Francis re-opened what was thought to be the settled question of whether Catholics in canonically irregular marriages — who remain members of the worshipping Church — could legitimately receive Holy Communion. In doing so, he set in motion dynamics that would become an impediment to the re-evangelization of the secularizing Western world and sowed confusion where the New Evangelization had seen great success.”

As for the sex scandal, Francis couldn’t — or wouldn’t — unhook himself from unsavory figures, undermining any efforts at reform. He kept close ties to both notorious cover-up prelates (e.g., Donald Wuerl, Juan Barros, and Roger Mahony) and abominable clerical offenders (e.g., Theodore McCarrick, Marko Rupnik, and Gustavo Zanchetti).

Although “mercy” was often said to be a main theme of Francis’s pontificate, he didn’t mete out much mercy to his charges in the curia. Rather, he readily indulged his mean streak. He was irascible as a leader, erratic as a decision-maker, and vindictive to those who dared to disagree with him. He ruled the Vatican with an iron fist, firing or reassigning employees with little to no notice or explanation and upbraiding them in private and in public. Predictably, morale plummeted. Murmurs of a “reign of terror” could be heard among the curial cognoscenti. Many labored in fear of falling afoul of Francis’s fury.

Though he talked often of reaching out to the “peripheries,” perhaps the major undertaking of Francis’s pontificate was the self-referential, navel-gazing exercise otherwise known as the Synod on Synodality (which, we may hope, the next pope mercifully axes).

As popularized by Pope St. John Paul II, papal junkets were frequent. Francis flew from country to country on the papal plane — he himself an “airport bishop”! — giving interview after interview in which he blurted out controversial opinions or contradicted earlier doctrinal pronouncements, raising alarm among the press and the people and precipitating rationalizations, retractions, and excuse-making from the Holy See’s Press Office. Fr. Raymond J. de Souza memorably called these periodic papal blunders “imbergoglios.” I took to calling them episodes in the ongoing Francis Follies.

For these and other theological transgressions and procedural misdemeanors, the Pope was the recipient of an unprecedented string of public rebukes:

•  a dubia (Sept. 2016), five brief yes-or-no questions from four high-ranking cardinals about passages in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia that they say were causing “uncertainty, confusion, and disorientation”;
•  a critical letter (July 2017) from Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, a highly regarded Capuchin theologian, informing him that “chronic confusion” marks his pontificate, fostering “a growing unease” among the faithful and compromising their “capacity for love, joy and peace”;
•  a correctio (Aug. 2017), a 25-page “filial correction” signed by 250 Catholic clerics (one a retired American bishop), religious, and laymen, charging him with supporting positions on sacramental marriage, the moral life, and Holy Communion that are causing a host of “heresies and other errors” to spread throughout the Church;
•  an 11-page “testimony” from a retired archbishop and former U.S. nuncio (Aug. 2018), accusing him of keeping Theodore Cardinal McCarrick as “his trusted counselor” despite knowing full well that McCarrick was a serial predator, “thus multiplying exponentially with his supreme authority the evil done by McCarrick”;
•  a mysterious “memorandum” (March 2022), signed by a pseudonymous “Demos,” believed to be a cardinal (possibly George Pell of Australia), stating that “commentators of every school…agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe”;
•  a letter from four pro-Francis scholars (May 2022) — including Massimo Faggioli, one of the Pope’s loudest American hype men — describing his “vision of the conflict” in Ukraine as having “important shortcomings”;
•  and a second memorandum (Feb. 2024), signed by “Demos II,” whose real identity is still unknown (Pell had passed away by the time of its release), saying conditions in the Church since the appearance of the first memorandum “have not materially changed, much less improved,” and, as a result, the Church is “more fractured than at any time in her recent history.”

All these the Holy Father reportedly received with “irritation” and even “rage”; he responded directly to none of them.

But now we may close the door on these dilemmas, as this exhausting, discouraging pontificate has finally come to its merciful conclusion. (To revisit the blow-by-blows — such as the Pachamama brouhaha, the London luxury-apartment scandal, intercommunion with Lutherans, capitulation to Chinese communists, appeasing Islamic aggression, blessing same-sex couples, atheists in Heaven, and oh so much more! — refer to our online dossier “Pope Francis,” found here: newoxfordreview.org/topics/pope-francis.) But a catastrophe — if you want to call it that — of this complexity surely will continue to reverberate over the course of the coming years, especially if Francis’s successor is one of his handpicked protégés.

What kind of man may we hope for in the next pope? In this we may defer to Gerhard Cardinal Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope Benedict XVI. The new pontiff, Cardinal Müller told Italian newspaper La Stampa (April 28), must have “a solid theological and doctrinal formation,” be “strong on doctrine,” and “determined to stand up to ideological lobbies, including the gay lobby,” which Francis failed to rein in and the presence and power of which allegedly led Benedict to resign. In other words, the next pontiff must be an anti-Francis. Moreover, Müller called for a return to “orthodoxy, doctrine founded on Scripture and apostolic tradition, and against heresy.” Doctrine, he insisted, “is not the property of the pope.” No one can modify it. Rather, doctrine “must conform to the word of Jesus.”

Now we know who Francis’s successor is.

As I write, the white smoke has billowed from the Sistine Chapel, shouts of Habemus papam! rang out in St. Peter’s Square, and the new Pope has appeared: Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who took the name Leo XIV.

Prevost, a relative unknown, owes his rapid ecclesiastical ascent to Pope Francis, and he acknowledged his predecessor in his initial Urbi et Orbi address from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8. A mere 18 months earlier, Francis had plucked Prevost from the remote Diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, elevated him to the cardinalate, and installed him as prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops.

One thing we know about Leo XIV is that he’s not an anti-Francis. Far from it. In his Urbi et Orbi address, he repeated several of Francis’s favorite themes, saying we must “build bridges with dialogue and encounter,” and “we want to be a synodal Church” (so much for blowing up that whole thing). But will Leo XIV’s pontificate merely be Francis 2.0? That remains to be seen.

Leo broke from his immediate predecessor by stepping out onto the balcony in the same vestments Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II wore: a red mozetta and burgundy stole with ornate gold embroidery atop the traditional white cassock, perhaps signaling at least a stylistic departure. And Leo closed his address by praying the Hail Mary entirely in Latin — a first for any pope. The early predictions among Vatican-watchers are that, thematically, there will be much continuity between Francis’s pontificate and Leo XIV’s, but with more intellectual heft and a more pragmatic leadership style — and, we may hope, less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants freewheeling. Leo is, after all, a doctor of canon law, and he taught patristics and moral theology at a major seminary in Peru. We may also hope he’s less of a browbeater than Francis and more of a spiritual father. The best-case scenario would be that Leo retains the best aspects of Francis’s pontificate — his concern for the poor, his advocacy for peace, his eagerness to reach out to believers on the margins — while restoring neglected or jettisoned elements of Catholic tradition, including celebration of the Tridentine Latin Mass. Above all, we may hope that he embraces orthodoxy.

The time for deeper analysis will come as this pontificate unfolds. For now, as Leo settles into the Chair of Peter, it is enough for us to pray. We pray for the repose of Francis’s soul. We pray for the Church, for her leaders, and for an increase of faith in the Church, among her leaders, and in the world at large. Now more than ever, the world needs to hear the Church’s clarion call to conversion in Christ. We pray that Leo XIV issues that call clearly and consistently over the course of his reign. We pray for strength, courage, and blessings upon our new Pope.

Whatever shape the new pontificate takes, we can rest in the knowledge that the Church will endure. We have this on the supremest of authorities. It is, after all, what Christ promised us. If the Church can endure a pontificate like that of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, she can endure almost anything.

At this time of transition, we recall that our faith is in the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone as we say, “The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope!”

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