The first Pope I loved

I lost my Catholic faith in my teens, resenting the Church’s over-riding obsession with controlling people’s sexuality and bodies. But over the past decade, I came to cherish Pope Francis as a moral compass in an increasingly hostile world.

Pope Francis did not substantially change the Church’s official stance on issues like abortion and gender identity, two issues where I respectfully remain at odds with the official church.

But he changed its order of priorities, putting social inequality and the globalisation of indifference towards migrants and the poor at the top of his agenda, while side-lining divisive culture wars.

That is why progressives including atheists and agnostics, felt at home in Pope Francis’ broad humanistic Church, while clerical conservatives and traditionalists resented him viscerally. 

I grew up under the shadow of John Paul II’s grandstanding papacy: that of a charismatic and conservative Pope whose priority was confronting—and ultimately contributing to the toppling of—totalitarian communism in Eastern Europe. In contrast, his rebuke of capitalist injustices was muted and directed only against its ‘excesses’, not its fundamental flaws.

Moreover, in doing so, he marginalised those in his own Church—like liberation theologians—who were confronting capitalism and the violence of right-wing regimes, particularly in Latin America. And while priests were censured for standing with the poor, or for advocating women’s rights, his papacy turned a blind eye to sexual predators within its ranks.

This was followed by Pope Benedict’s denouncement of “the dictatorship of relativism”, which— in the absence of communism—was directed against LGBTQ people and aimed at stopping the tide of social liberalism. While he should be credited for understanding the gravity of the crimes committed by a system designed to protect sexual predators, this only amplified the contrast between a Church obsessed with controlling everyone else’s sexuality and the depravity of some of its own high-ranking members.

It was in this context that Pope Francis shifted the Church’s focus to a critique of capitalism’s inherent and deep flaws.

“Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” the Pope said while visiting Bolivia in 2015, decrying a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature”.

“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, workers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself—our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say—also finds it intolerable.”

From the start of his papacy, he positioned himself against an ascendant far right, condemning the “globalisation of indifference” during one of his first major speeches as Pope, delivered in Lampedusa in 2013. He also denounced the structural basis of oppression: “the culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles.”

And following Donald Trump’s election, he wrote to U.S. bishops denouncing the programme of mass deportations:

“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

Sure, his compassion and call for justice also raised expectations that he ultimately could not—and probably did not even want to—deliver. On abortion, he changed the rules, allowing all priests, and not just bishops or their delegates, to absolve women who had committed this ‘sin’. But while he still described the act as murder, he framed it more as a symptom of a “throwaway culture” than a condemnation of women. 

Neither did he rock the boat by challenging the male monopoly on the priesthood, and he backtracked on a highly symbolic proposal to allow priests to officiate blessings of same-sex unions—on the understanding that this was not equivalent to marriage. This tacit acceptance of inequality ultimately jarred with Pope Francis’ message of social justice.

Yet one must recognise that, unlike others in his flock, he resolutely scorned the far right’s appropriation of Catholic traditional values. Nor did he condone the denial of the Eucharist to Catholic pro-choice leaders like Joe Biden.  He even described Italian radical and pro-choice activists Emma Bonino as one of Italy’s one of "Italy’s forgotten greats" for her advocacy of human and migrant rights.

Ironically, his last official meeting was with J.D. Vance, a Catholic traditionalist who stands on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Now, his death presents the Church with a stark choice: a relapse into traditionalism in a world that has swung to the right, or a steadfast commitment to social justice and engagement with modernity. This makes the next conclave one of the most pivotal moments in Church history.