Pope Francis died this month at the age of 88, after twelve years at the helm of the Catholic church. What should atheists think about his legacy?
Despite my scorn for Roman Catholicism’s absurd dogmas and imperial pomp, I can’t deny there were things I liked about the guy. For instance, he said some good things about climate change. I was amused when he fired an ultra-conservative bishop.
To his credit, he said that homosexuality shouldn’t be a crime, and he formally apologized for the church’s participation in cultural genocide of indigenous people. He spoke out for immigrant rights and against Israel’s war on Gaza.
All these are praiseworthy sentiments, and hopefully the next pope will continue to emphasize them. But what’s more notable are the things Francis didn’t do. Granted, the papacy is only a bully pulpit when it comes to world affairs – but even within the church, where he had power, he didn’t use it.
He didn’t lift Catholicism’s absolute ban on contraception and abortion that’s cost so many women their lives, their health and their freedom. He didn’t allow women to become priests; in fact, he agreed with it. He didn’t condemn, and even seemed to excuse, fundamentalist violence against freethinkers who satirize religion.
He did nothing meaningful about the continuing scandal of priests molesting children. In particular, he didn’t take the biggest step a pope could theoretically take: sanctioning bishops who covered it up.
Despite his occasional sympathetic remarks, he didn’t change any of Catholicism’s harsh and repressive dogmas about LGBTQ people.
It’s true that he permitted priests to bless same-sex couples (the same way they bless pets, or golf clubs), but only as long as they don’t do it in a way that implies official sanction of their relationship. It’s almost a backhanded compliment, recognizing people in same-sex partnerships as long as they accept being treated as lesser than opposite-sex relationships. He also didn’t stop the cruel practice of Catholic schools randomly firing beloved teachers for being gay.
This seems like the theme of Francis’ papacy. He tried to convey an impression of acceptance and tolerance, but without changing the religious dogmas that were the problem in the first place.
You have to wonder what his motivations were. Did he want reform, but was hemmed in by church politics and the weight of tradition, which conspired to prevent him from bringing about real change? Or was it only a PR strategy – did he agree with those religious rules and teachings, and only sought to put a friendly face on them to make the church more appealing?
We’ll probably never know what the truth was. But either way, there’s a lesson in it, even for those of us who aren’t Catholic.
Although Francis wasn’t truly an agent of change, people thought he was. And they loved him for it: he was consistently popular throughout his papacy. He was more popular than his predecessor, which means tribal loyalty among Catholics can’t be the sole explanation.
What this shows is that people want a humane leader. They hunger for a leader who projects a sense of kindliness and compassion, someone who cares about them and empathizes with them. That moral philosophy still appeals to people, even in a world of right-wing demagogues who make cruelty their governing rule. Whether or not Francis truly exemplified those gentler virtues, Catholics believed he did, and that’s why they liked him.
This should be a lesson for reformers and social-justice warriors of all stripes. If we want to win, we have to be clear about why we want a better world. It’s not about a tribalistic desire to “win”, or a merely economic concern for fairness. It’s because we care about everyone and want what’s best for them. If progressivism isn’t rooted in this love of humanity, it has no chance of success.
Image credit: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han), released under CC BY 2.0 license
“the biggest step a pope could theoretically take: sanctioning bishops who covered it up.”
That would’ve required him to sanction Jorge Mario Bergoglio, which seems like it was unlikely to ever happen. Even now, it’s highly likely the new one will have been complicit. It was so widespread, basically everyone in power at the time was. Which is why what you suggest will never happen.
He couldn’t have done any of those things. Catholics like to believe that they have never changed their doctrines, believing that it would outright disprove their religion if they ever did. (Since the Holy Spirit is supposed to protect the Magisterium from ever ruling incorrectly.) This means that all modern popes are constrained by what their predecessors have ruled, so if any pope did try to implement your reforms a large faction would cite the disagreement with earlier teaching as “proof” that said pope is a heretic and as such not the legitimate pontiff. Think of the reaction to the Second Vatican Council but worse. No matter how conservative the current Church hierarchy rules, the Traditionalists will never be happy with them unless they make the Tridentine Latin Mass mandatory again, revive the antisemitic canard that all Jews past present and future are guilty for the Crucifixion of Jesus in a way that the Romans like Pilate are NOT, and condemn democracy as Satanic while asserting that the only acceptable state is a Catholic monarchy ruled by divine right of kings, with no constitution limiting the king’s power. Obviously this is never going to happen no matter who the pope is, but it shows why your reforms can’t take place, since Traditionalist Catholics think the Church is far-left even though it’s demonstrably even less so than the Democratic Party.
I’ve had fun asking Catholic apologists if it’s still morally permissible to arrest and torture people for heresy. Since the church did that at one point and the church never changes, that must be OK, right?
The amount of stammering and backpedaling this elicits never fails to amuse me. So far, I haven’t found anyone willing to bite the bullet and say yes.
In defense against your smugness to be fair, a papal bull at that time wasn’t an infallible proclamation from the Magisterium but rather more akin to a secular edict, given the fact that the papacy and other bishops had a huge decree of temporal power (The pope even had all of central Italy to himself as a personal dominion.) in Catholic kingdoms, plus there was another pope from the same timeframe who hypocritically extened his opposition to slavery inly to the enslavement of Christians. Nonetheless, the fact remains that this was done by the official authorities of the Catholic Church, and that the Church claims moral highground despite its involvement in (and initiation of) the persecutions and other human rights violations of the past, and so to claim this was never doctrine doesn’t absolve the faith of its wrongdoings.
Sure, but if the pope ruled a kingdom, then it’s reasonable to assume that the laws he passed would be in accordance with Catholic doctrine.
It would be a very unusual version of “separation of church and state” to say that the way the pope governed his dominion had nothing to do with Catholicism!
Really? Not even Theodore Beale or Brian Niemeier?
(*gloomily*)
Catholics defending the Crusades and the torture/execution of heretics?
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images.html
Quotes like this really make me wonder how society could ever have thought Chesterton was this wise sage. Is it really just because he said society need not question its prejudices? He’s saying, “we had to persecute reason in order to save it.” You know that quote saying “Some people like [Marx/Lenin/Nietzsche/Freud/insert modernist writer here], and others have read him?” One could place Chesterton or Lewis in that spot and be equally accurate.
As already noted, there are things that are part of Catholic dogma, or too baked into tradition, which no pope can easily go against. And the corruption in defending abusive priests, and covering up for those who abused, and covering up for those who covered up abuse (and so on), goes too far and too wide.
I think, given those context, Francis tried to do the best he could with his office.
He might have been able to do better, but I’m not sure how without bringing even greater division to the Church.
One of the interesting things I learned about is that there was a schism within the Church after the Vatican I council., which was the one that proclaimed papal infallibility. Yes, the council voted in favor of the idea, but that did not stop people from being so outraged that they cut themselves off from communion with the Church at Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Catholic_Church