Was Pope Francis a Liberal?

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I build my Church. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” Like most promises, this one holds less than meets the eye. If Catholics are right, it’s a promise of final triumph, sure; in the meantime, it’s little more than a warrant of bare survival. It does not guarantee good or particularly holy administration or vast membership or good temporal repute. It merely underwrites continued existence, and other far more ancient creeds—Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Hinduism—have managed this and seem set to continue managing it without Our Lord’s divine rubber stamp.

Longevity is not the same as health. That’s one of the clear lessons of the late Pope Francis’s pontificate. When the Argentinian pontiff died Monday morning, he had been visibly ailing for some five years, at least since his alarming abdominal surgery in 2023. As the monarch, so the kingdom. (The Golden Bough, folks: read it.) There are fewer butts in pews in Catholicism’s traditional core territories than ever, the Vatican is nigh bankrupt, and in the global south the Church is losing ground to evangelical insurgencies. Everyone agrees on the symptoms; aetiologies differ. Where commentators, especially the dear old earnest American press, erred about Francis was in the belief that the man was sincerely ideological in some way. You see it in the headlines on his exitus, the celebratory tributes from the liberal CNN and the somewhat darker stuff from the fever-swamps of the traditionalist Catholic blogs. 

He was disruptive, yes, and disruptive in ways that often favored liberals. Yet it was the disruption itself that was the point, not the liberalism. He was quite happy to make cracks in the press at the expense of “faggots” or to talk about Satan in dark, medieval terms. (His favorite conductor was Furtwängler, for crying out loud. How many liberals do you know whose preferred Wagnerian is Furtwängler?) No, the essence of the Franciscan papacy was control, the singular monopoly on power by the occupant of the Chair. The constant reshuffling of the curia, disrupting long-standing power-bases and not coincidentally putting egg on the faces of prominent papabiles; foregoing elevating bishops from the usual places to the cardinalate, instead preferring to hand out red hats in far-flung parts of the world with weak and poorly understood interests; throwing the underground Chinese Church under the bus in the badly conceived and executed deal with the PRC; these are all moves to ensure that there was no power but Francis’s power in the Roman fold. The shabby handling of traditionalists is best explained along these lines. Even as he crushed traditionalists within the Church, which disproportionately affected the wealthy, powerful, and relatively conservative American Church, he cultivated friendly relations with the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X. By granting them faculties for confession, he functionally brought them out of schism, but their canonical status remains irregular and confusing. Where the law is unclear, power is the judge’s. 

Francis in his way consummated the imperial style of papacy. This was in some respects a long time coming; it began to develop at Trent and especially at the First Vatican Council. Yet the execution was all his own, and perhaps irreplicable. We have suggested (and are by no means alone in this) that his reign was an illustration of the Argentinian political idiom, a Romanized peronismo. What we are about to see in the Catholic world is the chaos that ensues when a figure like Peron dies. For 12 years, the wheel of the Church turned on a single hub. What happens when it is taken away? The College of Cardinals is full of relative newcomers, and Francis rarely convened them together at Rome, preventing the formation of cliques and interests that lay the usual groundwork for a conclave. Nobody knows what will happen next, and anyone who tells you he knows is a fool or a liar. In such an environment, however, it is not uncommon to see external lobbies exert disproportionate influence. 

Good news, perhaps, for Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, who looks as if he might be the U.S. government’s man, and who has cannily cultivated friends both liberal and traditionalist. Zuppi also has the advantage of looking like a classic Italian institutionalist, which may well be appealing after Francis’s permanent revolution. The Vatican fisc is in appalling condition—incoherence and indifferentism don’t tend to rally the faithful to fund diocesan taxes and give generously to Peter’s Pence, and the census numbers have never recovered from the Covid-19 lockdowns. While ideology maintains its charms, money actually talks. Cardinals and the interests they represent, irrespective of their own thoughts about how to run the Church, may well converge on a stability candidate. Whatever program comes next, any philosophical or political program is likely to take a back seat to operational competence and institutional retrenchment.

It has been a long and astonishing 12 years. Liberal Catholics may look back on it fondly, especially depending on what strange thing next happens at Rome. (And, irrespective of what it is, it will feel strange.) Yet there will be little appetite for a reprise of this show. Après Francis, le deluge.