There’s a photo of the late Pope by Pablo Leguizamon doing the rounds. It shows then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on the Buenos Aires underground in 2008, surrounded by commuters. It’s easy to see why it is popular. A portrait in humility or rather democracy: a senior member of the Catholic Church on the subway like everybody else. He looks impeccably cool, with a wry look and the ghost of a smile on his face — more like a boxing coach or a mafia consigliere than a leading clergyman. It is usually accompanied with some quote saying he’d worked as a janitor, a nightclub bouncer and a chemical technician in a lab. He was someone, in other words, from our own temporal world.
Part of the attraction of Pope Francis, even to professional literal communists online, comes from negative space. He was all the more impressive because of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a corrupt power-hungry operator like the Borgia and Medici popes, nor was he a stern conservative patriarch like Pope Pius IX. But this was also part of the problem, one that cuts through to the heart of the Church and its very survival in the West at least, where its attendances and number of churches are in general decline. This was the Pope as a progressively tinged statesman, and the Church a kind of spiritualised NGO. There’s nothing that indicates an organisation in peril or doubt more than when it feels the need to justify its existence. It did help that Pope Francis followed Pope Benedict XVI who, in public image terms, had the bedside manner of Darth Sidious and was seen as a heavyweight conservative theologian upholding tradition against the evils of modernity.
By contrast, Pope Francis represented a break from the past and a swing to the Left. He named himself after St Francis of Assisi, champion of the poor and patron saint of animals and adopted the motto Miserando Atque Eligendo meaning “Lowly but Chosen”. Clad in white, Pope Francis rejected the regal pomp Popes had long adopted, placing themselves aristocratically above their flock. This, along with his preferred acts of humility — the kissing of feet, the embracing of the marginalised, advocacy for those brutalised by poverty and war, begging on his knees for peace — resonated with recovering Catholics like myself who had come, via the Church’s many sins and cover-ups, to see it not as something noble and exalted, and more akin to the hellish screaming popes of Francis Bacon.
All this symbolism was key to Pope Francis’s image as a radical. He certainly appeared to be a reformer. He was a vocal critic of the worst excesses of neoliberalism, and materialism generally. He advocated continually for the developing world, the poor, migrants, prisoners and interfaith dialogue. He highlighted the brutalities inflicted upon children, and civilians and advocated for peace at times and places against the mainstream narrative. He even stated, during a hastily backtracked interview, that “a hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists”. At every juncture, he was met with opposition from the Church’s more reactionary elements.
The actual meaningful impact he made upon the Church itself, structurally or theologically, is questionable. This is partly due to the intransigent Byzantine bureaucracy within the Vatican. But also a large part of it is because, beyond symbolism, Pope Francis was not the radical pope he is often touted as. On the majority of topics, he ultimately toed the line with established Church orthodoxy. They were often presented with the gloss of “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there was still little doubt sin was involved. Take the issue of contraception. The Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has been ruinous, even callous, especially in AIDS-stricken parts of the developing world. Pope Francis changed little.
The closest predecessor to Pope Francis, in spirit, was the “Good Pope” (“Il Papa Buono”) John XXIII. They shared a similar temperament, charismatic, modest, with an affable ease with the public and an intellectual openness. Yet their differences are illustrative. The “Good Pope” set off major liberalising changes in the church by calling the Second Vatican Council. He had previously wielded his influence and the apparatus at his disposal as nuncio to help save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. These were remarkable actions at an abyssal time, and comparisons may be partly unfair. Pope Francis’s efforts to highlight the cruelties and injustices inflicted in today’s world are undoubtedly noble. Whether they represent the maximum use of the Vatican’s diplomatic and economic power is more debatable. Man shall not live on symbolism alone. The world has little need of a patron saint for the increasingly grim and ineffectual spectacle of “raising awareness”.
Much was initially made of his being the first Jesuit to become Pope — it was a controversial appointment, as they are often seen as rebellious troublemakers, frequently clashing with the Vatican to the point of once being banned. But for all his professed dedication and pastoral ministry to the poor, Bergoglio was an unusual Jesuit. He came to prominence during the Argentinian dictatorship, when it was dangerous time to be an advocate of the dispossessed. The military junta was paranoid and sadistic towards anyone they suspected or could frame as being communist. It was a time of massacres, death flights, rape and torture chambers, murder squads and disappearances.
At the time, Liberation Theology had emerged as a truly radical strain of Christianity, focusing not just on poverty but those who created and profited from it. And the authorities, either in Buenos Aires or Rome, saw them as heretical pseudo-Marxists. The Argentinian form of Liberation Theology soon had the junta’s attention, and the murder of clergy commenced.
The future Pope Francis, though, was critical of Liberation Theology. He initially seemed to think that the Church should address poverty apolitically, as if poverty were not political. The Jesuits did not look favourably upon his opposition to radicalism, and he was gradually alienated within the order. There have been signs that the era weighed heavily on his mind; in one address, he spoke of “the complicit silence of most of society and of the Church”, a tacit acknowledgement of his own wilful ignorance of the crimes taking place then perhaps. It could have been something even worse, with accusations being levelled by a journalist Horacio Verbitsky that Bergoglio effectively threw two Jesuit priests Fathers Yorio and Jalics to the wolves by denying them the protection of their order (Jalics later reconciled with the Pope and said he had not denounced them). In this light, his move towards a more radical position later in life could be contrition, an admission of guilt that he failed to rise when it mattered. Or it could be seen as a rebranding exercise for the Church, a victory of style over substance, a purging not of the Vatican’s sins but their public image, and an appropriation and dilution of radicalism in the process. In either case, Pope Francis was far more of a survivor than a rebel.
Where does that leave the Church now with his passing? Despite the lack of substantive change, Pope Francis has shown there is renewed popular appetite for socially conscious religion. His message resounded especially in the developing world where Catholicism is on the rise. Intentionally or otherwise, he has cleared a viable path through the thickets that a genuinely radical pope might be able to move through, by standing up to intransigent Vatican authorities, in principle at least, and showing a relative outsider could preach with greater global impact than a more cloistered insider could. There is an important role for a force of the Vatican’s size and influence to challenge global capital, especially given “the Left” has collapsed into internecine civil warfare of identity politics. Even if you’re pro-choice or in favour of euthanasia, it would be in bad faith to deny there is a vital role for an organisation advocating for the rights of unborn children and for those vulnerable towards the end of life, especially given our neoliberal drift to extremes, moral relativism and the abstraction of human lives.
Faced with the contemporary world, there is a temptation for the Church either to retreat into tradition and veer Rightwards (as seems likely), or to dilute itself into abject meaninglessness as Anglicanism has. Both would be a grave existential error. There are paths off the forked road of tradition and modernity, that take stranger more enlightening routes through ethics, technology, vernacular, ecology, the numinous, the syncretic, the gutter and the stars. The Church’s survival depends on deeply engaging with the world, especially at its worst, but also offering a sanctuary from it.
The very fact that the Catholic Church does not fit today is one of its strongest reasons it should exist. This is a place, one of the very few, that is not solely driven by the profit principle, where you can go without spending money, where you can meditate or confess your failings. To sit in a Gothic cathedral is to experience something beyond just the wonder of architecture and craftsmanship. It is an anachronism but not necessarily a retrograde one. Through it, ideas of pilgrimage, ritual, redemption and grace have survived into an age that scorns any practise without monetary value or not beholden to ego. It is one of the few realms where good and evil are still recognised as existing, let alone the divine. “A religion without mystics,” as Francis recognised, “is a philosophy”.
Rather than becoming an obsolete fossil or following relativism into nihilism, the Catholic Church could embrace its innate weirdness. It is completely out of place and thus, at its best, it could be a refuge from late capitalism and a bulwark against it, existing both outside of the world and in its darkest places. It was this that originally gave us the church of the catacombs and the outer fringes, from the Stylites to Celtic Christianity to Santería, which brought light to hard lives in ways both intensely local and cosmic. There is a myriad of alternatives to the centralised vision of the Vatican City, as the Jesuits and others have shown.
“Until the church rises to the challenge of its own calling, it will have to dwell here with the rest of us in the Inferno.”
What the Church can offer is the precise qualities for which it is dismissed or mocked. Karl Marx wrote that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”. The assumption was that these were dishonest or impossible things. Yet imagine a world that will not allow these to exist or aspire to creating them, even if impossible. If the Church turns away from its surreal miraculous fantasies and supra-modern position, it will be on the same decline as political parties now, beholden to a world that makes everything the same, that deconstructs all loyalties and meaning, where everyone is out for themselves and everything is for sale. “Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the centre of our lives,” Francis warned “they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings.” As it is for individuals, so too is it for religious institutions.
C.S. Lewis, who Pope Francis read and quoted, wrote, “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside”. The Church has still not truly faced its past, nor the inequities of the present. Added to this is Christ’s calling to his apostles to give up everything they own and follow him. If the Church ever did these things, they would open that door and exit Hell. Some of us might even be tempted to follow them.
For now, though, there is a battle at the heart of the Church. This did not begin with Pope Francis, nor even the tidal shifts back and forth since the Industrial Revolution. It has always been here. The history of the Church is one of schisms, heresies, dialectics, synods and competing factions. It is not between Left and Right, the past and the present. There is a battle because that is the nature of conscience and guilt and what it is to be human. The Church will have to wrestle with its soul as Pope Francis, a flawed but decent man in indecent times, clearly did. We all must, if we are to remind ourselves that we even have souls. Until the Church rises to the challenge of its own calling, it will have to dwell here with the rest of us in the Inferno, a broken institution in a broken world, with the knowledge there is no one stopping us leaving but ourselves.
