Pope Francis: Death of a Tyrant

 

Twelve years of an abusive papacy have ended and the relief among faithful Catholics is palpable.

The world's media response is to wax lyrical about his humility and mercy, demonstrating both that they were not paying attention and that the Argentinian's efforts to disguise the Catholic Church's moral and social teaching was well received and successful amongst the secular mainstream.

“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you." (John 15:18 f).

The world LOVED Pope Francis. They loved that he was, at best, ambivalent, at worst, dead set against, Catholic teaching and morality and particularly sexual morality, which it felt like he never shut up about, constantly talking about LGBTQ, transgenderism, etc etc and not in a good way, in a way that hinted that the Church had been wrong for 2,000 years. In typical Francis fashion, he simultaneously used pejorative slang to attack same sex attracted people on a number of occasions. 

Somehow, he managed a media profile that left him as "The Pope of Mercy" — incredibly, no one seemed to notice that there was always a camera around when these moments of mercy occurred. Notwithstanding that, these moments were effective, as were his eschewing of papal traditions and apartments, but do they promote Christ or Jorge Bergoglio? Will the next pope take up residence in the papal apartments and if he does, will this win him condemnation because he is "not as humble as Francis"?

This merciful legacy is contrary to the direct experience of anyone who has struggled to be faithful to the Catholic Church and its teachings. To us, he was a monster. He cancelled our Sacraments, closed our Churches, did secret deals with our enemies, berated us for being faithful, attacked our priests and regularly, publicly, called us names.

There have been many honest accounts of the last twelve years. Perhaps the most immediate and damning was the reaction from Archbishop Chaput.

You have likely seen Catholic Unscripted's initial analysis where Gavin certainly does not hold back:

A more thorough, but no less critical analysis appeared in Unherd, which correctly frames him as chaotic: “Jorge Mario Bergoglio was unique in his extraordinary skill at destruction, sometimes creative, often not.” and catalogues much of the controversy surrounding his papacy: "It still remains unclear where Bergoglio stood on both questions. To his many enemies in the Catholic Church, he was a Marxist and a revolutionary" however "he unsurprisingly never made his agenda clear". What was clear was his disastrous and mendacious personnel policy: "When it came to personnel, the Bergoglio papacy showed its least attractive and most damaging side. Favouritism, and its opposite, were much in evidence. Certain clerics, who should have been fired for the most obvious faults, particularly with regard to child abuse and sexual immorality, were protected — even against the very people the Pope had commissioned to clean up the Church’s act. Particularly notorious was the case of Bishop Barros, who was eventually driven out after a long effort by the Pope to keep him in place. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sins caught up with him remarkably slowly, while Bishop Zanchetta of Argentina was sheltered in the Vatican despite facing criminal charges. On the other hand, those who spoke truth to power suffered: Cardinal Raymond Burke was moved on from his Vatican jobs and even evicted from his Rome flat. Other bishops deemed too conservative, most of whom were champions of the Latin Mass, were removed from office. All the while, Francis put Latin worship under ever tighter restrictions.

The men promoted by Francis raised eyebrows too. Several unknowns were made cardinals, and have remained unknown ever since. Consider his pick for the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, an undistinguished Argentine cleric called Víctor Manuel Fernández. His previous writings, particularly a book on the theology of kissing, were found to be rather embarrassing. In diplomacy, meanwhile, matters were left in the hands of Cardinal Parolin, who oversaw a secret treaty with the Chinese government allowing the CCP to appoint Catholic bishops, an unheard-of usurpation of the Church’s independence in the modern age. This move was bitterly criticised by the former bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen, who could only meet the Pope in a public audience. Like so many others who had concerns about the Church’s direction, he was refused a private audience."

The article concludes that if the plan was to change the Church, it ended in failure, highlighting Fiducia supplicans as evidence of this: "In December 2023, Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, published a document that allowed for the blessing of gay couples, albeit in deliberately ambiguous language. The reaction was immediate. Conservatives fumed at the thought of the Church blessing sin; many had always suspected the thrust of the Bergoglio papacy was to liberalise Church teaching on homosexuality, and this seemed proof of that. Most importantly, though, the African bishops rose up and condemned the document. Despite saying there would be no clarifications, Fernández remarkably swiftly issued what amounted to a retraction. Amid the verbiage explaining that blessings were of individuals not couples, people detected a defeat for Pope Francis and his chief collaborator."

Personally, I can't help wondering if the African response to this document will further the potential for an African Pope, while Cardinal Sarah seems to be a clear favourite with the people he is quite old now, but perhaps Ambongo Besungu?

The verdict is that the papacy of Francis was a disaster whatever way you look at it. Yes, those outside the Church applauded the way he reached out to the marginalised, but they did this while handily ignoring his constant baiting of traditional Catholics. The Vatican finances are a mess, its income falling steadily over his papacy. There is a distinct lack of any clear leadership around sexual abuse the ordinary clergy are demoralised and bewildered, and the numbers coming forward to be ordained have declined dramatically. 

"As for changing doctrine, or even changing practice, little has happened. Perhaps there is no new model Catholicism in the offing, for the simple reason that none is possible. There is only the Catholicism of the past two millennia. Francis apparently raged against his critics in private, and many of those same critics died before him. Yet the Church itself survives him, just as it has his predecessors."

It wasn't only Catholics who were disturbed by Pope Francis, he did huge damage to the Church's reputation with other Christian denominations who often look to the Pope for a lead on Christian issues. This was perhaps best summed up by Carl Trueman, who, writing in First Things, argues that while Francis was orthodox on issues like abortion and transgenderism, his intellectual shortcomings and liberal-leaning actions—such as promoting vernacular liturgy, ambiguously addressing same-sex blessings, and making controversial statements like “all religions are paths to God”—created chaos and undermined traditional Catholic authority. Trueman portrays Francis as an authoritarian pope pursuing a liberal Protestant agenda, exemplified by his support for figures like Nancy Pelosi and his deal with the Chinese Communist Party, which allowed secular influence over episcopal appointments. This combination, at best, made Francis a disruptive figure whose policies strained Catholic-Protestant relations and sowed confusion, impacting Christians broadly by weakening the Church’s cultural and moral influence.

I found my own feelings were perfectly summarised by my colleague from the Catholic Herald, Simon Caldwell, writing in The Conservative Woman. Why there and not the Catholic Herald? Well, good question! Clearly the Catholic Herald were not prepared to print Simon, a long time staff journalist for the publication's piece. I was quite shocked by the tenure of this piece because Simon is a quiet, diligent and really holy Catholic and I was shocked and pleased that he felt the same way about this awful papacy as I do. I have reproduced it in full here because it is so good and deserves to be widely read!

It is aptly titled: Francis, the Pope who alienated good Catholics

THE outpouring of grief following the death of Pope Francis was like a wall of noise, a practically uninterrupted blanket of praise, a seamless garment of tribute. Even his enemies fought to temper their public comments, undoubtedly conscious of the enduring Latin injunction de mortuis nil nisi bonum, that one must not speak ill of the dead.

It was only in private conversations that one could truly gauge the true sentiments of rank-and-file Catholics. One devout woman, orthodox but very much in the mainstream of the Church, confided to me that when she heard of the death of Francis on Easter Monday, ‘I couldn’t help but weep with immense relief – thanking the Lord that it was finally over’.

The ‘it’ in this context is not the awful suffering Francis had endured over 38 days in hospital, but his pontificate. This pope was one of the most divisive leaders the Catholic Church has seen for centuries, and he constantly exasperated good Catholics.

Catholics believe the Petrine ministry is endowed with a specific charism, or spiritual gifts, so a pope may serve as a focus of unity by teaching with clarity and encouraging Christians to persevere in faith. ‘Strengthen your brothers,’ Jesus told St Peter in the Gospel of St Luke (22: 32). Francis, however, was a serial heresiarch, who deliberately resorted to ambiguity to sow confusion among the faithful and subvert the teachings and traditions of the Church.

He undermined the teaching of Jesus on the indissolubility of marriage, for example, and introduced blessings for same-sex couples. He allowed a pagan earth goddess called a Pachamama to be honoured in a Roman church (it was subsequently stolen and thrown in the River Tiber by a man convinced that idolatry was still a sin forbidden by the first of the Ten Commandments). He elevated climate change ideology to religious dogma and handed over control of the Catholic Church in China to the Communists. Francis effectively did away with Hell by promoting the belief that it was empty and that only a ‘cult’ believed otherwise. Consequently, one did not have to be sorry for one’s sins to receive absolution under this pope or to be in a state of grace to receive Holy Communion.

Heterodox opinions were uniformly tolerated among the clergy, with Francis refusing to sanction even Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp when he argued that the euthanasia of the elderly was as morally justifiable as killing an enemy on the battlefield in a just war. But woe to anyone who expressed orthodox opinions too loudly. Francis brutally suppressed the traditional Latin Mass because it was attractive to such Catholics and he removed a succession of bishops from office because they dissented from his agenda. He would also sack any priest who dared to publicly criticise him.

When I was interviewed by GB News on Monday, it was put to me that Francis was a ‘humble’ man and, although I wished to be charitable, I had to demur.

Francis was an extreme authoritarian who ruled by motu proprio (of his own initiative) because such ukase-style edicts allowed him to bypass the checks and balances of normal government. In this respect, he was like a Russian czar, an absolute monarch or a mob boss, down to the throwing of tantrums and swearing like a dockyard labourer when he was slow to get his way. He wielded his power capriciously, cherry picking Catholic teaching or overriding canon law to give weight to his own prejudices. Sometimes, he would ignore the rules completely. For instance, he made covid injections mandatory for Vatican employees, even though Church teaching upheld their right to reject such medical impositions.

He used his authority to protect sinister friends from justice, such as Father Marko Rupnik, a fellow Jesuit who was accused of the serial rape of more than a dozen nuns, sometimes in quasi-satanic rituals. Rupnik was excommunicated latae sententiae (automatically) after he granted absolution in the confessional to a woman with whom he was having sex. This was an offence of such enormity under the Code of Canon Law that only the Pope could lift the sentence. Rupnik was rehabilitated and to this day is a priest in good standing who is living in a convent (where else?). It is good to have friends in high places.

Simultaneously, Francis would deride faithful priests as spinsters, mummies’ boys and pansies when they resisted conformity with a world made more miserable than joyful by its saturation in disenchanted sex and pornography. It makes one wonder if there is any truth in the unsubstantiated rumour that emerged in a German magazine some years ago that Francis fathered a son with his housekeeper in Argentina and that the child died in his teens.

The charges against Francis are so numerous that they could fill a sheet longer than the Lorsch Litany. If Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were guilty of just a fraction of them, the media would have hounded them to their deaths.

For Francis, the mainstream media have only praise. The reason for this is that they judge popes in purely secular terms. They like what they see in Francis so much that they have effectively canonised him as one of their saints – as a pope of the people and the poor, a reformer and moderniser, a pope for women, gays, the environment, for people of other faiths. But look more closely, and one will see not a pope of the people, but of the elites, not of the poor but of political systems which perpetuate poverty, a pope not just of migrants but of mass migration, even at the price of what is left of Christian Europe. Take the 2016 murder in Rouen, France, of Fr Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit by Islamists as he stood at the altar. Afterwards, Francis refused to attribute specific religious motivation to the atrocity. ‘I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence,’ he told journalists. ‘There are violent Catholics!’ True, but in the cold-blooded butchery of Fr Hamel, there was a distinction that Francis had deliberately failed to make.

Informed Catholics don’t give a hoot about the political posturing of Francis because they know it is about as non-binding on them as his favourite colour, breed of cat or football team. His political opinions matter no more than the opinions of anyone else. The political views of Francis had no lesser or greater weight than the political opinions, say, of JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, a recent convert to the Catholic faith and a man whose views would have been in diametric opposition. To impart political views is not what a pope is for, unless he is defending fundamental human rights, properly understood, or when the salvation of souls requires it. Catholics took Francis’ with a bucket of salt. In Italy, for example, the public became accustomed to doing the opposite of what he asked them to do, especially on migration, and voted for politicians like Giorgia Meloni.

The same went for his native Argentina where he served as Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires but where, perhaps significantly, he never returned as pope. He intervened in the 2023 presidential elections from Rome as much as he could, however, when Javier Milei emerged as the frontrunner. Milei was anathema to Francis, who saw him as a populist, an Argentine Donald Trump guilty of the heinous crime of describing the climate change narrative as a ‘Socialist lie’ which served the promotion of population control through abortion, which he described as ‘murder’.

Francis went all out to stop him, railing against him as a ‘pied piper’ who promised to charm the people with promises of wealth creation only to ‘make them drown’, and mobilising the Argentine Church to campaign for opposition candidates. Milei fought back by calling the Pope an ‘imbecile’ and a ‘spreader of Communism’, among other grave insults. He won the election. Rubén Peretó, professor at the National University of Cuyo, Argentina, later told Vatican journalist Aldo María Valli that Melei’s triumph ‘confirms what everyone here knows: Argentines do not like Pope Francis and do not want him’.

‘For years, when news about Bergoglio appears in newspapers and portals, administrators have been forced to close readers’ comments, most of which are derogatory and harsh. Many might have thought that the rejection of Bergoglio was widespread only among those who read and informed themselves […] it is proven that it is present in all social strata, even among the poor. Precisely for this reason, Bergoglio will never come to Argentina, because his trip would be a failure.’

The Argentinians clearly knew Francis better than the rest of us. In fairness, it is also true that Francis had many good points and that he did many good things. Among them was the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman in 2019 as England’s newest saint. The Victorian cleric might one day be proclaimed a doctor of the Church because of his theological teachings on conscience. Ironically, his writings offer some succour and encouragement to Catholics troubled by popes like the very man who made him a saint.

‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts,’ wrote Cardinal Newman in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk of 1875, ‘I shall drink to the Pope, if you please – still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’ 

Newman, a stalwart opponent of religious liberalism, was a prophet of our times. My guess is that he saw Francis coming.