As he began his papacy, the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio SJ, known to the world as Pope Francis, indicated that he would lead a humanitarian-democratic rehabilitation of the Catholic Church as it continued to shepherd its flock towards the future. While his commitment expressed many left progressive politics and policies, it also informed his primary responsibility, and skewed the way he understood his role as guardian of the Church’s judgments on faith and morals.

Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis continued to demonstrate a self-elevating sentimentalism rooted in cosmic standards of justice and applied it to different world problems he deemed crucial, such as illegal immigration, climate change, or economic inequality. He saw himself as a pope of the future, showing the Church how to keep up with the times. Instead, his legacy already seems passé. 

Immigration

One early episode stands out because it touches on how Pope Francis misunderstood responsible statecraft, democratic legitimacy, the rule of law, and the need for limits in political decision-making. He did this by identifying justice with moralistic humanitarianism, as illustrated by his first trip outside Rome after becoming Pope to the Italian island community of Lampedusa in 2013. It had become the landing ground for many seaborne migrants from Africa and parts of the Middle East looking to make their way to Italy and other European destinations. The small island of around 6,000 in population had received nearly 8,000 migrants that year alone.

The crossings were perilous, and thousands of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, which should have been discouraged by European public authorities, including the European Union.

Pope Francis lent his voice to this tragedy. He summarily announced to the inhabitants of Lampedusa that the migrants’ deaths were primarily the fault of Europe’s indifference: “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters?” He asked. “No one!” he answered, then continued, “We each reply: it was not I, I wasn’t here, it was someone else.” He also blasted the citizens of Lampedusa, many of them Catholics, who were not even worth his pastoral sensitivity, even though they were the ones directly bearing the costs of the migrants’ invasion, which more than doubled their population. Francis also blamed the global forces of capitalism, which, he asserted, made it necessary for these immigrants to leave their homes and villages for Europe. Francis threw around these ideological slogans with reckless abandon.

By his actions, Pope Francis helped create the false notion that European democracies should be home to millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa. He asserted in no uncertain terms the migrants’ right to move to Europe, to be housed and cared for by what he believed were the never-ending resources of a callous, wealthy continent. The open borders’ chorus had a spiritual leader at last. Neither prudence nor authentic charity could trump the absolute right of the migrant. In the pope’s approach, the common good of a once-Christian Europe must give way to exclusively humanitarian concerns, to a generalized compassion that was as much secular as religious.

Left unsaid by Pope Francis is what the Catholic Church actually teaches regarding nations and migrants, a teaching that is built on principles of justice and prudence.

Nations have responsibilities to their citizens to ensure protection and the stewardship of resources for the common good of those entrusted to public authorities. Human beings bearing the image of God also should have the opportunity to thrive and live in a decent society, permitting them, as a matter of justice, when this has been denied, to move and seek to flourish elsewhere. When possible, national authorities should receive individuals and families in these extreme situations, but must also consider their own limitations and needs in making these decisions.

Such clear-headed thinking escaped Francis’s understanding of this issue throughout his pontificate. He would repeat his line of thought in America’s migrant situation, while never engaging in the sober work of prudently applying the standards of justice and mercy, prudence and decency to the concrete circumstances facing citizens and statesmen. He spoke carelessly, rather than speaking as a leader bearing the tremendous responsibility of guiding the thoughts, if not hearts, of almost a billion and a half Catholics. He never once gave voice in any substantive sense to what longstanding citizens of European nations and the United States thought about the tradeoffs and burdens of the migrations of millions of people into their countries, many of them from different civilizations with cultural mores, beliefs, loves, hatreds, so vastly different from their own and some decidedly hostile to the Christian religion itself. In the end, he implicitly denied the legitimacy of democratic nationhood, the borders that make it all possible, and the consent of the governed that must inform it. Too often, he acted as if he were the High Priest of Auguste Comte’s religion of humanity rather than the Holy Roman Pontiff.

What Francis really wanted was the implementation of the politics of war in climate change policies. He welcomed governance by large transnational bodies responsible to no one as they thundered down various climate change demands.

The political and cultural consequences of the numerous “Lampedusa” examples that would mark Europe during the last decade were enormous. None more eventful than the fateful summer of 2015 when Germany’s Angela Merkel threw open Europe’s gates to a million and a half migrants, a gesture that presaged the populist politics that surged in many European countries and the United States. Pope Francis thought he was ushering in a type of Humanitarian Universal Church that would work alongside a Europe that welcomed the world into its egalitarian bosom. Yet most Catholic faithful in Europe and North America, while having compassion for migrants, remain aware of what can and cannot be given in these circumstances. Instead of being in the vanguard on this issue, he was a progressive priest fighting a rearguard action, appearing at times to be angry at a West that wouldn’t take his words seriously or literally.

Climate change

Another hallmark of Francis’s tenure was his devotion to climate change, an issue inevitably interconnected with free markets, rightful political authority, poverty, inequality, population, and family. Francis’s thoughts on these matters echoed the dominant progressive ideology, and were most evident in the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You). As political scientist Daniel Mahoney underscored, the document demonstrates an understanding of creation and man’s place as its chief steward. It is rich and well stated. The pope reminds his flock that moral progress is not synonymous with technological progress. As Mahoney also notes, the document’s sound theological foundation could have been used to develop a level-headed approach to the care of the earth’s resources. However, instead of a rational discussion, the document is marked by an apocalyptic rhetoric depicting a distressed and decaying planet, all because of man’s selfish, consumer-driven activities.

In the encyclical, Pope Francis asserts that air conditioning, for one, is a huge problem caused by masses worldwide seeking their comforts, oblivious to the damage caused by the desire to be comfortable indoors. Did he ever consider that air conditioning has helped save countless lives of people in hospitals in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East? He blames a rapacious capitalism that places human desires ahead of the well-being of the planet and future generations.

More examples of destruction abound: Francis warns us that doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We are on the way to leaving a legacy of debris, desolation, and filth for coming generations. The pace of consumption, waste, and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate future catastrophes, as those which periodically occur in different areas of the world.

The document provides countless illustrations such as these. What is totally missing, however, is the minimal empirical awareness that technological developments, the profit motive, increased specialization in the economy, property rights, and the rule of law have been how Western societies have grown richer while gradually polluting less. Economies have become more efficient in production and more refined in energy usage. Thoughtful Catholics have instead looked to more balanced and humble voices like Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute, who has never shied away from the reality of climate change, while crucially explaining that the adaptation and ingenuity provided by market economies, allows people to deal with the changes brought about by climate change. The end is not nigh.

Those schooled in western constitutionalism, and the belief that a government’s power is determined by a set of laws, note that appeals to “emergency” and “necessity” (as seen in this papal encyclical) are emblematic of attempts to break through barriers of prudence, the rule of law, and an awareness of the limits of power. What Francis really wanted was the implementation of the politics of war in climate change policies. He welcomed governance by large transnational bodies responsible to no one as they thundered down various climate change demands, such as the urging that we all stop driving gas-powered vehicles. The apocalyptic rhetoric of the pope, who at one point in Laudate Deum (Praise God)—a document intentionally written to influence the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP 28) being held in Dubai in 2023—informed the world “that we may be nearing the breaking point” of our current existence.

Ironically, as a prophet of doom, Pope Francis always seemed at home with Hollywood actors and European elites whose climate change policies and corporatist ideas have devastated many Eurozone economies, including the German economy, hurt the livelihood of European farmers, and made energy a luxury good throughout Europe. All policies that will lead to intermittent power outages for some time to come, if recent events in Spain and Portugal are a foretaste. Unless, of course, the nations of Europe regain their good sense and eschew apocalyptic fantasies.

Throughout his papacy, Francis claimed to care pervasively, and emphatically, for the poor. But as a critical Wall Street Journal editorial notes, sound thinking never met his care as he championed the ideas that would keep them poor.

He rarely mentioned that businesses provide opportunities to both employees and consumers of their goods or services. His rhetoric and teaching regarding markets were marked by hostility. Did he ever look at the abundance in Western economies and wonder if more than exploitation and abuse might explain this condition of plenty? If so, he never communicated it. He did not understand that profit is evidence that a business has brought together capital, labor, and other resources in a manner beneficial to consumers, enriching everyone’s lives. Profit in his estimation was equal to greed and stood convicted without trial. He owed more than a little to the left-populist Peronist ideological current in his native Argentina, a current that informed the political and economic corrosion of that once prosperous country.

Inequality

While many of us thought that the root of ills was sin, in his November 2014 address to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Francis stated that we must “resolve the root of the ills, which is inequality.” To end inequality, or what is really the inherent aspect of any free society, we must “renounce the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and of financial speculation, and to act primarily on the structures of inequality.” Where does anything recognizably called the free market exist apart from law, legality, and the dignity of persons? We weren’t told. Too often, the pope reduced Catholic social teaching to such dogmatic egalitarianism and its accompanying ideological clichés.

Francis never seemed to wonder if many of the poor were not taking responsibility for their lives in part because they believed elites like the pope, who everywhere proclaimed them victims of global, impersonal markets. The Bible speaks in manifold tones about the poor, to mean so much more than material deprivation, a condition that has marked man’s lot on this earth for most of human history. The “poor in spirit” resonates across scripture, the soulful movement of those who seek God’s mercy, God’s healing power in lives marked by sin, suffering, and betrayal. The biblical poor are not the proletariat beloved by ideologists who invoke them to undermine personal and political responsibility and to justify new forms of oppression.

The Church’s Teachings

Francis’s commitment to the progressive political vision often put him in an awkward relationship with traditional church teachings. The bones of the Catholic Church’s mission as it proclaims the salvific act of Christ’s death and resurrection are confession and repentance—a recognition of and a turning away from sin. Francis never spoke against this message, but didn’t shout it from the rooftops either. Contrast the paucity of his statements about repentance with his near-incessant commentary about structures of inequality, the betrayed planet, the injustice of the death penalty, and the migrant question. He spoke often of God’s mercy, almost as if it would just land on anyone, but only with great reluctance would he mention repentance, which the Church believes is the requirement for its full reception. Why? Repentance requires an interrogation of the soul and engages the fundamental questions of right and wrong, good and evil. It stresses the only progress we can really make in this life, how close we might come to the life of God. Progress is a moral and spiritual imperative of the soul, nothing more.

Francis intoned that the Catholic Church should now affirm progressive ideological truth. In aiming to be the Pope of Progress, however, he became the Pope of the Rearguard.

Many commentators have noted that nothing changed under Pope Francis’ papacy when it came to issues which progressives inside the Church have long sought to alter: issues of sex and marriage, and the prospect of female priests. That’s true. But this overlooks his significant indications in the 2014–15 Synods of Bishops on the Family that he wanted to change the Church’s teaching for the divorced and remarried to allow them to receive communion without a formal declaration that the first marriage was not in fact a valid marriage. He was rebuffed at the time by bishops from Africa and other developing parts of the world. However, the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, issued by Pope Francis, increased confusion by its ambiguity in upholding the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. It gave rise to bishops in different countries drawing separate conclusions about what the Church now taught. Four cardinals issued a “dubia” to Francis—which translates into “doubts,” or a set of questions asking for clarifications about doctrine sent to the Holy See. They were seeking clarity, if not reaffirmation of what the Church had long proclaimed to be a judgment about marriage that issued from Christ himself. The pope ignored them.

Francis did change the Church’s teaching on the death penalty, stating that the punishment can never be justified (whether he has the unilateral power to change it is another matter altogether). For its entire history, however, the Church always taught the opposite. Although many errantly believed that Pope John Paul II had excluded the use of the death penalty as a matter of justice, he had in fact stated that he no longer thought the punishment necessary to protect the common good, given the ability to house inmates securely, but he never categorically condemned it. He understood that the government, as a trustee of the common good, unlike private individuals, will always possess the right to take human life to fulfill this primary responsibility.

Logically, many then asked what’s next after Francis’ sweeping change in the death penalty teaching. The language used in justifying this shift is grounded in purely secular and progressive reasoning in “an emerging global awareness” about the death penalty’s injustice. After all, what couldn’t be justified if the ground of morality is no longer natural law and the awareness of good and evil rooted in primordial categories, but instead is found in the arc of progress separating right from wrong on nothing deeper than “the times they are a changin’”? Only later did Pope Francis answer this question by stating that even life imprisonment was unjust. From faculty lounges, one finally heard a word never uttered in those confines: Amen.

A final note on Francis’s papacy must consider his manifest disdain for “conservative” or “orthodox” Catholics. Bishop Robert Barron’s essay “Francis in Full” relates some of the insults he hurled, many directed at young priests, “the closed, legalistic slave of his own rigidity”; “doctors of the letter!”; “rigidity conceals the leading of a double life, something pathological”; “professionals of the sacred! Reactionaries.” He referred to conservative young priests as “little monsters.”

These same clerics and the laymen who are in tune with them represent what is undoubtedly the most vibrant part of the Church. Recent evidence offers proof that adult baptisms are surging even in the long moribund churches in Europe. Young men, especially, are coming to church. Surveys make it glaringly apparent that the priests taking their ordination vows of late are vastly more traditional and rooted in the Church’s deep wellspring of thinking. Francis had always seemed disconnected from, if not disapproving of, these emergent “green shoots” in the Church.

It all makes sense. Like many of our intellectuals and older clergy, Pope Francis believed that the line between good and evil was found in one’s attitude to progress. He intoned that the Catholic Church should now affirm progressive ideological truth. In aiming to be the Pope of Progress, however, he became the Pope of the Rearguard, the leader of a dying liberal church that had surged at times in the late 1960s and 1970s, but that is rapidly ceasing to matter, much like the thin imprint of his pontificate on the Church.