Pope Francis and the end of the Imperial Papacy is an opinion
The Church in St. Peter’s Square: What Did Joseph Ratzinger Want to Tell Us About His Nazi-Born-Infeld Success?
The Argentine Cardinal, who was known for riding the bus, took many of the steps that church experts said were needed to move the church forward. Joseph Ratzinger was chosen by the College of Cards to be the Pope.
I was in St Peter’s Square for a second conclave eight years ago and thought the Argentine was too old to serve as pope.
I was surprised at how large a figure Francis became. He was a constant, looming presence. My children grew up with my listening to papal speeches in the car. I gave the rosary beads the pope had handed me to relatives and friends who needed them more than I did.
He was moved sobs as he came face to face with the people who had suffered enormous persecution, the members of the Rohingya ethnic minority in Bangladesh. In my opinion, Francis cared a lot about migrants and the forgotten and marginalized, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.
When the conservatives wrote Francis an official letter of “dubia” for doubt, asking him to clear up the “grave disorientation and great confusion” caused by the document he wrote, he simply refused.
That infuriated them, and over the years the pressure, and noise, the conservative opposition produced on affiliated news outlets led some of them to suggest that the time of a schism, or formal break, with the church, was nigh.
I asked Francis if he was worried about the break off from Rome of his opponents in the American church on one papal flight.
On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the news media than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. After we both got stuck in elevators for a week, he looked at my notes to see if they related to what happened to me. I saw him accept enough sweets to feed an army.
In the Vatican, he surprised me with a governing style that his critics considered authoritarian (“Frankie, Where’s Your Mercy,” posters in Rome read) and an ability to get around the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.
I was surprised when he wrapped up the meeting of the bishop with a rant about the church being unfairly accused by the devil.
I heard stories from his friends that he learned from his mistake and showed a willingness to change. He admitted to his mistake and promised that it wouldn’t happen again. He took important measures to improve safety in the church.
He succeeded in one way or another. For generations, modernizers lamented the outsize power of the papacy, the anachronism of a monarchical authority in a democratic age, the way the concept of papal infallibility froze Catholic debates even as the world rushed forward. The Catholic bureaucracy believed that Francis shared those concerns and was going to promise a more horizontally oriented church. He used his power to suppress deviations from his authority the same way as his predecessors, but this time the targets were conservative groups instead of progressives and modernizers.
After the death of Pope Francis, many Catholics who had been following the pope through his lengthy reign of John Paul II and Benedict don’t think he’s a liberal pope.
