WSJ: Pope Francis, the Misunderstood Pontiff
Pope Francis’ death concludes the most misunderstood pontificate in modern times. Hailed by some as a progressive reformer, and attacked by church conservatives as an iconoclastic revolutionary, Francis’ approach to the Catholic Church resembled the credo of the nobleman Tancredi Falconeri in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard.”
Everything must change so that everything can remain the same, Falconeri says, to explain his embrace of Garibaldi’s revolutionaries during the wars of Italian unification. This spirit of conservative reform guided Francis right up through the closing hours of his reign.
Francis’ elevation to the papacy was itself Falconerian. The last pope born outside Europe had been the Syrian-born Gregory III, who died in 741. The election of a native Argentine was widely hailed as a break with more than 1,000 years of a European monopoly on the papacy, and a sign that a modernizing church was turning outward toward the non-European, non-Western world.
Reality was less simple. Francis was as European as a non-European can be, and his election brought the papacy home to its Italian roots. When John Paul II was succeeded by Benedict XVI in 2005, this was the first time since Gregory XI followed Urban V in 1370 that two non-Italians in a row had served as bishop of Rome. For Italian prelates unhappy with this shift, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a godsend. The son of Italian immigrants, Bergoglio spoke Italian at home as a child and was a citizen of the Global South who was legally eligible for Italian citizenship. Everything had changed, and everything remained the same.
The job has its perks, but no Roman pontiff can expect an easy life. With about 1.4 billion members and a substantial presence on every inhabited continent, the Church of Rome is the world’s largest single religious organization, and its inner divisions and disputes mirror those of the rest of the world. Mostly wealthy and socially liberal churches in Europe and North America face demographic decline and chronic shortages of priests. Feminists in these countries resent what they see as outmoded ideas like an all-male priesthood, while many seek changes in traditional church teaching on matters of sexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion.