When he was elevated to the papacy in 2013, it was widely expected that Pope Francis shake the Catholic Church, of the delight and the horror of the conservatives of the liberals. It was said that ancient teachings such as the condemnation of the sex of the church outside of marriage and its restriction of the priesthood to men were in the sight.
In the course of its 12 -year -old pontificate, Francis managed to undermine the clarity of church teaching in various hot issues. But it didn’t change dogmas. And with his death, he leaves a church that is tired of confusion and a generation of young Catholics who love the church precisely because of the rules he tried to liberalize.
Since the sexual revolution, Catholic liberals have waited for a Pope who would put the Church in line with secular social trends. This faction considered Francis’s papal predecessors, John Pablo II and Benedict XVI as archieth archirillas. Francis was his hero, a Pope who came to the throne who described social conservatives as “verified graves” and “small monsters” who “like to throw stones.” Armed with papal infallibility, it could bring some change of superposition.
An impediment was the Catholic teaching that dogmas, once defined, cannot be changed, even by a Pope. However, Francis found a solution. I was running with the dogma that marriage lasts until death. According to this teaching, a divorced Catholic cannot marry again unless the Church has declared the first null marriage. Liberal Catholics have long hated this rule. If Catholics could divorce and get married again at will, wouldn’t it be easier to be a Catholic?
Francis’s solution was to add a note to the foot of the 2016 pastoral exhortation Amoris Laetitia Suggest that in “certain cases”, a Catholic who had married without the permission of the Church could be in good reputation. What cases? That was uncle. As a result, almost all are free to think that their cases qualify. The episode revealed Francis’s strategy: dogmas cannot be changed, but lagoons can be opened, wide enough to drive a truck.
The liberals also had great hopes about gay marriage, especially after Francis in 2013 answered a question about homosexual Catholics with his own question: “Who am I to judge?” Ten years later, he created a lagoon in teaching that marriage is an institution that unites a man and a woman.
Document 2023 Fiducia begs Authorizes priests to confer blessings to homosexual couples, not in Your unionsExactly, but in Individuals within unions. The hair division was not impressive, or for the defenders of homosexual rights or for gay Catholics who strive to live with the church’s teachings. Many bishops rejected change, either silently or vocally.
Francis disappointed the liberals about the ordination of women. He instituted two commissions to investigate the possibility of ordering women to diaconate, the range of sacred orders just below the priesthood, but does not touch additional action. Francis also did not move the ball, for abortion or contraception. And gender theory was a team too far. Francis called him an assault on nature, similar to nuclear weapons.
The most complete victory that Francis gave to the liberals referred to the traditional Latin mass, and may have failed. This ancient liturgy, complemented in the 1960s by the simplest mass of Vatican II, is popular among young people with a “traditional” sensitivity, which are attracted to the qualities of mystery and astonishment of the Church, and the challenging moral teachings.
In 2021, Francis made illegal celebrate the Latin Mass without permission from Rome, which was usually rejected. In doing so, the life of the Church for the same Catholics who are more likely to become priests or nuns someday, or marry their children in faith. By suppressing the Latin Mass, Francis did not get against the past, as he thought, but against the future.
The liberals had predicted an “Francis effect” on church assistance, a “return to parishes at a mass scale” in the words of the biographer Austen Ivereight, in response to Francis’s liberal words and actions. On the other hand, assistance to the weekly mass has stagnated since 2008, in about a quarter of Catholics. Continuous priestly vocations to decline. The only growth is between priests and lay Catholics who have the same “traditional” sensitivity that Francis sought to eradicate. As the cardinals find the next Pope, they must give the thesis facts considered.
The conclave seems open. Cardinal Guinean Robert Sarah is a favorite of traditionalist and conservative Catholics. The youngest Dutch Cardinal Willem Eijk is another strong option. Only a centrist figure like the Italian Pietro Parolin would be welcome, so it calls Francis’s war against conservatives.
A Pope who perpetuates that war will risk permanently alienating the burning minority of Catholics who attend Mass every time they pay and believe in the ancient teachings of the Church if they find it easy or not. And that would be Damag in fact. Who emerges from the conclave must learn from the failure of Francis’s reform attempt, who attended those who rented to the Church and punished those who love it.
Julia Yost is the main editor on the religion news site Affairs First Things.
