Pope Francis Aimed to Modernize the Church, Yet Tradition is What We Need Today
Francis was intended to be a pope suited for the era of globalization.
While the pontiff’s spiritual mission remained constant, the context in which he operated shifted. When the College of Cardinals selected Jorge Maria Bergoglio from Argentina as the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, they were making an assumption about the direction of the world.
They were mistaken.
Upon becoming Pope Francis in 2013, same-sex marriage was gaining traction in America and Europe, yet discussions around “pronouns” or the implications of transgender ideology on women’s sports and children’s bodies had not yet emerged.
Barack Obama had recently been re-elected as the President of the United States, signaling, to many eager supporters, the dawn of a post-racial age in both politics and potentially beyond.
The political landscape across the Atlantic leaned towards free trade and expansive immigration — the debate was merely about the scale.
The entire globe appeared on the verge of becoming a unified community, requiring only the reconciliation of the United States and Europe with the Global South.
This necessitated a reminder for wealthy Americans and Europeans of their responsibilities towards the impoverished of the world.
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Francis wasn’t chosen as a socialist pope, but rather one expected to provide moral equilibrium in the face of escalating economic globalization.
The cardinals hoped for Francis to mediate the dynamics of north and south within sexual politics as well.
With same-sex marriage becoming prominent, the Catholic Church appeared to be on the defeatist side of the culture war raging in the West, reliant on negotiating the most favorable terms of retreat.
The Church could not simply reject its teachings on homosexuality, contraception, or the ordination of women — it regarded these as divine instructions. While the Western populace may have been willing to abandon them, regions where Christianity was actually flourishing, such as Africa, were not.
Catholics closely observed the fragmentation within the Anglican Communion and various Protestant denominations, which were torn apart by disputes regarding homosexuality and women’s roles in the Church, resulting in enduring divides between African and Western congregations.
Francis was envisioned as a unifier among the Church’s diverse factions.
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He would diligently uphold the Church’s foundational teachings, presenting them in ways meant to reassure those who dissent and progressives of their inclusion in the community.
However, while engaging gently with those calling for Church modernization, he firmly opposed those in the West drawn to Catholicism for its traditional values, especially those preferring the Latin Mass.
What neither Francis nor the cardinals who chose him foresaw was the imminent eruption of significant political discord over globalization in the West, coinciding with the progressive push towards wokeism and gender ideology granting the right a more favorable position in the culture war.
Francis accepted the idea of a socially moderate church that could align with liberal Western values — without outright abandoning essential doctrines — while appealing to the Global South by critiquing the capitalist world economy.
Yet, the Church now faces an unexpected prospect to evangelize the West once more using a decidedly different approach, should the cardinals select a pope as distinct from Francis as he was from the conservative Benedict XVI.
Despite Francis’ resistance, the Latin Mass continues to attract new converts and lapsed Catholics back into the Church.
Recent polls indicate that the decline of Christianity in America and Europe has either slowed, ceased, or in some places even reversed.
In particular, young men are becoming increasingly religious, a trend correlated with their political rightward shift.
In France, the Church has noted a 45% increase in Easter conversions compared to last year, marking the highest number of converts in the two decades since the French Bishops’ Conference began tracking these figures.
On the final day of his life, Pope Francis met with Vice President JD Vance, a young Catholic convert from the populist right, embodying the shifts occurring within both the world and the Church.
When Pope Francis became pontiff: A timeline of his religious journey and career
- Dec. 17, 1936: Jorge Mario Bergoglio is born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the eldest of five children of Mario Jose Bergoglio, an accountant from Italy, and Regina María Sívori, the daughter of Italian immigrants.
- Dec. 13, 1969: Ordained a priest within the Jesuit order, which he would lead as provincial superior during Argentina’s tragic dictatorship beginning in the 1970s.
- May 20, 1992: Appointed as the auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and, in 1998, succeeds Cardinal Antonio Quarracino as the archbishop of the Argentine capital.
- Feb. 21, 2001: Elevated to cardinal by Pope John Paul II.
- March 13, 2013: Elected as the 266th pope, being the first from the Americas, the first Jesuit, and the first to adopt the name Francis, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi.
The next pope may take a similarly critical stance towards the Trump-Vance administration’s immigration policies as Francis did: a pope is always expected to emphasize compassion, including for those crossing borders illegally.
Yet if Francis represented the pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church requires now is a populist pope—one who grasps that by renewing its connections with the working class in the West, alongside the Global South, it can gain eager converts.
Moreover, a Church that emphasizes traditional moral teachings both in Europe and America, as well as Africa, is likely to thrive.
Pope Francis, in some respects, exhibited too much conservatism, failing to fully acknowledge the perils of globalism and the allure of traditionalism even within the West.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
