–OpEd-
ROME — Across his 12-year papacy, and since his death on Monday, Pope Francis has been hailed by both the press and the faithful as a figure of innovation and historic transformation. Yet the facts before us, and the sobriety of his own judgments, should have prompted a far more measured and clear-eyed appraisal.
Francis may have been the most misunderstood, and most overpraised, pope in modern history.
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Take, for instance, the iconic “Buonasera” (Good evening) with which he opened his papacy in St. Peter’s Square on March 13, 2013, the night of his election. Everyone remembers it. But few recall the similar “Buonanotte” (Good night) with which Benedict XVI closed his own papacy on February 28, the evening of his resignation in Castel Gandolfo. Something subliminal seemed to lead the public to see Francis‘ down-to-earth greeting as extraordinary and the second as routine, even though they were identical in meaning.
Even more striking was the media’s fixation on the phrase “Who am I to judge?,” in response to a question on gay rights in the Church, during Pope Francis’ July 28, 2013 flight back from Rio de Janeiro. It was celebrated as a groundbreaking statement on homosexuality. In reality, it was a hesitant response from the newly elected pope, prompted by his risky appointment of Monsignor Battista Ricca to the Vatican bank. Ricca, a man with a widely discussed sexual history, had been quietly transferred by top Vatican diplomats to manage the Santa Marta guesthouse, only for Francis to unexpectedly name him to lead the important financial institution, known as IOR.
Scandal and finances
Francis would go on to make similarly ill-fated appointments. Notably, two members of Opus Dei, Monsignor Lucio Balda and Francesca Chaouqui, were chosen for COSEA, a newly established commission overseeing the Holy See’s economic and administrative structure. Both would later be tried and convicted in connection with the VatiLeaks 2 scandal.
Francis raised expectations with one of his signature catchphrases.
Twelve years of papacy were not enough for Francis to resolve the two major problems left to him by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who had handed over extensive investigative files during their first meeting at Castel Gandolfo: the much-criticized Vatican bank and the scandal of clerical sexual abuse. On the first issue, Francis raised expectations with one of his signature catchphrases, “Saint Peter didn’t have a bank,” but the IOR remained in place, unchanged, Ricca and all.
On the second, his response was, as so often, hesitant. It took years to remove Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the clergy, and in 2018 he even accused abuse victims in Chile of fabricating claims against Bishop Juan Barros, though he later expressed shame for that.
Revolutionary Pope?
His record in Argentina already made clear that the man born in Buenos Aires with the name Jorge Bergoglio was not the progressive the media painted him to be. In 2010, just three years before his election to the papacy, the Buenos Aires cardinal vehemently opposed a same-sex marriage bill that lacked a Senate majority. His language was so retrograde that President Cristina Kirchner accused him of using “the rhetoric of the Crusades and the Inquisition, and decided to attend the vote herself. The law passed with 33 votes to 27. Ironically, thanks to Bergoglio’s conservatism, Argentina today has a marriage law more progressive than Italy’s.
Why then has Pope Francis been so widely seen as a progressive, even a revolutionary? Part of it comes down to his South American populist tone, which has often been mistaken for a kind of European-style leftism, such as when he blamed “NATO barking at Russia’s door” for the war in Ukraine.
Yet another part of it lies in the typical Jesuit ambiguity, frequently mistaken for straightforward speech. The result has been confusion among the faithful, who struggle to make sense of the pope’s shifting stance on issues like communion for the divorced, women’s ordination and clerical celibacy.
Yet the clearest clue to understanding Francis’s papacy came at the very start, when Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York warned: “Don’t expect a change in the product: expect a change in packaging.” This blunt commercial metaphor revealed the Vatican’s age-old survival tactic: change everything so that nothing changes.
I know how the news gets into the media.
Marketing, of course, is not something you can improvise, it calls for professionals. The first to play the role of papal spin doctor was Greg Burke, an Opus Dei journalist from the United States, who explained his job in a rare interview: “I know what journalists are looking for and what they need, and I know how things will play out in the media.” In other words, he knew what bait his colleagues would go for, and he had Francis toss it in the pond, with impressive results in terms of public relations.
The second spin doctor was Jesuit intellectual Antonio Spadaro, editor of the influential journal La Civiltà Cattolica for 12 years. He landed the pope’s first long interview and many more thereafter, enjoying privileged access to the pontiff and joining him on numerous international trips. In this way, Francis bypassed the Vatican’s formal hierarchies and maintained a direct link to the Jesuit order that shaped him.
The image of Pope Francis was created largely by these two, even if it had little to do with reality. The notion that Bergoglio was a revolutionary clashes with the unchanged reality of the Vatican: a patrimonial absolute monarchy with medieval trappings, where executive, legislative and judicial authority is concentrated in the hands of one man, who personally owns all the state‘s assets.
Green Pope?
Francis often said he wanted a “poor Church,” but he knew full well that his signature alone could have made it so: something he never signed, of course. Instead, he offered empty gestures of austerity: living in a room at Santa Marta instead of the Apostolic Palace, using a small car for short trips while still flying in planes for his travels.
The pope never stopped celebrating every birth as a divine gift, discouraging contraception.
Then there’s the image of the “environmentalist pope,” bolstered by ties to the Slow Food movement and Carlo Petrini. That too is a misconception. The biggest environmental threats today are overpopulation and meat consumption. Every child born in the West represents a blow to the planet, adding one more person who will consume roughly 80 times more resources than someone born in the Global South.
Yet the pope never stopped celebrating every birth as a divine gift, discouraging contraception and equating abortion with murder — calling abortion doctors “hitmen,” with a rigidity on par with Catholic fundamentalists like U.S. Vice President JD Vance, the last politician he met before his death.
As for meat consumption: around 200 million animals and three billion fish are slaughtered every day, averaging out to 150 animals per person per year. Already, 80% of cultivated land is used for pasture or animal feed, and the growing demand for meat is a major driver of deforestation. Preaching environmentalism without addressing excessive meat consumption is a glaring omission from a pope who took the name of a saint known for his Canticle of the Creatures and love towards animals.
In the end, while Benedict XVI moved with strategic intent but ultimately failed, Francis acted tactically and, as T.S. Eliot might have said, left us “not with a bang but with a whimper.”
