In the first part of this two-part essay, I identified the pockets of resistance to Pope Francis within the U.S. Catholic Church. In what follows—part two—I discuss four areas of particular concern to the neo-traditionalist opponents of Francis. While seldom openly accusing the pope of “sin” or “heresy,” they found his statements and pastoral example in these four crucial areas to be misguided, confusing, and erroneous, to say the least.
(Downplaying) the Sins of the Flesh
According to his detractors, Francis, in addition to “downplaying” the Church’s condemnation of abortion, failed sufficiently to condemn so-called sexual sins. In 2013 he responded to a journalist’s question about gay priests by asking, “Who am I to judge” (celibate) gay priests “who seek God and are of good will.” In a 2023 interview with the Associated Press, he expressed concern about the criminalization of homosexuality in some countries. “We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” Francis emphasized. “Being homosexual is not a crime. It is not a crime.” Subsequently asked to “clarify” the statement, he responded that “Yes, [homosexuality] is a sin. Fine, but first let us distinguish between a sin and a crime.” As a rebuke to his self-appointed watchdogs, he added: “It’s also a sin to lack charity with one another.”
In a handwritten note sent to Father James Martin, S.J., founder of the LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference, in advance of the annual assembly of the group in 2024, Francis expressed solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics, their friends, families, and pastors: “I am glad that [Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory, archbishop of Washington] will celebrate the Mass; I will be spiritually with him and with all of you, united in prayer.” Francis had sent similar greetings and blessings to the LGBTQ Outreach conference the three previous years as well. Perhaps most controversially, in 2024 the Holy Father allowed priests to bless same-sex relationships, a decision that concerned or appalled many conservative bishops, clergy, and neo-traditionalist PIO laity in the United States.
The Sin of Pride
Some of the pope’s most brazen detractors claimed that Francis’s supposedly “lax” attitude to official Church teaching about marriage, abortion, and homosexuality was rooted in arrogance and pride. Following his own “whims” more than the traditional teachings of his predecessors, they charged, Francis revealed himself to be the leader of his own cult of personality and a sower of “confusion” among the faithful. As Kevin D. Roberts, the Catholic president of The Heritage Foundation, wrote:
Yet as much as Pope Francis loved the poor, he was not a humble Franciscan friar but a savvy Jesuit political operator whose initial attention to the corporal works of mercy—though never entirely lost—soon gave way to practical considerations about what would secure his power over the Church. And unfortunately, as he aged and became more entangled in the politics of the Vatican, Pope Francis became vulnerable to manipulation by his advisers as well as the media and indeed made many missteps that confused and divided his flock. . . . Examples abound. One week he would promote the blessing of ‘unions of persons of the same sex.’ Next, he would say that marriage will always be the union of one man and one woman. On one occasion, he declared that abortion was akin to ‘hiring a hitman,’ while nevertheless appointing a pro-abortion economist to the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The Sin of (Political) Heresy
Politically right-wing U.S. Catholics resented Pope Francis’s public criticism of the policies of both Trump administrations, especially around the treatment of migrants, refugees, and the poor. A well-known case in point was the pope’s “fraternal correction” of J.D. Vance’s politically self-serving interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept of ordo amoris (“the order of love”) as justifying the deportation of “illegal” immigrants.
Nor were the conservative Catholic opponents of Francis fans of his critiques of nationalism and his indictment of growing economic inequality in the United States and beyond. They rightly perceived a coherence to the pope’s teachings on “the planet and the poor,” which Francis cast as the most vulnerable victims of a worldwide system, governed by what he labelled the “technocratic paradigm,” which thrives on the exploitation of nature and the hoarding of wealth by a tiny minority of hyper-capitalists. A culture of consumption, Francis proclaimed, had led to the “globalization of indifference” to “the cry of the poor and the cry of the planet.” The anti-Francis agitators balked at the pope’s demand, articulated most powerfully in Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home, his influential 2015 encyclical, that affluent nations and individuals should take responsibility for the plight of the hundreds of millions of climate refugees caused in part by the developed world’s reckless pollution of the environment.
Robert Mickens, a veteran Catholic journalist and trained theologian, argues that the most vehement enemies of Francis see him as a kind of Catholic terrorist:
No, he is not waging a reign of terror. But he is prophetically disseminating a message that . . . could easily unsettle and change our lives in ways far more radical and destabilizing than anything unleashed by Islamic State militants. He’s doing so on multiple levels and on various fronts. And he is meeting pockets of resistance in every sector of society, even inside the Catholic church. There are Sunday Mass-goers who bristle at his insistent calls for a major reform of the “economy that kills,” including the application of greater regulations on free markets. There are wealthy, generous benefactors of Catholic dioceses, people who try to be as responsible with their resources as they have been hard-working in earning them, who are offended by his anguished cries for a more just distribution of wealth . . . .There are good and decent citizens of all faiths and of no faith at all, compassionate people who are offended by Francis and believe he is plain wrong in demanding that Europe and North America throw open their doors to migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
For U.S. Catholics, Pope Francis’s approach to violence of all kinds (from genocide and war to the arms trade and handgun violence), and his support for human life in all its stages, “from conception to natural death,” recalls the “seamless garment of life” ethic articulated in the 1980s by Joseph Bernardin, the cardinal archbishop of Chicago. Neo-traditionalists of the present day, especially those susceptible to right-wing U.S. political discourse, find Francis’s consistent ethic of life too inclusive, much in the same way Cardinal Bernardin’s lay and episcopal critics did in the ‘80s.
Objections from right-wing U.S. Catholics to the Vatican’s “foreign policy” under Pope Francis included his widely reported outreach to the Palestinian victims of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and devastation of Gaza. Trump supporters in particular were appalled when Francis called for an investigation to determine whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constituted genocide.
The anguished reactions by alt-right social media celebrities to the election, in May 2025, of Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, were based on their dashed hopes that the new pontiff would break decisively with his predecessor: “Sorry, Catholics. This new Pope is an open borders globalist. He will be pushing for abortion soon. This isn’t a guess. You can scroll his X account and see what he’s been up to,” lamented alt-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich.
The Sin of Ecclesiological Heresy
Voices from across the spectrum of anti-Francis neo-traditionalists objected, with various degrees of vehemence, to what they judged to be the pope’s doctrinal and theological errors. These they culled from two “sources”—first, his unscripted, often spontaneous and widely reported remarks to reporters or to various gatherings of Catholic schoolchildren, families, pilgrims and the like; and, second, his official proclamations, decision and writings, including not only his apostolic exhortations and encyclicals, but also his talks to various Catholic organizations.
The list of “unofficial” faux pas is long, and includes Francis’s comments berating the Roman curia (the governing and administrative bureaucracy of the Catholic Church) and the tendency of some of its priests and bishops to act not as shepherds but as princes; his denunciations of clericalism as the scourge of the Church and of the papal court as “the leprosy of the papacy”; his warning that spiritual arrogance, combined with an unreformed life, is a temptation of dioceses, parishes, and religious communities alike; and, his assertion that the Church should not be a doctrinal fortress or a policer of orthodoxy, but rather a field hospital expressing God’s mercy to the spiritually, psychologically, and physically wounded, whatever their relationship to the institutional church and its doctrinal and moral imperatives. Such comments, the critics say, are an example of Francis’s flawed ecclesiology (theory of the Church), reflected in his “annoying” suggestion that the Church should be conceived as an inverted pyramid, with the laity above and the pope and bishops below, and that the Church is a synod (a body that governs through deliberation and mutual consultation of laity and clergy). They also object to his radical openness to other world religions, especially Islam, and his comment that all the great religions are “paths to God.” These kinds of statements, the neo-traditionalists contend, carry the taint of indifferentism, the (condemnable) belief that differences of religious belief are of little or no importance.
Objections to the explicitly authoritative or “official” pronouncements of Pope Francis are legion. While more generous critics gave less weight to the unscripted remarks by this “undisciplined” pope, as falling short of any serious, authoritative exercise of the papal magisterium (teaching office), they spared no effort in attacking the official expressions with which they disagreed. These included Francis’s supposedly dangerous positions on God’s mercy, articulated in Misericordiae Vultus (2015), his “philo-communist” tendency in support of the poor and popular movements, and his notion of popular piety as a theological locus of equal standing with the official magisterial teaching which, for centuries, has been promulgated from the top, as it were, from the popes and the bishops down to the faithful, who are to receive and obey rather than help develop and shape the teachings. Francis’s supposed shortfall in moral theology, the dissenters charge, is displayed in his offering the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist to separated Catholics who have remarried (Amoris Laetitia, 2016). Not least, Laudato Si “shows a lack of scientific and ecological competence.”
Some of these criticisms reflect the ecclesial in-fighting that has been waged by U.S. Catholics, among others, since the Second Vatican Council, which (astonishingly) remains controversial among the neo-traditionalists. Unlike both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, they claim, Francis is less a theologian than a (unspoken: mere) pastor. Hence, his doctrinal errors flow from his lack of theological sophistication. “Obviously, the problem is not that he is not a theologian but rather that his theology is pastoral,” writes the Jesuit theologian Victor Codina, a supporter of the late pope. “Francis passes from dogma to kerygma, from theoretical principles to pastoral discernment and mystagogy. And his theology is not colonialist but from the Global South, and this bothers the North.”
Most egregious to some of Francis’s enemies was his “canonical offensive” against Opus Dei, as one detractor described the pope’s calls for reform of the organization, which was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá and elevated by Pope John Paul II to the status of a “Personal Prelature” of the Church. Why Opus Dei has been the subject of controversy for decades is suggested in the title of journalist Gareth Gore’s recent exposé—the latest in a line of many such take-downs— Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. To many conservative Catholics, however, Opus Dei is a model of lay piety and service to a world whose political structures and operative atheism or paganism pose a serious threat to Christianity. To these U.S. Catholics, “. . .Pope Francis was especially misguided in his approach to more conservative segments of the Church. He imposed serious restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, which is growing rapidly in the United States. And despite Pope Francis’s frequent denunciation of “clericalism,” he upended the constitution of Opus Dei, a prelature distinguished for promoting the role of the laity in the Church’s mission, and did so “for no apparent reason” (say his critics).
Conclusion
While this brisk tour of the anti-Francis horizon has focused largely on the neo-traditionalist opposition to his pontificate, another essay of equal length could be devoted to the disaffected voices on the Catholic left, who felt that Francis did not go far enough in liberalizing the Church. However, it is important to recognize that progressive PIO Catholics enjoy lower levels of funding, institutional support, and political and ecclesial clout than the neo-traditionalists and their clerical and episcopal supporters.
That said, the six American cardinals who participated in the recent conclave to elect a new pope, as well as their fellow American bishops, have welcomed with open arms their fellow American, Robert Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV. It may be of no little comfort to progressive Catholics that the Pro-Trump social media personality Joey Mannarino groused that “the new Pope…is worse than Francis…“we’re f***ed.”
What progressive Catholic can fail to rejoice at that elegant appraisal?
Declarations of victory from disciples of Pope Francis’s theologically and pastorally coherent, geographically and culturally inclusive vision of the Church may be premature, however. Early signs are that the neo-traditionalist PIOs are not humbled by the election of Pope Leo XIV. Already they are pursuing a two-track tactical response: cast the new pontiff as more “balanced,” “disciplined” and “institutionally responsible” than his immediate predecessor; and simultaneously gear up for a new round of papal policing and divisive polemics. Are these tactics destined to fail, clearing the way for the U.S. bishops and laity to embrace their fellow American with the deference and support accorded Francis’ predecessors? One hopes.
