In the days and weeks since the death of Pope Francis, the international news media has been full of tributes to Francis’s progressive vision for the Church and speculation as to whether his successor, Pope Leo XIV, will continue his approach or return to the more conservative vision associated with his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This sort of language has been embraced by both Francis’s critics on the right, who saw him as far too willing to adapt Church teaching to fit modern liberal sensibilities, as well as by supporters and those who would like to see the Church embrace more progressive stances on contraception, same-sex relationships, and the role of women in the Church. And yet, one of the hallmarks of Pope Francis’s papacy was precisely the way he defied distinctions between “progressive” and “conservative.” On the one hand, he placed the defense of the poor and the marginalized, of migrants and the environment, at the center of his papacy. On the other, he reaffirmed the Church’s traditional prohibition on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of women. On the one hand, in speaking of gay Catholics, he acknowledged “who am I to judge?” and allowed priests to bless same-sex couples. On the other, he used a homophobic slur and attacked what he called “gender ideology.” On the one hand, he elevated a few women to leading roles within the government of the Church; on the other, he initially resisted efforts to open the way for women to become deacons.
How are we to make sense of these apparent contradictions? That Pope Francis seemed to resist the logic of the progressive/conservative binary is an indication of how ill-equipped we are to make sense of religious actors using categories derived from a political framework. This is doubly true when those categories emerge from a specifically North Atlantic political context that does not reflect the concerns and priorities of the global Church.
Beyond Political Ideologies
From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis insisted on holding together values and commitments that European and American politics tends to prize apart. This was most evident in Francis’s insistence that the defense of human life cannot begin and end with opposition to abortion, but must just as vigorously condemn other affronts to human life and dignity such as poverty, war, and the death penalty. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he explained in the first interview he gave as pope. “Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary thing,” he continued; “The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.” Pope Francis made a similar argument in a 2018 apostolic exhortation in which he called for a more holistic defense of human life. “Our defence of the innocent unborn needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life,” he explained. But “equally sacred,” he insisted, “are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection” (para. 101). This integral commitment to human life was also central to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’. In it, Francis lambasted a “throwaway culture” that treats not just material goods but life itself as disposable—a culture manifest most obviously in the vast amount of waste generated by our insatiable thirst for consumption, but also in the attitude that some forms of life are less valuable than others. “When we fail to acknowledge the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities,” he wrote, “it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected” (para. 117). Again and again, Pope Francis insisted on holding together commitments that conventional politics, and especially those animated by the American “culture wars,” have tended to pit against one another.
Here, it’s worth probing why exactly Pope Francis’s vision is so difficult to classify ideologically. In the first place, it arose from a set of philosophical and theological principles that are distinct from the ones that animate most political projects, even if such projects are often embraced and championed by religious actors. This tension was most clearly on display in a controversial recent document prepared by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which condemned so-called “gender theory” alongside a host of other “grave violations” to human dignity. It justified this critique by drawing a sharp contrast between Catholic anthropology and a secular liberal model, which “identifies dignity with an isolated and individualistic freedom that claims to impose particular subjective desires and propensities as ‘rights’ to be guaranteed.” “Human dignity cannot be based on merely individualistic standards,” the document insisted; it must be grounded “on the constitutive demands of human nature, which do not depend on individual arbitrariness or social recognition” and “have a concrete and objective content based on our shared human nature” (paras. 18 and 25). According to the document, this disagreement on the anthropological grounds for human dignity explains why Catholics and liberals arrive at opposing positions on such issues as reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights.
That Pope Francis seemed to resist the logic of the progressive/conservative binary is an indication of how ill-equipped we are to make sense of religious actors using categories derived from a political framework.
Pope Francis’s teaching on the environment and global solidarity likewise reflected this suspicion of liberalism and political ideologies more generally. In Fratelli Tutti, written at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pope pushed back against the rising tide of nationalist and populist movements, which threaten the bonds of international solidarity needed to grapple with global challenges such as climate change, poverty, and the pandemic. And yet, he was equally concerned in that document to resist what he saw as the dominant form of global integration—that of neoliberalism and the market, which can only impose a false universalism leading to deeper forms of inequality and isolation. Indeed, in the chapter of the encyclical devoted to establishing a “better form of politics,” Pope Francis explicitly framed his own distinctively Catholic vision of universal fraternity rooted in the parable of the Good Samaritan as a rejoinder to both populism and a technocratic liberalism that privileges the individual at the expense of communal solidarity. In this latter model, he argued, “liberty becomes nothing more than a condition for living as we will, completely free to choose to whom or what we will belong, or simply to possess or exploit. This shallow understanding has little to do with the richness of a liberty directed above all to love” (para. 103). Passages such as these give the lie to the critique frequently levelled against Pope Francis by some on the right, who accused him of uncritically embracing modernity or accommodating liberal values. They also reveal that the pope was not hostile to politics per se, but only to those political formations he perceived as being at odds with Catholic teaching, whatever position they happened to occupy on the political spectrum.
Pope Francis and the Global Church
That Pope Francis’s vision seems to scramble our political categories is thus a useful reminder that the politics of the American Church and the “culture wars” issues that have come to dominate it do not always reflect the priorities and concerns of the global Church. Though Pope Francis was certainly not a proponent of Latin American liberation theology during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, his abiding commitment to the poor and the marginalized very much reflects the “preferential option for the poor” so central to that theological movement. It’s a reminder that for so many Catholics across the global South, poverty, migration, violence, and war are by far the most immediate and pressing concerns that the faithful confront in their daily lives and must therefore be front and center to the ministry of the Church in these regions. These priorities informed Pope Francis’s teaching on the environment, which stressed the way that climate change and ecological devastation disproportionately affect the poor and poorer countries, as well as his insistence on the need for the Church to go out to the peripheries. They were likewise reflected in his commitment to synodality within the Church—the effort to decentralize decision-making and encourage greater dialogue, consultation, and participation of all the faithful in the mission of the Church. In all these ways, Pope Francis brought the priorities and concerns of Catholics from the global South to the forefront. Given that the demographic face of the Church continues to shift inexorably from Europe and North America to the global South, these are likely to remain pressing questions , and they are questions which cut across any simple distinction between “conservative” and “progressive” forces within the Church.
A Jesuit Vocation
Finally, I think we can’t fully grasp the complexities of Pope Francis’s vision without understanding something of his vocation as a Jesuit. Critics of the pope would often point to the tension between his rhetorical or symbolic gestures of inclusion—such as allowing priests to bless same-sex couples or his famous statement “who am I to judge?”—and his unwillingness to make substantive changes to Catholic doctrine. Some argued that such discrepancies sowed “confusion” in the minds of the faithful. But it might be more helpful to view them as an effect of the Pope Francis’s commitment to the typically Ignatian practice of discernment. Discernment is a mode of prayerful decision-making that involves listening and seeking out the guidance of the Holy Spirit, rather than adhering to a pre-established set of rules. It is an attitude that allows for greater flexibility and an appreciation for the complexity of human life. It may well reflect Francis’s intellectual debt to some of his Jesuit forebears, such as the mid-century French Jesuits Gaston Fessard and Henri de Lubac, who were committed to holding opposing ideas and values in a productive tension.[1] As Pope Francis explained in an interview with the Jesuit publication America, “a Catholic cannot think either-or (aut-aut) and reduce everything to polarization. The essence of what is Catholic is both-and (et-et). … The Holy Spirit in the church does not reduce everything to just one value; rather, it harmonizes opposing differences. That is the Catholic spirit. The more harmony there is between the differences and the opposites the more Catholic it is. The more polarization there is, the more one loses the Catholic spirit and falls into a sectarian spirit.” Such a sectarian spirit, he noted elsewhere, “turns contrapositions into contradictions, demanding we choose, and reducing reality to simple binaries,” and for Pope Francis, it was associated above all with “ideologies and unscrupulous politicians” (79). His suspicion of this sort of either/or thinking and his willingness to embrace the complexity and ambiguity of human life is a testament to one of the great hallmarks of Pope Francis’s papacy—his commitment to being a pastor first and foremost. Beyond the imperative to maintain doctrinal purity, Francis always tried to keep the person front and center, inviting the Church to meet people where they are.
For all these reasons, Pope Francis often disappointed those who looked to him hoping he might confirm their pre-existing political priorities, and they are likely to be similarly disappointed by his successor as well. Let us hope, then, that the new pope will maintain Francis’s pastoral approach, his humility, and his commitment to discernment. In this era of deep polarization within the Church and our wider world, there is still something valuable to be found in the “both/and” perspective to which Pope Francis remained committed, even if it sometimes frustrated both progressives and conservatives alike.
[1] On Pope Francis’s debt to Fessard and de Lubac, among others, see Robert Barron, “Gaston Fessard and the Intellectual Formation of Pope Francis,” in Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization (2020), 131–48; Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey (2018).
