Pope Francis was beloved by millions around the world, within and beyond the Roman Catholic Church, for his personal warmth, ebullient joy, and compassion for people in need. Popular among the majority of Catholics in the United States, he also had his detractors and active opponents. In this first part of this two-part post, I situate the opposition within the broader American Catholic cultural, political, and social landscape, and indicate some of the reasons the late pope incited negative reactions among a minority of the faithful. In the second part, I explore in greater depth the nature of the opposition to Francis’s pontificate, and what some neotraditionalists considered his egregious mistakes (“heresies” or “sins”).
No one term for these hardline opponents of Francis captures the nuances of their overlapping but disparate theological and ecclesiological perspectives. While “neotraditional” is less apt to be conflated with secular political categories suggested by terms like “conservative” or “ultra-conservative,” it does not capture fully the conflation of religious and political categories which marked the theopolitical discourse of some of the late pope’s most vocal opponents.
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By Googling “US Catholic opposition to Pope Francis,” one learns that there are “about 2,420,000 results.” For some Catholics, it seems, there was a lot not to like about the late pope. In fact, his pontificate was a shot in the arm for the neotraditionalist American Catholics who are the subject of this essay. Galvanized for amplified “faithful dissent” by what they saw, incorrectly, as a pontificate captive to the worst “liberal” tendencies in church and society, they sought to raise their visibility and influence among the U.S. Catholic bishops as well as the laity. Ironically, however, in reimagining the Church’s modern past and charting a religious future shaped by strict doctrinal, theological, and ecclesiological orthodoxy, these self-anointed defenders of the traditional faith were too often captive to a blinkered national and sociopolitical perspective and set of priorities. Bolstered and seduced by the anti-Francis polemics of powerful secular right-wing politicians and media in the United States, the neotraditionalists failed to resist the temptation to reduce the pope’s nuanced (and deeply orthodox) theological anthropology and global perspective to ready-to-order American and secular political binaries (e.g., “liberal” vs. “conservative,” “left” v. “right”). In her essay for this series, Sarah Shortall explores this tendency and identifies its flaws.
In order to understand how and why the neotraditionalist network in the United States opposed Pope Francis, and what that might say about their role in the reception and interpretation of the pontificate of his successor, Pope Leo XIV, in the U.S. Catholic community and beyond, a bit of context is necessary.
The US Catholic community—numbering 53 million self-identified Catholic adults, or roughly one-fifth of the US population—is complex and layered (as is the phrase “opposition to Pope Francis”). The layers relevant to this essay are the mainstream laity, the US Catholic bishops, and the professional, independently organized Catholics (the PIOs). All three of these Catholic layers include opponents of Pope Francis, but to various degrees and for various reasons. The mainstream laity accounts for roughly 98% of the US Catholic population and includes Americans who are categorized demographically, according to the terminology of the Pew Research Center, as White (54%), Hispanic (36%), Asian (4%), Black (2%) and “those who identify with another race” (2%). In terms of ecclesiology, or official status within the Catholic Church, the laity are baptized Catholics who are not clergy (ordained priests). By “mainstream” I mean laity who are members of a Catholic parish or religious community but who are typically not PIOs, that is, they are not members of a full-time professional advocacy or media network, organization, or movement that operates at some (often ambiguous) distance from the official institutions and authority structures of the US Catholic Church.
Lay Opposition to Pope Francis
Like the other layers, the mainstream laity is not monolithic but internally differentiated. For example, 29% of U.S. Catholics are immigrants, while 14% are the children of immigrants. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. Catholics say they attend Mass once weekly or more frequently; hence, 71% do not. One-third of U.S. Catholics have a bachelor’s degree. Politically, 53% of Catholics who are registered voters lean toward the Republican Party, while 43% affiliate with the Democratic Party. Despite official Roman Catholic teaching, 60% of U.S. Catholics say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. In the Pew Research Center survey conducted in February 2025, two months before his death, Pope Francis was viewed favorably by 78% of U.S. Catholics; at least 80% have expressed a favorable opinion of him in 10 of the 15 U.S. surveys in which Pew asked about Francis since he became pope in 2013. Catholic Democrats (88%) are much more likely than Catholic Republicans (69%) to view Francis favorably.
Among the twenty percent who viewed Francis either unfavorably or unenthusiastically, the (scant) evidence drawn from polling data or in-depth interviews (as opposed to anecdotal material or interviews with randomly selected individuals) suggests that they viewed him as “too liberal” on abortion or LGBTQ+ rights, and, notably, on migration. But did all these unhappy or indifferent lay Catholics actively oppose Francis? There is no data supporting such a conclusion; more likely, the number of active opponents amounted to a small, though not insignificant, fraction of that subgroup. The significance of these actively opposed lay Catholics—a minority within a minority of those who were not fond of Francis—was amplified by their participation in, or tacit support of, one or more of the dozens of independently funded and operated organizations (e.g., educational networks, media outlets, religious societies, and advocacy groups) that acted (and continue to act) as the Catholic equivalent of secular “lobbyists” and “influencers.” The conflation of religious and secular discourse by some PIO Catholics is not surprising, given their own professional setting amidst U.S. corporate, media, legal and political cultures. The neo-traditionalist PIOs used their ample organizational resources, including a feverishly dedicated core of polemicists, to raise a constant drumbeat of subtle or overt criticism of Pope Francis. In so doing, they mobilized a subset of his doubters into active opponents.
As for mainstream lay Catholics, religious sensibilities are one thing, political behaviors quite another. For decades, sociologists have debated whether we can speak reliably of a “Catholic vote.” For example, polls conducted in the 2020s have consistently found that a majority of U.S. Catholics favor greater inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, believe that in most cases abortion should be legal, and oppose the denial of Communion for politicians who support abortion rights. Yet a portion of this majority also support Donald Trump. (Fifty-six percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 U.S. presidential election voted for him.) How to square this fact with the high favorable marks Pope Francis received from the mainstream laity? Put simply, for millions of U.S. Catholics’ fidelity to Church teaching and/or to politically relevant exhortations of the pope does not translate into actual political behavior. Whereas 55 percent of respondents to a poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC (National Opinion Research Center) in 2022 said that the church influences their social values, including compassion for the poor, migrants, and refugees, only 35 percent said that the church influenced their political views.
“Official” Catholic Opposition to Pope Francis
The second layer of the U.S. Catholic population to be analyzed in the context of “opposition to Francis” is the bishops. Collectively, the bishops— the official leaders of the Church, also known as the hierarchy— are a tiny fraction of the 37,302 ordained priests who are currently active in parishes or in diocesan administration or other ministries in the U.S. The hierarchy includes cardinals (6 currently active, 10 retired), archbishops (31), diocesan bishops (160), and auxiliary bishops (81)—all of whom are in full communion with Rome and (at least putatively) obedient to the pope (a.k.a., the Holy Father, the Bishop of Rome, the successor to St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ). (For readers keeping score, these 288 men represent .0005434% of the U.S. Catholic population.) On a question as broad as “opposition to Pope Francis” it is risky to generalize about even this smallish number of men. While bishops are selected and appointed by the pope, share in his apostolic teaching authority, proclaim and defend orthodox Catholic doctrine, and govern and administer their ecclesiastical unit (typically, a diocese or archdiocese), bishops differ, sometimes dramatically, in their “pastoral approach,” that is, their style and mode of relating to their flock. At least since the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. “Vatican II,” 1962–1965) most theologians and bishops have recognized a distinction between, on the one hand, a bishop’s formal role as upholder of orthodox Catholic doctrine and canon law (a comprehensive system of regulations that set forth the proper observance of the sacraments, the conduct of rituals and the specific responsibilities of clergy and laity), and, on the other, the manner by which he enacts that teaching and governing role.
The pastoral approaches among the U.S. bishops range from strict enforcement of “the rules” through some form of sanction against troublesome laity or the occasional renegade priest whose behaviors or statements are deemed at odds with Catholic teaching, to a more “liberal” or “progressive” pastoral style which, while seldom indulgent of open rejection of doctrine or canon law, tends to “meet people where they are” and takes account of the challenges Catholics face living in a pluralistic, antinomian society. One example of this difference in pastoral approaches was the aforementioned controversy over whether to forbid Holy Communion to pro-choice U.S. Catholic politicians; the AP/NORC poll of 2022, cited above, found that a majority of lay Catholics disagreed with the decision of some (but not all) Catholic bishops to do so.
One of the rumblings against Francis, which surfaced repeatedly during his 12-year pontificate, was that he was far too “pastoral” in this liberal sense and not sufficiently “doctrinal” in his public statements and behavior. The conservative bishops who implied or openly stated this accusation, or allowed their surrogates to suggest it, felt strongly that Francis was inclusive and “merciful” (by which they meant “indiscriminate”) to a fault, leading him to ignore what they saw as the strict boundaries between the circle of practicing Catholics in conformity with Church teaching and law, and those Catholics who dissent from official Catholic teaching by, say, supporting abortion or LGBTQ+ “rights” in church and society. (Progressive Catholics did not fail to point out that, despite the hierarchy’s consistent advocacy for the rights of migrants, few bishops denounced nativist U.S. Catholics, of whom there are more than a handful.)
While the episcopal subset of anti-Francis dissenters did not openly air their grievances, there were headline-grabbing exceptions. A case in point was the open defiance of U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who had served as Archbishop of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008 before being transferred to the Vatican, elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, and appointed as prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s highest judicial authority after the pope. In 2014, Pope Francis removed him from this powerful position, after Burke—reportedly Donald Trump’s favorite to succeed Francis—publicly criticized efforts to make the church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ individuals. Unbowed by his demotion, Burke continued to speak out against his putative boss, and in 2022 led a group of cardinals in challenging Francis’s authority through the public posing of formal questions known as “dubia,” or doubts. Francis responded by removing Burke’s subsidized Vatican apartment and salary. Burke was not the only American prelate to break publicly with Francis. Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas, unleashed a stream of invectives against the pope, culminating in the bizarre claim that Francis had failed to “refuse” the “siren call of sodomy.” In November 2023, after receiving a recommendation from a committee, led by the Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, which had conducted an inquiry (technically, an “apostolic visitation”), Francis ordered Strickland relieved of his duties as bishop.
While such high-profile cases of opposition were rare, expressions of disdain for Francis among like-minded bishops or their staff were not. The pope’s opponents on the right clustered around PIO Catholic organizations such as EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) and the “unapologetically Catholic” Napa Institute.
Social media influencers of the Catholic alt-right, “who have more attitude than theological training,” were quick to denounce Pope Francis as heretical, and championed the anti-Francis conspiracy theories of Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who was excommunicated for schism in 2024 after being charged with public statements that denied the legitimacy of Pope Francis and rejected the Second Vatican Council. The influence of the anti-Francis PIOs extended even to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The fifth floor of the USCCB office building in Washington, D.C., where the executive offices are located, became known as a “Francis-free zone.”
At the core of the outspoken or more subtle opposition of some U.S. Catholic bishops to Pope Francis is the overarching issue of abortion. Following Roe v. Wade in 1973 the U.S. hierarchy’s opposition to abortion became their almost exclusive focus. At their November 2019 plenary, the US bishops made explicit this longstanding decision by voting to identify abortion as their “preeminent priority.” Significantly, this vote and announcement came after a public debate among the bishops, during which some objected to prioritizing the abortion question. They did so on the grounds that such a move would be inconsistent with Pope Francis’s example in frequently speaking about abortion in relation to the Church’s teachings and positions on other life issues, including capital punishment, environmental degradation, and the denial of the basic necessities of survival to migrants and refugees. (In Gaudete et Exsultate, his 2018 apostolic exhortation on holiness, Francis declared that the Church’s “defense of the innocent unborn” needed to be “clear, firm and passionate.” But the pope also said that the lives of people already born were “equally sacred,” and he highlighted issues such as human trafficking, poverty, euthanasia, “and every form of rejection” of the sacred dignity of human life.)
In addition to the bishops, who constitute the Catholic hierarchy, the priests who are currently active in parishes or in diocesan administration or other ministries include a subset that have accused Francis of sowing confusion on bedrock church doctrines, while wielding an autocratic leadership style behind a façade of humility and informality.
As for the 49,883 active Catholic nuns or women religious currently serving in the United States, they are not ordained as priests and thus not considered clergy. Canonically, these women fall under the category “laity” (baptized, non-ordained Catholics), although this is misleading, given the enormously influential, indeed indispensable, leadership role they have played in building and leading Catholic schools, hospitals, orphanages, charities and other institutions of the Church. One can hazard the following generalization about these women, namely, that those who are active in the world, especially those whose religious lives were shaped by Vatican II, tend to embrace the social justice teachings of the Church and generally approve of Pope Francis, while expressing disappointment that his groundbreaking elevation of women to leadership positions in the Vatican did not extend to allowing women to study for the diaconate, traditionally seen as a step on the process toward ordination to the priesthood.
The PIOs
The “professional,” independently organized Catholics are perhaps the most consequential layer of the U.S. Church, given that the category includes members of the first two layers, the mainstream laity and the clergy (including the hierarchy). PIO Catholics drive a vast, diffuse array of movements, para-church organizations, religious societies and media outlets, which might be described, collectively, as the Catholic version of American civil society, with the qualification that some PIOs—church bureaucrats and religious orders (most prominently Opus Dei), for example— are formally recognized by the Church. Others, including academics teaching in Catholic or non-Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, are not.
The PIO “layer” is scattered across the American Catholic map and includes both international and home-grown organizations and movements. Most of the blatant opposition to Francis came from the PIOs of the Catholic right, but the late Holy Father attracted his fair share of critics hailing from the Catholic left. In short, “PIO” is not meant to indicate a specific theopolitical orientation; the devil is in the details. Consider the following: Opus Dei, The Napa Institute, Eternal Word Television Network, the National Catholic Reporter, and the Women’s Ordination Conference. Any classification of Catholics that encompasses such disparate, theologically and ideologically diverse organizations calls for a de-clustering process that gives each organization its due. For a head-start, see, inter alia, the following studies: Mary Jo McConohay, Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right; Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby, Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America; and Gareth Gore, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church. From these secondary studies and the primary sources produced by the various mobilized opponents of Pope Francis—books, essays, blogs and social media posts, television and radio shows and numerous other public pronouncements—one can glean at least four “sins” he supposedly committed, which are set forth in the second part of this two-part essay.
