Pope Francis was meant to be a pontiff for the age of globalization.
The pope’s spiritual mission doesn’t change, but its earthly context does, and when the College of Cardinals chose Argentina’s Jorge Maria Bergoglio as successor to the retiring Pope Benedict XVI, they made a guess about where the world was going.
They proved to be wrong.
In 2013, when Bergoglio became Pope Francis, same-sex marriage was rapidly gaining acceptance in America and Europe, but no one was yet talking about “pronouns” or what transgender ideology would mean for women’s sports and children’s bodies.
Barack Obama had just been reelected as America’s president, heralding, in the eyes of hopeful supporters, a post-racial epoch not only in our politics but perhaps everywhere.
The political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic favored free trade and high levels of immigration — the question was only how high.
The entire planet would soon be a single community, and all that remained to do was reconcile the United States and Europe with the global South.
That called for reminding wealthy Americans and Europeans of their duties to the world’s poor: Francis wasn’t picked to be a socialist pope, but one who would provide a moral counterpoint to the cold logic of economic globalization.
The cardinals also wanted Francis to strike a balance between north and south in the politics of sex and sexuality.
With same-sex marriage triumphant, the Catholic Church seemed to be on the losing side of the West’s culture war, with its future dependent on negotiating the best possible terms of surrender.
The church couldn’t simply repudiate its teachings on homosexuality, contraception or the ordination of women — it recognized those as God’s own teachings, after all, and if the Western public might have been content to dispense with them, people in the places where Christianity was growing, not shrinking, such as Africa, were not.
Catholics saw what was happening to the Anglican Communion and many mainline Protestant denominations, which were ripped apart by divisions over homosexuality and the role of women in the church, with permanent rifts splitting African and Western congregations.
Francis was meant to bridge the Catholic Church’s factions.
He would — and did — uphold the church’s core teachings, yet he’d present them in ways designed to reassure dissenters and progressives of their place in the flock.
But even as Francis took a gentle approach to those who insisted the church “modernize,” he cracked down hard on those in the West who were drawn to Catholicism precisely for its traditionalism, particularly those who wished to attend the Latin Mass.
What neither Francis nor the cardinals who elected him anticipated was that massive political conflict over globalization was about to erupt in the West itself, just as progressives’ promotion of gender ideology was about to give the Right the upper hand in the culture war.
Francis envisioned a socially moderate church that would accommodate liberal Western attitudes — without capitulating entirely to them — while appealing to the global South with criticisms of the capitalist world economy.
Yet now the church has an unexpected opportunity to evangelize the West anew using the opposite strategy, if the cardinals select a pope as different from Francis as Francis was from the conservative Benedict XVI.
For despite Francis’s hostility, the Latin Mass has continued to pull new converts and lapsed Catholics into the pews.
And recent polling shows the decline of Christianity in America and Europe has slowed, halted, or even, in places, reversed:
Young men in particular are becoming more religious, a trend connected to a rightward turn in politics.
In France, the church has just recorded a 45% increase over last year in adult baptisms at Easter — leading to the largest number of converts entering the church this season in the 20 years the French Bishops’ Conference has been conducting its survey.
On the last day of his life, Pope Francis met with Vice President JD Vance, a young Catholic convert on the populist right who exemplifies the changes taking place in the world and Church alike.
The next pope may be as critical of Trump-Vance immigration policy as Francis was: a pope can be expected to prioritize compassion, including for illegal immigrants.
But if Francis was the pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church needs now is a populist pope, one who understands that if the church renews its ties to the working class within the West, not just in the global South, it will find ready converts.
Likewise, a church that emphasizes traditional moral teachings in Europe and America, as well as Africa, will grow.
Pope Francis was too conservative, too much a man of his time, in one sense — he didn’t go far enough in recognizing the upheavals of globalism and the attraction of traditionalism even in the wealthiest parts of the world.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.
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I just hope the new pope is one WHO GOES BACK TO The roots of christianity.. THE BIBLE!
In traditional physical war, you need fighting generals, not political generals or you end up with endless political compromises that just prolong the death and destruction like that we now see in Ukraine. The same applies to spiritual warfare, unless you are led by Christians of the warrior class whose weapons are those Christlike truths that set us free, not the self-deceiving DEI half-truth prevarications that may keep the peace temporarily, but prolong the agonies of spiritual war and increase the number of lost souls to perdition. Keeping around an overaged leftist Pope, with blank stares and am obscene triple chin, sitting in a wheelchair 60 pounds overweight with soft voice in love with love, sans justice, sans ability to meet Universal evil on an equal playing field of strength has not served the Catholic Church well at all since the last great Pope John Paul left the scene and he himself should have retired when he became unable to reflect a risen Lord, but a fallen overaged depleted and impotent Joe Biden. “God helps those who helps themselves” may not be in the bible, but if you cannot even put a spoon of pablum into you own mouth, or walk to podium to conduct a mass, it is long past you time to step down, not waste more precious years of lost Church leadership that should have been proactive, not reactive, or at least be able to hold fast not compromising absolute truths for populist temporary temporal conveniences that only empower absolute evil eternally.
” EVERYBODY CAUSES. HAPPYNESS WHEREEVER THEY GO, SOME BY COMING, SOME BY LEAVING. AUTHOR UNKNOWN.
The word “Catholic” translates as Universal,,,regarding the whole,,,, not pandering to the subsets of social rebellion. You only win the spiritual battle when YOUR light overcomes their darkness, which does not embrace compromising those tried and true Universal truths that set men free, which soon results halfway trips down the road to hell ,when you meet them halfway in their evil in order to keep peace in the family of man,,,a peace that lasts about as long as one made with guys like Hitler, Stalin and Putin. Loving the sinner but hating the sin, is about the silliest compromise of all, when you are dealing with men of pure evil, born equally in body mind and spirit, but soon diverge BY CHOICE into separate opposing forces of team CREATOR versus team CONSUMER, and we all learn too late that being called an American consumer just led us to join in on the right battle, but siding too often with the wrong team. Many a road to American hell has been sold claiming those good intentions that never were good, just masked by lairs, cheats and pardoners of sinners fathered by men who first sell their souls, then sell out their children and/or the people they were entrusted to protect. Yes, indeed there IS a thing called absolute truth, and it does not waver with the movements of the planets, the movement of their lying mouths, or the elevation to Pope of a man who can compromise with the devil in leadership tolerance that in inaction becomes acceptance by the many.