Retrospect on a pontificate

Pope Francis prays during his Wednesday general audience on Feb. 5, 2025, in the Paul VI Audience Hall at the Vatican. (Photo: Vatican Media)

During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, as Benedict’s successor described him as an orthodox, tough-minded, courageous reformer who would clean the Vatican’s Augean stables while maintaining the theological and pastoral line that had guided the Church since John Paul II’s election in 1978: dynamic orthodoxy in service to a revitalized proclamation of the Gospel, in a world badly needing the witness and charity of a Church of missionary disciples.

That was how I had perceived Cardinal Bergoglio when we met for over an hour in Buenos Aires ten months earlier. During that conversation, the cardinal expressed gratitude for what I had done to explain John Paul II to the world in Witness to Hope. In turn, I told him how taken I was with the 2007 “Aparecida Document”, in which the bishops of Latin America committed themselves to a future of intensified evangelization. It was, I said, the most impressive explication of the New Evangelization I had yet read, and I thanked him for the leading role he had played in drafting it.  

So, when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected pope on March 13, 2013, I anticipated a pontificate in broad continuity with its two predecessors, if with distinctive personal accents. So, I daresay, did most of the cardinals who voted to make the archbishop of Buenos Aires the 266th Bishop of Rome. Francis, it was thought, would be a reforming pope who would further energize the Church for mission and evangelization by straightening out the Vatican mess that had destabilized the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

That is not quite what transpired over the next twelve years.

Pope Francis’s evident compassion for the dispossessed and the poor certainly helped the world understand better that the Catholic Church follows its Lord in extending a healing hand to the marginalized on the peripheries of society. His inaugural apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), was a ringing affirmation of the evangelical intention of the Second Vatican Council, in continuity with John Paul II’s great encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer) and the Aparecida Document. So was the Pope’s challenge to young people at his first World Youth Day in Brazil: don’t be afraid of trying new ways to bring others to Christ, even if some of those ways don’t work. 

Yet within a year of his election, Pope Francis re-opened what was thought to be the settled question of whether Catholics in canonically irregular marriages — who remain members of the worshipping Church — could legitimately receive Holy Communion. In doing so, he set in motion dynamics that would become an impediment to the re-evangelization of the secularizing Western world and sowed confusion where the New Evangelization had seen great success, not least in sub-Saharan Africa. This pattern of unsettling what was thought settled continued throughout the pontificate and engaged questions of the moral life (including the Church’s response to the increasingly bizarre claims of the sexual revolution), questions of Church order (including who the Church was authorized to ordain), and questions of Catholicism’s relationship to world powers eager to bring the Church to heel (as in China).

In late 2016, Pope Francis invited me to what would be my third and last private audience with him. It was a friendly, candid conversation, like its predecessors. But when I suggested that the arguments over Holy Communion for those in irregular marriages, which had intensified following his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), were an impediment to the passionate evangelization he had proposed in Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope dismissed my concerns by saying, “Oh, arguments are fine.” Of course they are, I thought, in many other circumstances. But is it in the nature of the papacy to unsettle what has been settled?

There remains a great work of reform to be done in Rome: financially, theologically, and otherwise. Even more fundamentally, however, the next pontificate must understand what the Francis pontificate seems not to have grasped: Christian communities that maintain a clear understanding of their doctrinal and moral identity and boundaries can not only survive the acids of post-modernity; they have a chance to convert the post-modern world. By contrast, Christian communities whose self-identity becomes incoherent, whose boundaries become porous, and who mirror the culture rather than trying to convert it wither and die.

For as always, the bottom-line question for the Catholic future is, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8) — the “faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), and none other.

George Weigel is an independent columnist whose weekly column is syndicated by the Archdiocese of Denver. The opinions and viewpoints expressed by Mr. Weigel therein are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Archdiocese of Denver or the bishops of Denver.