Pope Francis, Trad Icon

The early years of Pope Francis’s reign coincided with an HBO show about a young, chain-smoking pontiff who takes the suggestive name Pius XIII and brings back the papal tiara upon taking office. For a small but influential cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals—many of us converts to the faith—Jude Law’s Pius was the Roman pontiff we wished we had: a traditionalist with a revulsion for modernity born of his own abandonment by his hippie parents.

The pope we got in real life was an Argentine Jesuit who couldn’t stop talking about the climate, seemed to wink at divorce, and framed young traditionalist priests as latter-day Pharisees who’d merely substituted Saturno hats for wide phylacteries. Yet in retrospect, it’s clear that Francis was just the pontiff we needed. The substance of his message was far more “trad” than critics appreciated. And his governing style challenged us to practice what we preached about authority.

Start with the late pontiff’s teaching, both in magisterial documents and his daily practice as universal pastor. Too often, the trads couldn’t get past the surface to glimpse the rebuke to post-Enlightenment modernity at the heart of his teaching. Last year, for example, when Jordan Peterson chided Francis for prioritizing climate change at the expense of “salvation,” conservative Catholic outlets and personalities raced to cheer the Canadian pop psychologist.

Numerous episodes of this kind marked his pontificate, which saw the emergence of a veritable anti-Francis cottage industry, mainly centered in the Anglophone world. Learned commentators who should have known better joined forces with cruder “trad” influencers to prime a subset of Catholics against the pope. The second Francis would open his mouth to teach, the angry online replies and accusations of “communism” and worse piled up.

Set aside that stewardship of the earth is a perfectly biblical injunction, whether one might agree or disagree with this or that policy agenda. As Rusty Reno pointed out in his tribute, Francis’s social and environmental teaching, though occasionally garbled by the NGO-ese language in which it was couched, expanded his immediate predecessor’s critique of Enlightenment reason.

I witnessed this firsthand as part of a small group of journalists who joined the Holy Father on his 2019 journey to Abu Dhabi, marking the first time a Roman pontiff set foot on the Arabian Peninsula, in defiance of a warning attributed to Omar ibn al-Khattab, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s closest companions, that “on the peninsula of the Arabs, two religions shall not co-exist.” Speaking alongside the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Francis railed against the modern logics of “individualism” and “utilitarianism.” In their place, he proposed an “integral” account of human development encompassing metaphysics—a continuation of Pope Benedict XVI’s argument in his 2006 Regensburg Address.

In Ave Maria, Francis’s book-length meditation on the “Hail Mary” prayer, the pope likewise fulminated against the neoliberal elites who embody and enact a soulless modern logic. He described them as an “elite [that] does not know what it means to live among the people,” characterized by “spiritual orphanhood” and a “narcissistic” individualism that deprives them, and society at large, of “any sense of belonging to a family, to a people, to a land, to our God.”

This Franciscan line of thought culminated in his remarkable address to an emptied-out St. Peter’s Square at the height of the Covid pandemic. While offering words of hope, Francis also scrutinized the pre-pandemic status quo ante, suggesting that modern man’s quest for total mastery had led him to lose sight of “our roots” and “the memory of those who have gone before us.” In doing so, we had deprived ourselves “of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.”

He added: “We were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.”

All this amounts to a far more radical and systemic critique than most will find in the Church’s trad corners, where too often opposition to autonomy-über-alles doesn’t extend beyond the abortion or gender clinic to include the boardroom and the trading floor; where the purple-haired are afflicted, but not so men who coolly offshore jobs, asset-strip firms, or deny workers a living wage. Francis not only saw more clearly the whole rotten structure, but called out these critics on their narrowness and, yes, rigidity.

This doesn’t describe all such communities, to be sure, and there is no denying that Francis went out of his way to skewer the whole lot, his slurs falling upon the guilty and innocent alike. He could be a mean dad. Still, negative polarization being the monstrous force that it is, the trad critics at times seemed bent on vindicating Francis’s caricature of them, with the more fevered corners descending into full-on anti-Semitism, apologia for slavery, and soft sedevacantism.

Which brings us to the question of authority. The anti-Franciscans stood on tradition, which very much includes a broad, centralized Church authority under Peter, even as they recoiled from the authority actually ordained above them, namely, Pope Francis. In other words, they affirmed (or were supposed to affirm) the Petrine form but struck an oppositional stance to the substance of Peter’s teaching. Which is to say that they sought to have their cake and eat it, too.

It is to be hoped that whoever is elected to succeed Francis will find, to his left and to his right, a fuller share of that filiality and mental docility expected of Catholics when dealing with Christ’s vicegerent on earth. As for Francis himself, may he rest in peace, and be joined to the fellowship of the holy pontiffs.