The Last Modern Pope

Who am I to judge? More and more, the earth, our home, seems to resemble an immense pile of filth. We don’t need to be like rabbits. Make a mess! How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? The great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Abortion is like hiring a hitman. God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy. I don’t remember the footnote. A person who thinks only about building walls is not a Christian. All religions are willed by God. Frociaggine.

Stooping, the pope tenderly embraces a severely disfigured man. China’s underground Church has the rug pulled from beneath its feet. Abuse victims in Chile are told they are committing “calumny.” Inmates weep openly as the Holy Father visits a prison to wash their feet. The Pontifical Academy for Life is gutted and starts promoting bizarre doctrinal errors. A little child runs onstage and the pope lights up with joy. An Argentine sex abuser is helped out with a job in the Vatican treasury. Cardinal Burke is kicked out of his apartment. A half-naked figurine who may or may not be some kind of Amazonian goddess is saluted in the Vatican gardens. A number of well-connected pedophile priests are given reduced penalties after appealing to the pope for “mercy.” Alone in St. Peter’s Square, with the pandemic darkening the world, the Vicar of Christ somberly raises the Eucharist to bless the whole of humanity. A doctrine chief is appointed with a special interest in the theology of making out.

That, with apologies for the many omissions, is a kind of impressionistic summary of a pontificate that—especially if you spent some of it writing for the Catholic press—seemed at times unbearably, ridiculously, don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry dramatic. And now it all begins to fade out, and as we pray for the repose of the soul of the Holy Father, those blinding moments seem to be receding further and further away, little pixels in a portrait of—well, of what?

For me, the Francis years have the unmistakable sense of an ending, of a last hurrah. Nobody would have predicted that in 2013. To begin with, Francis was, quite simply, a phenomenon. For a while he was as unavoidable as Taylor Swift was last summer. The soundbites echoed through the media for days. The face—grandfatherly, shrewd, usually wearing a broad smile—was everywhere. The Paris Climate Agreement, the prevention of U.S. military intervention in Syria, the peaceful 2016 elections in the Central African Republic, and a surge in confessions in England were all attributed to his efforts.

Moreover, he was consistently surprising. Next to Francis, Donald Trump looked drearily predictable. Just when you were tempted to write him off as a liberal, he would poleaxe the German bishops or issue a thunderous statement on “gender ideology.” Just when you were relishing his comment that “If we don’t proclaim Jesus Christ . . . [w]e would become a compassionate NGO and not a Church,” he would release some turgid document composed in impeccable U.N.-speak. His sternest critics would find themselves floored by a public gesture of kindness or a beautiful mini-sermon on the love of God. Previously undreamed-of initiatives crash-landed on the Church: an Amazon synod; a synod on pretending not to want to change Catholic teaching on the sacraments; a synod on synodality; a ban on advertising the Latin Mass in parish bulletins; a cinematic collaboration with Wim Wenders; a deal to give the Chinese Communist party new powers over bishops and priests. Even the hideous cover-up scandals, like the Zanchetta and Rupnik affairs, had an insane, couldn’t-make-it-up quality to them. He visited sixty-eight countries, published millions of words, and rewrote swathes of canon law. This was a pontificate on a Napoleonic, a Henry VIII scale. You could almost miss, underneath it, the signs of an era coming to a full stop.

That era began in 1864, when Pope Pius IX outraged European and American opinion by condemning the notion that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” It was, of course, a thoroughly modern sentiment. As Roger Scruton observed, one definition of “modernity” is the condition in which people go around thinking about what it means to be modern. And for the 150 years after Pius’s throwing-down of the gauntlet, there was a general impression that the Church should be thinking about it a great deal, and that the pope’s job was to define the Church’s relationship to the modern world.

So for a century and a half you could class Catholic thinkers and leaders—and especially popes—by where they stood in relation to Pius’s words. Some tried to reconcile the faith with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” Some declared war on these three horsemen. Most attempted some sort-of-coherent combination of the two approaches. The most fascinating figures, like Newman and Ratzinger, were the synthesizers: the geniuses who discerned what could and couldn’t be accepted from the times they lived in, and so left inattentive observers confused about which side they were really on. 

But everyone could be placed somewhere between those two approaches: The Church as a fortress, the last magnificent stand against the dissolving forces of the modern world; or the Church as an elegant but rather stuffy palace, needing to open the doors and windows to fresh influences, and perhaps get rid of some of the furniture too.

Every generalization about Pope Francis is risky and open to a dozen counterexamples. But all in all, the Francis pontificate was the most determined effort to occupy the opposite pole to Pius IX’s; to attempt a reconciliation, and coming-to-terms, with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.

With progress, in that the late pope constantly drew a distinction between the past of the Church and the allegedly wiser, more openhearted present. “There was a time, even in our Churches, when people spoke of . . . a just war. Today we cannot speak in this manner.” Or: “The death penalty is unacceptable, it is immoral. Fifty years ago, no . . . but there has been a better understanding of morality.” More broadly, in the decade-long assault on the integrity of Catholic doctrine, undermining perennial Church teaching in a thousand ways without ever daring to try and change it—a controversy that is not worth rehashing here, but which was surely the standout fact of the pontificate. Whether it was as “compassionate” as Francis’s supporters claimed is another matter: Do you show compassion to (for instance) divorcees and gay people by neither teaching them how to live in the light of Christian doctrine, nor teaching them how to live without it, but instead suggesting that it’s all unfathomably complicated? Still, it certainly identified the pope with a kind of progressive thinking.

With liberalism, in that the Holy Father generally strove to make Catholicism seem much more live-and-let-live than had previously been understood. “Who am I to judge?” caught the public imagination because it sounded like a reconciliation with liberalism. Again, Francis liked to hint that the Church should be more chilled out about cohabitation, and made ambiguous statements about the truth of non-Christian religions. Proselytism was “nonsense,” he declared—again somewhat ambiguously, but if you wanted to find a liberal message it was there for the taking.  

With modern civilization, most obviously in his willingness to crack down on the Latin Mass, which to older generations of progressive Catholics is the most annoying symbol of the obstinate unchangingness of the Church; in his frequent polemics against “rigidity” and traditionalism; also, more indefinably, in his manner—his frequent implications that he was Not Like The Other Popes, his ease with the contemporary media and his instinct for their preoccupations. He was, as Rolling Stone put it, “the cool pope.”

So transfixing was all this, you could easily miss that, meanwhile, Pius IX’s three horsemen were running out of steam. “Progress” no longer has the same ring to it, plagued as we are by technological stagnation, falling birthrates, climate crisis, declining economic prospects, artistic repetition, and cultural self-doubt. Liberalism isn’t exactly over, but listen to how depressed or frantic liberals sound these days, and how much recent events have left their project in confusion. Is Hamas’s Hitlerian pogrom of October 7, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians in response, a case of liberalism vs. illiberalism? Are trans rights liberal this week? Is free speech?

As for modern civilization, who knows what it means anymore, or what it means to be reconciled with it. Is JD Vance a modern figure or an outdated one? Is Kanye West? Is Narendra Modi, or Xi Jinping for that matter? Does the culture of, say, Nigeria (median age: nineteen) define the modern world more or less than that of Japan (fifty) and Germany (forty-seven)?

Pope Francis was the last modern pope—not in the sense that the next one will be a totally based Jude-Law-as-Pius-XIII character who will declare mantillas compulsory and say mean things about Muslims; but in that the next pope will no longer be able to think of himself as tasked with defining the Church’s relationship to modernity—or if he does try, the effort will look increasingly hopeless.

And to say that the next pontiff will be the first postmodern pope is not to predict that he will install Duchamp’s urinal in the Vatican and start quoting Baudrillard in his Wednesday audiences. It is to say that he will occupy a world in flux, where the old contrasts have gone. No longer a single superpower defining the terms of “liberalism” and “democracy,” but an increasingly anarchic and multipolar international arena. No more all-powerful governments deciding how much social justice to dole out, but an intangible economy ruled by corporations and mysterious movements in the bond markets.

In the Church, meanwhile, no longer the towering structure of an imperial papacy served by a docile episcopate. The African bishops, when roused, can strongarm the Vatican’s doctrine chief into effectively retracting a document; in the West, the main people policing the boundaries of Catholic doctrine and practice are not men in miters, but podcasters and influencers. And no more progressive youth and crusty conservatives: The seminaries are full of eager young men somewhere to the right of St. John Paul II. No more paradigm-shifting encyclicals, either, when people struggle to read anything longer than an Instagram post.

Even if a pope wanted to redefine the Church’s relationship with the modern world, he would be unable to; a point reflected in the chaos and controversy of the Francis pontificate. In a sense, he tried to lead the Church into the twenty-first century. But after so much scandal and failure, the Church has become significantly harder to lead: Clergy and laity are already coming to terms with the world on their own resources, without waiting for a synod or apostolic exhortation to tell them what to do. And the modern world has changed too, collapsing into a series of competing modernities—several of them rather harder to dialogue with than the fathers of Vatican II seem to have envisaged.

As a harbinger of the next era, take the career of Luce, the tacky anime “mascot” for the Jubilee Year launched last October by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization. Within seventy-two hours Luce had been adapted by others as, in turn, a semi-ironic icon, a symbol of the hierarchy’s ineptness, a strangely potent mash-up of Japanese cuteness culture and the treaclier end of Catholic piety, a champion of traditional beliefs about spiritual warfare, and a far-right meme, before disappearing off the face of the earth. Luce couldn’t have happened without the Vatican. But after that nobody even thought of asking Rome’s opinion. This is what a postmodern Church looks like. And only a pope with a once-in-a century force of character could have staved off the moment of realization for so long.

Standing on the balcony of St. Peter’s on the evening of his election, Pope Francis famously opened with the greeting “Buona sera.” He spoke more truly than he knew.