Fabiano Golgo
In the longue durée of Catholic history, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election in 2013 marked a rupture as subtle yet seismic as the Reformation’s aftershocks. Here was a pope who, in an age of resurgent autocrats and algorithm-driven division, chose the subway over the sedan chair, disdained the pompieri of papal regalia, and declared himself a sinner in need of prayers—not a sovereign demanding fealty. His papacy, like the man himself, was a tapestry of paradox: a traditionalist who radicalized mercy, a Jesuit intellectual who trusted the unlettered, a global moral voice whose quietest gestures—a kiss on a disfigured face, a foot washed in a prison—echoed louder than encyclicals.
Francis’s genius lay in his grasp of symbolic politics. He understood that in an era of viral imagery, actions—a stripped-down throne, a phone call to a divorced Argentine mother—could dismantle centuries of clerical aloofness. Yet his substance was equally transformative. Laudato Si’, his 2015 encyclical, fused Thomistic theology with climate science, rebuking both capitalist predation and the “throwaway culture” of modernity. It was a Gaian manifesto penned in Vatican Latin, aligning the Church with Greta Thunberg before her school strike began. Critics called it naïve; historians may yet rank it alongside Rerum Novarum as a hinge of Catholic social teaching.
On sexuality, he navigated a Via Dolorosa between doctrine and compassion. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said of gay priests, a phrase that—despite changing no canon law—punctured the Church’s culture of anathema. To LGBTQ+ Catholics, it was a lifeline; to traditionalists, a heresy. His synods on family and Amazonia became battlegrounds between those yearning for aggiornamento and a Curia still nostalgic for Pius IX. Yet Francis, ever the Jesuit pragmatist, advanced reforms obliquely: decentralizing authority, elevating lay voices, and framing “accompaniment” as a pastoral imperative. The result? A Church less a fortress than a field hospital, as he envisioned—though one still strewn with the wounded.
His greatest trials, inevitably, stemmed from the Church’s oldest sin: the abuse crisis. Here, the paradoxes curdled. He defrocked predators and summoned bishops to account, yet shielded allies like Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga from scrutiny. His 2019 summit on abuse was a watershed, but victims’ groups noted a lingering instinct to protect the institution over its flock. For a pope who denounced clericalism as “leprosy,” it revealed how even he remained a creature of the system he sought to heal.
Geopolitically, Francis played a weak hand shrewdly. In China, he traded silence on repression for a fig-leaf of unity, recognizing Beijing-appointed bishops—a Realpolitik gamble that left underground Catholics feeling betrayed. In Europe, he chastened populists who weaponized Christianity against migrants, declaring, “You cannot love the Bible and hate the stranger.” Yet his influence waned where nationalism outmuscled Scripture: Orban’s Hungary and Trump’s America, where white evangelicals embraced a pope-bashing strongman, proved impervious to his gospel of inclusion.
Even as death hovered near, Pope Francis insisted on making one final call to Gaza — a 30-second conversation that, for the tiny Christian community sheltering at Holy Family Church, carried the weight of a thousand sermons. Throughout 18 months of relentless siege, bombardment, and starvation, the pope called them nightly, a small miracle of steadfast solidarity from the Vatican to the ruins of Gaza City. He spoke not merely as a pontiff, but as a father — anxious, faithful, and heartbreakingly human — urging them not to be afraid, praying with them, asking always after Christians and Muslims alike.
Against the remorseless logic of Netanyahu’s war machine, whose bombs made no distinction between Hamas fighters and children in makeshift tents, Francis offered a radically different form of witness: one that refused to let Gaza’s people be consigned to invisibility. In his final Easter message, as illness ravaged his body, he once more condemned the devastation and demanded a ceasefire — a moral act of resistance that, for those left behind in the shattered courtyards of Gaza, endures as a precious fragment of hope.
What endures? For the Church, Francis planted seeds of synodality—democratizing discernment—that may sprout long after him. For the world, he reasserted Christianity’s moral voice in an age of transactional politics, even as secularism advanced. And for the faithful—like the writer Andrew Sullivan, who found in Francis a “window” back to grace—he offered something ancient yet revolutionary: the notion that faith begins not in dogma, but in the dirt of human encounter.
History’s verdict will hinge on whether his successors nurture or uproot his fragile reforms. In a century of crises, he reminded us that the greatest power is often whispered, not decreed—and that a Church hemorrhaging credibility in the West might yet find redemption in the Global South’s slums, where his vision of a “poor Church for the poor” already breathes.
The Carnival, it turns out, was never just about vestments. It was a warning—and an invitation—to a Church forever torn between palace and subway, between guarding its treasures and scattering them like seeds. Francis, of course, would opt for the scattering.
