Francis was meant to be a pope for the age of globalization.
The pontiff’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 re-elected as America’s president, heralding, in the eyes of many 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.
Here’s how Pope Francis’ successor will be chosen:
Francis wasn’t picked to be a socialist pope but one who would provide a moral balance to the unstoppable logic of economic globalization.
The cardinals wanted Francis to strike a balance between north and south in sexual politics, too.
With same-sex marriage triumphant, the Catholic Church seemed to be on the losing side of the West’s culture war, its future dependent on negotiating the best possible terms of surrender.
The Church couldn’t just 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 places where Christianity was actually 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.
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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’ drive toward wokeism and 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 outright on essential doctrines — while appealing to the global South by criticizing the capitalist world economy.
Yet now the Church has an unexpected opportunity to evangelize the West anew using the very opposite strategy, if the cardinals select a pope as different from Francis as Francis was from the conservative Benedict XVI.
For despite Francis’ 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 their right turn in politics.
In France, the Church has just recorded a 45% increase over last year in conversions 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.
When Pope Francis became pontiff: A timeline of his religious journey and career
- Dec. 17, 1936: Jorge Mario Bergoglio is born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the eldest of five children to Mario Jose Bergoglio, an accountant from Italy, and Regina María Sívori, the daughter of Italian immigrants.
- Dec. 13, 1969: Ordained a priest with the Jesuit religious order, which he would lead as Argentina provincial superior during the country’s murderous dictatorship that began in the 1970s.
- May 20, 1992: Named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and in 1998 succeeds Cardinal Antonio Quarracino as archbishop of the Argentine capital.
- Feb. 21, 2001: Elevated to cardinal by Pope John Paul II.
- March 13, 2013: Elected 266th pope, the first from the Americas, the first Jesuit and the first to take the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi.
The next pope may be as critical of the Trump-Vance administration’s immigration policies as Francis was: a pope can always 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 this one sense — he didn’t go far enough in recognizing the dangers of globalism and the attraction of traditionalism even in the West.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.