The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  Cardinal Müller implicitly challenged Pope Francis’s caricature of an obsessed Church. “It’s not as if other bishops or Pope Benedict had constantly spoken about abortion, sexual morals or euthanasia,” he said to a German newspaper.44 But the damage was already done by the pope’s remark. Liberal politicians quickly adopted it as a rebuttal against socially conservative Catholic opponents.

  The Signature Phrase of Pope Francis

  Against an “obsessed” Church, Pope Francis presented himself as a font of understanding. Indeed, nothing pleased liberals more than what has become the signature phrase of his papacy: “Who am I to judge?”

  “He did more with those five words than the last five popes,” burbled the pop singer Elton John. “He is my hero.”45

  The inane line came in response to a question during a press briefing on Pope Francis’s trip back from Brazil in July 2013. Francis had been asked about the presence of gay priests in the Church. He brushed the issue off, saying breezily, “Who am I to judge them if they are seeking the Lord in good faith?”46

  Ever since then, the press has feted Pope Francis as “gay-friendly,” a welcome contrast in its view to Pope Benedict XVI, whom liberal pundits demonized as a “homophobe” for simply upholding the Church’s perennial moral teaching and traditional priestly discipline.

  For conservative Catholics, the context of the pope’s remark made it even more dubious. What had prompted it was a scandal involving a homosexual priest named Monsignor Battista Ricca. Bizarrely, Pope Francis had promoted Ricca to the highest ecclesiastical position at the Vatican bank despite an amazingly sordid past for a priest. “Pope’s ‘eyes and ears’ in Vatican bank ‘had string of homosexual affairs,’” ran a headline in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph in July 2013.47

  The appointment flabbergasted the veteran Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, who established beyond any reasonable doubt that Ricca’s scandalous past included an affair with a member of the Swiss Guard, a beating he received at a gay bar, and a grimly comic incident involving the discovery by firemen of Ricca trapped in an elevator with a young male prostitute.48

  Pope Francis disregarded this information and appointed Ricca anyway. Far from hurting Francis’s image as a “reformer” in the eyes of the Western media, the Ricca scandal only sealed it. Liberals were pleased to learn that Francis was not only encouraging the very gay priestly candidates whom Pope Benedict had instructed seminaries to stop ordaining but was promoting them to top positions.

  While winning him plaudits from the press, the pope’s remark demoralized orthodox clergy and laity exhausted by countless gay scandals in the Church. “When the Pope rhetorically asked, ‘Who am I to judge a gay person of good will who seeks the Lord?,’ he effectively gave the green light for homosexual men to enter the priesthood,” complained Fr. Michael Orsi, a research fellow at Ave Maria Law School.49

  An official at the German branch of Vatican Radio felt so emboldened by the pope’s words he decided to run a picture of two lesbians kissing as an accompaniment to an article titled “Moral Theologian: Church’s Sexual Morality Is in Motion” on its website. Vatican Radio eventually took the picture down after Catholics complained that it was scandalizing children, but that the picture had appeared at all indicated the change of atmosphere under Pope Francis.50

  Conservative Catholics had hoped that Pope Francis would disband the long-discussed gay mafia inside the Church. But the Ricca scandal erased that hope.

  “So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find anyone who can give me a Vatican identity card with ‘gay’ [written on it]. They say they are there,” Pope Francis said vaguely in 2013.51 Such comments suggested that he was more apt to joke about the gay mafia than eliminate it, even as embarrassing confirmations of its existence continued to trickle out. One member of the Swiss Guard was quoted in the European press in 2014 saying that Vatican officials had solicited him for sex more than twenty times. A former commander in the Swiss Guard described the Vatican as a “magnet” for gays.52 A Polish priest and theologian working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came out to an Italian newspaper in 2015 as homosexual and said that he had a gay partner. He resigned, but the “Vatican said [his] dismissal had nothing to do with his comments on his personal situation, which it said ‘merit respect,’” reported Reuters.53

  “The gay mafia is so strong,” says a former seminary official interviewed for this book. The plethora of gay-friendly bishops Pope Francis has promoted “tells you where the power is in the Church,” he says.

  The homosexual magazine the Advocate, out of gratitude for his subversion of Church teaching, declared Pope Francis in December 2013 its “Person of the Year.” It thanked him for signaling a lack of seriousness about the Church’s stance on homosexuality and drew hope from his earlier support for gay civil unions as archbishop of Buenos Aires:

  It’s actually during Pope Francis’s time as cardinal that his difference from Benedict and hard-liners in the church became apparent. As same-sex marriage looked on track to be legalized in Argentina, Bergoglio argued privately that the church should come out for civil unions as the “lesser of two evils.” That’s all according to Pope Francis’s authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin. Argentine gay activist Marcelo Márquez backed up the story, telling The New York Times in March that Bergoglio “listened to my views with a great deal of respect. He told me that homosexuals need to have recognized rights and that he supported civil unions, but not same-sex marriage.”54

  Catholics in the pews were not so wowed. On November 10, 2013, the New York Times devoted a front-page story to conservative angst about Pope Francis. Titled “Conservative U.S. Catholics Feel Left Out of the Pope’s Embrace,” the article noted that members of the “church’s conservative wing in the United States say Francis has left them feeling abandoned and deeply unsettled.”

  By the time of his 2015 visit to the United States, dismay with the pope had grown to the point that the Wall Street Journal headlined an article “Conservative Catholics in U.S. Greet Pope Francis with Unease.”

  “The Catholic Church… faces a growing crisis of moral consistency and credibility,” wrote pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.55 “The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination. Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more appealing to those who have rejected them.”

  Conservative Catholic commentators in Latin America, whose voices were drowned out in the din of praise following Bergoglio’s election, had warned that his pontificate would prove disastrous. To these observers familiar with his tenure in Buenos Aires, the maddening incoherence and people-pleasing relativism of his pontificate were all too predictable.

  “Of all the unthinkable candidates, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is perhaps the worst,” wrote Marcelo González. “This election is incomprehensible: he is not a polyglot, he has no Curial experience, he does not shine for his sanctity, he is loose in doctrine and liturgy, he has not fought against abortion and only very weakly against homosexual ‘marriage’ [approved with practically no opposition from the episcopate], he has no manners to honor the Pontifical Throne. He has never fought for anything else than to remain in positions of power.”56

  Lucrecia Rego de Planas, a Catholic editor in Latin America, knew Francis from his time in Argentina and remembered his holier-than-thou poverty posturing. None of his first acts of ostentatious humility—which included the rejection of the papal apartments for a floor of the Vatican hotel—surprised her.

  In a blistering letter that she wrote to Pope Francis, she recalled his habit of showboating at the expense of the Church:

  Whe
n I met you during those retreats [in Buenos Aires], while you were still Cardinal Bergoglio, what struck me about you and left me disconcerted was that you never behaved like the other cardinal and bishops. Allow me to mention just a few examples: you were the only one who never genuflected in front of the Tabernacle or during the Consecration. If all the bishops showed up in their priestly frocks, because that was what a particular gathering required, you would show up in your street clothes and priest’s collar. If everybody sat in the seats reserved for the bishops and cardinals, you left the seat reserved to Cardinal Bergoglio empty and sat further back, saying “I like it here, this way I feel more at home.” If the others arrived in a car that corresponded to the dignity of a bishop, you arrived last, busily and in a hurry, telling all about whom you met on the public transit that you had chosen to get there.

  When I witnessed these things—I’m ashamed to say—I would think to myself: “Ugh… there he goes again, always trying to attract attention to himself! For if one truly wanted to be humble and simple, wouldn’t it be better to behave like the other bishops, so as to go unnoticed?”57

  As even his sympathetic biographer Paul Vallely acknowledged, Pope Francis has a weakness for contrived acts of humility. On his first papal trip, for example, he rebuked an aide for putting his briefcase on the plane, thus depriving him of the opportunity to look modest. He instructed the aide to retrieve the briefcase so that he could be seen carrying it, wrote Vallely:

  “Where’s my briefcase?” asked Pope Francis. The papal entourage had arrived at Fiumicino Airport in Rome for the pontiff’s first trip abroad. Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been pope for just four months and was now bound for Rio de Janeiro, where 3.5 million young people from 178 countries were waiting to greet him at World Youth Day in Brazil. And he could not find his briefcase.

  “It’s been taken on board the plane,” an aide explained.

  “But I want to carry it on,” said the pontiff.

  “No need, it’s on already,” the assistant replied.

  “You don’t understand,” said Francis. “Go to the plane. Get the bag. And bring it back here please.”58

  A less gullible and ideologically driven media might have questioned a pope so eager to advertise his humility. Instead, the media breathlessly reported his obviously scripted acts of humility, such as paying his own hotel bill at the Vatican after the conclave or calling to cancel his newspaper subscription. They reported on humble deeds, both real and imaginary, from the free haircuts and tours of the Sistine Chapel he ordered for the homeless to nightly ministrations that never occurred.

  “Is Francis Leaving Vatican at Night to Minister to Homeless?” ran a ludicrous headline in the Huffington Post.59 No such ministry happened. But it didn’t matter. Journalists covering Francis saw themselves as propagandists first and reporters second. Out of affection for his leftism, they were determined to cast him as the first pope to notice the poor.

  Obama’s Pope

  Barack Obama, capturing the drift of this hagiography, disguised his appreciation for the pope’s left-wing politics in safer praise for his “empathy” and “humility.” “I have been hugely impressed with the Pope’s pronouncements. He seems like somebody who lives out the teachings of Christ, incredible humility, an incredible sense of empathy to the least of these, the poor,” Obama said.60

  But it was the politically correct third-worldism of the first Latin American pope that Obama found most exciting. When Obama learned that Pope Francis planned to canonize the slain left-wing archbishop Óscar Romero, a movement that had stalled under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he immediately issued a statement: “I am grateful to Pope Francis for his leadership in reminding us of our obligation to help those most in need, and for his decision to beatify Blessed Oscar Arnulfo Romero.”61

  Obama also appreciated that Pope Francis was giving greater attention to left-wing politics than to theology, thereby making it easier for the left to shape politics and culture without religious resistance. As the New York Times put it, “His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable—articulated in his mission statement, ‘The Joy of the Gospel’—have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity.”

  At the end of 2013, Time magazine crowned Pope Francis its “Person of the Year.” The honor reflected the liberal elite’s giddy mood about his papacy and the aid it offered to the global left.

  “What makes this Pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church at all,” the magazine editorialized. “In a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church—the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world—above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were professors of theology. Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and literature teacher.”

  The “healing mission of the church” was Time’s euphemism for Pope Francis’s identification with global socialism. Beneath all of its patter about his outreach to the poor lay the real reason for the magazine’s decision to honor him: he was advancing left-wing politics and liberalizing the Church after his two conservative predecessors. Many other popes had performed corporal works of mercy for the poor. But because they upheld orthodoxy and did not enlist the Church in the causes of the global left, their charity went unpraised by the liberal elite. Time had finally found a pope it could champion without reservation. “He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals,” it concluded.62

  The media insisted on portraying Pope Francis as the “people’s pontiff.” But to conservative Catholics, these laurels from the media only proved his status as the elite’s pontiff. In a moment of ecclesiastical indiscretion in 2013, Philadelphia archbishop Charles Chaput let slip to the National Catholic Reporter that orthodox Catholics are “generally not happy with Francis” but that lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics who disdain Church teaching feel enthusiasm for his pontificate.

  “[Church-going Catholics] are not actually the ones who really talk to me about the new pope. The ones who do are nonpracticing Catholics or people who aren’t Catholic or not even Christian,” Chaput said. “They go out of their way to tell me how impressed they are and what a wonderful change he’s brought into the church. It’s interesting to see that it’s the alienated Catholic and the non-Catholic and the non-Christians who have expressed their enthusiasm more than Catholics have.”63

  Summing up the left’s manipulative attitude toward the pope perfectly, new-age enthusiast Jennifer Vanderslice said to the Guardian, “He is such a worldly and non-judgmental pope and is so dynamic. He will never change me into a Catholic but I do like the way he is spreading peace and talking about helping the poor and the less fortunate… It is refreshing to hear a pope who can strike a chord in so many people, whether they’re Catholic or not. You can take what you need and leave the rest.”64

  Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist who describes himself as “lapsed but listening,” also summed up Francis’s appeal for his secular readers concisely: “He is—gasp—a liberal.” At long last, a progressive occupies the chair of St. Peter, exulted Egan: “Pope Francis has shown himself to be a free spirit and a free thinker… He talks to atheists… He calls for the faithful to ‘mess up the church.’… Francis has befuddled the guardians of dogma and medieval sexual doctrines who have long kept sunlight out of the Vatican.”65

  Sandro Magister has observed that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI “were mostly popular inside the Church, even if they were harshly criticized from strongholds of non-Catholic public opinion, whereas Francis’ popularity is more conspicuous outside the Church, even if it isn’t eliciting waves of conversions.”66

  “The mass med
ia are trying to create a spirit of Pope Francis, just as they created a spirit of Vatican II,” commented Bishop Robert Morlino in the Wisconsin State Journal. “Many Catholics fell for that the first time. I hope they won’t fall for that again.”67

  If anything, Pope Francis’s liberal spin on Catholicism appears to be causing Catholics, both practicing and lapsed, to take Church pronouncements less seriously. According to polling data released by Pew Research in 2016, only one in ten American Catholics said that they rely a “great deal” on Pope Francis’s moral direction. Seventy-three percent of Catholics said that they prefer to rely on their own judgments.68

  Even in his homeland of Argentina, support for him is beginning to wane. In 2016, reported the New York Post, “a recent local poll revealed that Francis—the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires—has tumbled from the first to the ninth most ‘trustworthy Argentine’ in just two years.”69

  According to Politico, in a piece titled “Pope Alienates Base, Sees Numbers Drop,” attendance at Vatican events has been steadily declining over his pontificate:

  In 2015, more than 3.2 million pilgrims visited and attended papal events, liturgies or prayer services at the Holy See, the Vatican said at the end of December. That was a sharp drop from the 5.9 million visitors received by Pope Francis in 2014. And it was less than half of the 6.6 million pilgrims who visited the Vatican during the first nine-and-a-half months of his pontificate in 2013.70

  Pope Francis calls the Church on his watch a “field hospital.” But if it is one, many of his patients appear to be dying. Pews in many dioceses remain as empty as ever. As one wan headline put it in 2013, “Pope Francis’ Appeal Not Measurable Yet in Church Attendance.”71