Pope Francis

A great man with flaws and one terrible failure at the end

When a great man and leader of the Roman-Catholic Church, and beyond it, like Pope Francis – before his papacy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio – dies, it may seem almost impious to speak or write about politics. But in his case, we know for certain that it simply means doing what he told us to do.

For one of his fundamental teachings was that we have a religious and moral – not merely a civic – duty to engage in politics. He made this clear, for instance, in one of his major statements, the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers). There, he spelled out the pronouncedly broad and political – not merely intimate, small-scale, or private – meaning of the story of the Good Samaritan, one of the most famous parables taught by the founder of all types of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth.

In Fratelli Tutti, Francis stressed that the Good Samaritan story “summons us to rediscover our vocation as citizens of our respective nations and of the entire world, builders of a new social bond” in order “to direct society to the pursuit of the common good.” That is about as far away as you can get from the intellectual platitude and ethical cop-out of religion-is-just-a-private-matter. And that was a good thing, too.

Because, as Francis made clear time and again, he – rightly – saw our world in deep social, ecological, and, fundamentally, spiritual crisis. If you share his belief or not, it is important to understand that political engagement to save this world, for him, was a matter of survival of not just a species and its much-abused planet but God’s creation.

There is something else we should remember about this late pope. He was known for being both genuinely relatable – especially with the poor, weak, abused, sinful (his last major meeting was with JD Vance, after all), and troubled – and, at the same time, capable of harsh rebuke and tough determination. Having worked as a bouncer in his youth and later as a Jesuit taskmaster, he knew how to handle the gathering of careerist, vain, pushy, and scheming egos that the higher Church also is.

As a pope, he was a decent and mostly kind man, in other words, but no push-over. And yet, with all his assertiveness, he was also humble, not in an ostentatious but a substantial manner: the kind of humility that makes you give up on many of the lifestyle perks that have corrupted the papacy and wash the feet of prison inmates. Or admit that you are not the one to judge, as once when commenting on a priest who was said to be gay.

Think about it: it is true, obviously; and, by the standards of tradition, it is at the same time something sensationally extraordinary for a pope to say about a priest. For, remember, the Roman-Catholic Church, is not a fake democracy – as secular states usually are now – but an unabashed absolute, if elective, monarchy.

Against that background – Francis’s instructions to engage with politics and his fundamental humility – two simple questions make sense: What is the political meaning of his tenure as pope between 2013 and 2025? And where did he succeed and where did he fail?

A full disclosure won’t do any harm either: I am writing about this pope as someone raised as a Roman-Catholic yet now largely lapsed. Largely, because, in reality, with something like a Catholic upbringing, about which I am far from complaining, “there are,” as the Russians wisely say about another experience that shapes you for life, “no formers.” Perhaps, that explains why I have always felt much sympathy for him. Although, come to think of it, that was due to his politics.

Regarding those politics, for starters, let’s note a basic piece of context that, however, is often overlooked: It’s commonly noted that Francis was a multiple first: first pope from Latin America, first Jesuit, first one not from Europe for well over a millennium. But there was yet another important first: even if the Cold War between – very roughly – the capitalist West and the socialist-Communist Soviet camp ended in the late 1980s and Francis became pope in 2013, he was, actually, the first substantially post-Cold War pope, even if he as well had been shaped by its cruel local variant in his homeland Argentina. He had the ability to move on and evolve.

Counterintuitive as that fact may be, it is not hard to explain it. It was the result of the de facto rule that popes get elected when they are old and likely to be set in their ways and – usually, not always – serve until death. Specifically, once the Cold War had ended, the very Polish and very conservative John Paul II – a quintessential Cold War pope – stayed in office until 2005. His successor, the not merely conservative but leadenly reactionary Benedict XVI from Germany was, in essence, the Angela Merkel of the Vatican: the one you call when, in reality, everything must change, but you are in obstinate denial about it. And did Benedict fulfill those expectations!

It was really only after rigid Benedict abdicated and, in effect, retired – the first pope to do so in more than half a millennium – that there was an opening for finally moving the Church beyond this sorry state of stagnation. It was Francis’s achievement that, once elected to the papacy, he did his best – or, as his many critics and opponents would gripe, worst – to use that opportunity.

Apart from setting an example by his personal modesty – for instance, just two rooms in a Vatican hostel, a comparatively simple pectoral cross, no flashy cape or dainty red slippers, and, finally, orders for a fairly simple coffin, lying-in-state, and burial – Francis tackled major unresolved issues inside the Church, such as finance scandals and corruption, sexual abuse, and the prevalence of rule by clique and intrigue.

On these issues, he certainly did not universally succeed. Regarding child abuse by clericals, his reactions and actions well-intentioned, sometimes perfectly misguided, and sometimes unprecedented and consequential: as when he, in essence, forced a mass resignation of bishops in Chile and defrocked a truly demonic US cardinal for his revolting crimes and sins. But his record remains mixed. He himself, to his credit, ended up admitting his “grave mistakes” in this crucial area. Victims of clerical child abusers and critics plausibly find that his efforts did not go far enough.

Francis could neither defeat nor eradicate the hardy networks, lobbies, and plots of the Vatican and the Church leadership more broadly. In particular, the – surprise, surprise – conservative US cardinals form a powerful, mean lobby. But to be fair, no single person could have cleaned up these Augean Stables. That would take a miracle, one that did not happen under this pope.

Yet Francis did have an impact. His challenge was sometimes fierce, and the resistance it provoked proves that he hit a nerve. This, clearly, is an issue which will be decided, if ever, in the future. In that respect, note that kind, smiling Francis was worldly and tough enough to promote – where he could (an important caveat) – like-minded men to high office. As he installed the preponderant majority of the 135 or 136 cardinals who will elect his successor, his policies might be continued. Yet Church politics is less transparent than the Trump White House and much more complex. Nothing is certain.

Yet what about the world beyond the upper ranks of the Church? That is, after all, clearly what Francis – the pope with a personal cross that depicted Jesus as the Good Shepherd – cared about the most. For practical purposes and to greatly simplify, think of that world-beyond-peak-Church as consisting of two concentric circles: the inner yet large circle consists of currently about 1.4 billion Roman Catholics globally, and the outer, even larger one of everyone else in a world population over 8 billion.

There, Francis pursued two great lines: He clearly sought to finally do justice to the fact that demographically and in terms of commitment and dynamism, Roman-Catholicism’s center of gravity has inexorably shifted away from Europe and, roughly speaking, to the Global South-plus: Latin America, Africa, and Asia, too. Indeed, over the last half-century, Africa and Asia have been the only two regions where the increase in the number of Catholics has exceeded population growth.

When elected, he immediately pointed out – with a hardly hidden edge, I believe – that his cardinal brothers had plucked him “from the ends of the Earth.” That was a statement in favor of those “ends” and against the breathtaking, institutionally inbred provincialism that has made 80 percent of popes come from tiny Italy. By now, though, the cardinals who will elect the next pope come from 94 countries and less than 40 percent are from Europe, “with a record number from Asia and Africa.”

This true globalization of the Roman-Catholic Church in its most fundamental meaning, namely as the community of its members is what Francis was in sync with as no pope before him, not even the globe-trotting John Paul II. If the Church is wise, it will follow his example; if it is foolish – which, historically speaking, happens a lot – it will revert to Benedict XVI’s futile retreat into the past.

The other major policy Francis consistently pursued was – believe it or not – a form of socialism. If that sounds odd, recall that socialism is a broader and older church than Marxism. Socialists, even by the narrowest, most modern definitions, existed before Marxism. If we widen the lens to ancient history, a certain Palestinian rebel called Jesus, executed by the indispensable empire of his day, obviously, was one, too.

Francis understood that and stuck to it. That is why The Economist sniffles at what it mislabels as his populist and Peronist leanings. It is true that Bergoglio came from Argentina’s Peronist tradition, but Francis the pope cannot be captured by this past. He was, in reality, a sharp critic of populism, if understood as, say, Trumpism (or Sanderism-AOC-ism, I would add): the fake appeal to longings for justice solely to control, mobilize, manipulate, and profit.

The core of Francis’s evolved, de facto socialist position was – as The Economist, to its credit, also admits – “scorn for capitalism” or, to quote the Washington Post, another party organ of the global oligarchy – a strong concern for “social justice.” Indeed. And then some.

In sum, it is true that Francis was not a Marxist. Indeed, he failed to appreciate or see eye to eye with Latin American Liberation Theology, and his behavior during a brutal, murderous right-wing dictatorship in Argentina was less than exemplary, although accusations of collaboration have been shown to be unfounded and probably politicized.

As pope, in any case, he ended up being, in effect, a man of the Left. He had built the breadth of mind and the strength of character to reject the unfortunate recent hegemony of liberal capitalism in favor of something fairer and more moral, something worthy of humanity. In the dark post-Cold War that we are forced to inhabit, that fact made the Roman-Catholic pope one of the main forces (next to China, intriguingly) of the survival of leftwing ideals.

For those “realists” without imagination who are tempted to ask with – perhaps apocryphal – Stalin “The pope? How many divisions?”: Look where Stalin’s creation is now (hint: nowhere). And yet the Church is still around.

There was (and still is) another issue of immense importance for our future on which he stood out by being more honest and more courageous than all too many others: Francis did repeatedly censure Israel’s – and the West’s – brutal slaughter of the Palestinians, using terms such as “cruelty” and “terror” and pointing out that what Israel is doing is not even war, but, clearly something worse.

And yet, those who now claim that he condemned the Gaza Genocide are wrong, unfortunately. I wished he had, but he did not. The fact remains, painful as it may be for those who liked and respected him (such as I), that he failed to take this crucial and necessary step. The closest he came to it was the following, far too cautious statement: “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies."

That was more than almost any other leader in the “value” West; it was also more than the studious public silence practiced by Pius XII during that other holocaust, when the Germans did not support Jews committing a genocide, as now, but – together with their many collaborators and friends – committed a genocide against Jews. But both are pitiably low bars.

As the pope, that is, not just some political leader but a man with great soft power and extraordinary moral duties by design, he should, as a minimum, have condemned the genocide as just that and told all Roman-Catholics that not opposing it in every way they can is a grave sin. He should also have excommunicated co-genocider-in-chief Joe Biden and preening neo-Catholic JD Vance. Pour encourager les autres. Francis did have a steely, even ruthless side, as he himself knew well. This was where the world needed him to show it most, but he did not.

I like to think he would be the first to admit this fact. Because that is the way he was as a pope: great, fallible, and, ultimately, humble.