The Legacy Of Pope Francis Is Chaos, Confusion, And Division In The Catholic Church

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

Pope Francis’ famous exhortation to Catholic youth just months after being elected the 266th pope of the Catholic Church in March 2013 was “Hagan lio!” — “make a mess!” Twelve years later, upon his death Easter Monday morning at age 88, it’s fair to say that Francis took his own advice, making a mess of his pontificate and leaving the Catholic Church in a state of confusion and disarray.

When he ascended the throne of Saint Peter as the first Jesuit pope and first pontiff to hail from outside Europe in over a thousand years, Francis caused a stir. He eschewed the pomp and circumstance of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, donning simpler clerical attire, refusing to take up residence in the papal palace, and referring to himself simply as “the bishop of Rome.” Here, it seemed, was a populist pope, a man of the people who not only promised to clean up the corruption in the Holy See but went out of his way to embrace the poor, the disfigured, the downtrodden — and made sure to be seen doing so.

To many Catholics, he was an unknown. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, Francis was politically on the left, with strong anti-American and anti-conservative tendencies that would manifest themselves in the years to come. But he also had a reputation in Argentina for personal austerity and humility, doctrinal conservatism, and working closely with the poor. It was possible, in those very early days, to imagine that he could be a pontiff to bring together the warring factions of the church and forge a path into the 21st century for a united Catholic Church.

But it wasn’t to be. Early on in Francis’ pontificate there were signs of the chaos, confusion, and division that would come to define his papacy. What even many devout Catholics didn’t know in 2013 was that Francis’s past was checkered with scandals, including attempts to shield sex abusers from justice in Argentina, and that, as longtime Vatican observer Damian Thompson has written, Francis would govern Rome as an autocrat whose “rule is shaped more by his rages and simmering resentments than by any theological agenda.”

It didn’t take long for liberal reformers in the Catholic hierarchy — especially those in western Europe who had done so much to elect him — to see that in Francis they had a pope that would be willing, for reasons of his own, to push the boundaries of Catholic doctrine on contentious moral issues like homosexuality, marriage and divorce, and the ordination of women. Modernist, liberal reformers thought the revolutionary changes that had been impossible under Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI might finally be within reach under Francis.

Those changes never quite materialized, but Francis allowed the boundaries to be pushed just far enough to sow confusion over issues that should be — and according to Catholic teaching, actually are — clear-cut. Indeed, the true legacy of Francis is not opening the church to gay marriage, divorce and re-marriage, the ordination of women or any other major doctrinal reform, but opening up questions about these things that will now have to be answered definitively by a future pontificate.

Under Francis, great changes in the Catholic Church always seemed to be on the way but never arrived in full. Time and again, what Francis gave with one hand he withdrew with the other. The result was not some big reform or change in doctrine leading to schism, but deepening chaos and division in a church already on the brink of open war.

Take for example the papal ruling Fiducia Supplicans, which appeared to sanction the blessing of same-sex couples by Catholic priests. The document appeared without warning just before Christmas in 2023 and caused immediate scandal for seeming to defy Catholic teaching on marriage. It also caused confusion by declaring that same-sex couples or those in “irregular” relationships could receive “non-liturgical” blessings, a category that appears nowhere in canon law. That it was promulgated through the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had only two years prior condemned the notion of same-sex couples, only added to the confusion and outrage.

What followed was chaos. Amid questions from frustrated bishops all over the world, the Vatican issued a hasty clarification that the blessings in question should be no more than 15 seconds long and were not to be construed as an endorsement of the relationship. Shortly thereafter, the bishops of Africa more or less rejected Fiducia outright, issuing a statement that they “did not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples,” and that there would be “no blessings for same-sex couples  in the African Churches.” Meanwhile, bishops in Ukraine and Poland simply declared that Fiducia didn’t apply to them, even as LGBT activist priests like Fr. James Martin were celebrating it in the United States.

Where was Francis in all this? Mostly silent, although he did clumsily say that it was fine for the African bishops to reject blessings for same-sex couples because they’re Africans, and eventually seemed to disavow Fiducia amid the scandal it caused. The issue was left unresolved — yet another “mess” Francis made, albeit by accident more than by design.

Whatever the significance of Fiducia, it hasn’t led to any revolutionary change in Catholic teaching or practice vis-à-vis gay Catholic couples. Indeed, for all his liberal leanings Francis was never as fond of the church’s gay lobby as his conservative critics supposed. Less than six months after the uproar over Fiducia, Francis himself twice made headlines after it was reported that he used the term “faggotry” in private conservations with priests and bishops while arguing there’s a gay culture in the Vatican and that seminaries must be wary of admitting men with homosexual inclinations.

The entire Fiducia affair was emblematic of the pope’s disjointed, reactionary way of pushing the envelope on what should be settled Catholic teaching. To take another salient example, his 2016 Apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which came after two synods on the family in 2014 and 2015, appeared to offer an opening for divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive communion — something which should not be possible according to Catholic doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage. 

But Amoris urged priests to look at each individual case of divorce and remarriage separately and engage in a “process of discernment” about whether such a couple can receive communion. Essentially, it urged priests to adopt a pastoral approach to what should be a cut-and-dried matter of applying canon law. Defenders of Amoris, especially the liberal German prelates that had been pushing this issue for years, insisted that, despite appearances, it upheld the indissolubility of marriage, when in fact the entire purpose of the exhortation was to give priests and bishops a way around it.

As with Fiducia, the impetus behind Amoris came from liberalizing prelates of the shrinking churches of western Europe, whose utterly implausible argument was that the prohibition on communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics is a significant driver of declining Mass attendance in Europe. Only by loosening the rules — as if the Catholic hierarchy is free simply to change doctrine whenever it likes — could the church “stay relevant” and speak to the modern world, they argued. (Never mind that in countries like England and France, the recent record numbers of new converts to Catholicism are overwhelmingly conservative in their theology and cultural disposition.)

Francis’ willingness to indulge, up to a point, such reforming impulses from the most decrepit, wayward, dying parts of the Catholic Church, led by the most faithless, modernizing prelates, is the key to understanding what his actual legacy is.

His legacy isn’t clear, bold changes to Catholic teaching on issues so beloved by the cultural and political left. Rather, it’s the way Francis pushed the church toward a more Anglican model of communion, one in which theology and doctrine are negotiable and dependent on context. It amounts to a wholesale reimagining of Catholic moral teaching, in which each believer is “on a faith journey,” and the job of the Church and its leaders is to “journey with” each believer as they navigate life as best they can.

That’s one reason why the documents and declarations from the Francis pontificate are so larded up with academic and therapeutic jargon that it can be difficult to parse out what’s really being asserted. The liberalizing bishops and cardinals behind all of this know that what they’re proposing is a break with the church’s past understanding of sin, repentance, and communion. Since they cannot propose a break outright, they couch it in vague terms and convoluted formulations that leave the faithful wondering whether there has in fact been a change or not.

Meanwhile Pope Francis would periodically lash out with astonishing vehemence at Catholics in America who attend the Traditional Latin Mass. Yet he had little or nothing to say about protestantizing German bishops who are effectively in schism with Rome. Elsewhere in the developing world, bishops simply rejected missives from Rome that they knew to be incompatible with Catholic doctrine, as the Africans did with Fiducia.

All of this conjures a vision of the future in which a Catholic diocese in one part of the world might teach and practice one thing, and dioceses elsewhere might teach and practice something different — all under the increasingly meaningless banner of “Catholicism.”

The implications of this shift are enormous. It means nothing less than a denial of the Catholic faith and the universal, united Catholic Church. On a question like communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics, the central issue is the matter of sin and what to do about it. No amount of “pastoral accompaniment” can paper over the plain fact that the Catholic Church cannot recognize divorce, and that civilly divorced Catholics are barred — for their own good — from communion. The modern world might object to this, might call it unfair, but the Catholic faith is not contingent on modern sensibilities, no matter what a pope might say. That’s how it had always been — until Francis.

Pope Francis opened up questions that previously were closed, and in so doing created divisions and confusion that will require, at some future point, definitive clarification and decision. Perhaps these questions will have to be settled by an ecumenical council tasked with cleaning up the mess Francis made. But for now, as the cardinals of the Catholic Church gather in Rome for a conclave to select Francis’ successor, a cloud of uncertainty, even of dread, hangs over the Holy See. That’s the true legacy of Pope Francis.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/21/the-legacy-of-pope-francis-is-chaos-confusion-and-division-in-the-catholic-church/

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