Among the many verdicts on his papacy, the late Pope Francis was by some commentators associated with a form of liberalism first identified by Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864, which declared it heretical to believe that a pontiff should “come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation”. Pius X went on to describe this tendency as “modernism”: the “compendium and poison of all heresies”.
In 2018, the Church historian Richard Rex echoed the anxieties of both Pius IX and Pius X when he declared Francis to be a “crisis within a crisis”. Francis, he charged, had raised questions about the indissolubility of marriage, thus potentially surrendering on an “entire alphabet” of Catholic beliefs.
A leading modernist in the British Isles at the time of Pius X was the Irish Jesuit theologian George Tyrrell. He died in 1909 aged 48, his health wrecked by the treatment meted out to him by the anti-modernist Vatican thought police. Having been excommunicated, he was denied burial in consecrated ground; an attending priest who made the sign of the cross over the coffin was disciplined by his diocese.
Francis and Tyrrell would have agreed on the role of conscience. Tyrrell saw Christ as the voice of individual conscience, “subtly intertwined with our own soul”.
There are distinct parallels between the writings of George Tyrrell and the teachings of Francis. Tyrrell was condemned for writing that God is revealed through religious imagination and symbolism—a God open to all peoples and cultures. He argued that religious experience and salvation are attainable by all human beings. He raised conscience above dogma, challenged the pretensions of clericalism, and what he perceived as the creeping infallibility of the papacy. He urged a form of synodal democracy in the Church.
In Laudato si’, Francis attributed authentic spiritual expressions to indigenous “pagan” peoples and recommended an “economy” of mercy: the importance of the spirit. In Amoris Laetitia, Francis emphasised the role of conscience, at times over doctrine: “[N]ot all doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of dogma.” Conscience, he continued, does not necessarily restrict one to the letter of the law, but “recognises with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response that can be given to God”.
Ever since the Second Vatican Council we have been accustomed to seeing the Catholic experience in prosperous Western countries as a conflict between conservatives and liberals. In broad terms it plays out as a struggle between permanence and change, tradition and progress, authority and conscience, finality and openness.
Yet there is another perspective, crucial for a fuller understanding of the Francis papacy. The philosopher Charles Taylor writes of the conflict between high religious aspirations and prudence. By prudence he means a humanistic acceptance of our limitations and frailties. Taylor declares that the highest spiritual ideals also “threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on humankind”. The spiritual visions of human history “have also been poisoned chalices, the causes of untold misery and even savagery”. The practice of prudence through mercy and the scaling down of high aspirations nevertheless involves a loss, which Taylor describes as a form of spiritual lobotomy. When we moderate our spirituality with prudence, “we deceive ourselves if we pretend nothing is denied thereby of our humanity”. But is this the last word? Is none of us spared the choice between spiritually impoverished prudence and a wounding or self-wounding zeal?
Francis called for a third way: prudenza audace, an audacious prudence that keeps the opposing tendencies—with their accompanying rewards and dangers—in tension. In 2013, a woman in Argentina wrote to Francis about a moral dilemma: her husband was married and divorced without an annulment, and her parish priest had denied her Communion. She received a surprise telephone call from the Pope himself, advising her to go to Confession in another parish and to receive Communion there. Francis would never officially sanction divorce and remarriage, but he frequently raised the passage in Mark 10 where the Pharisees attempt to trap Jesus on the prohibition against divorce. Was it lawful, they asked, for a husband to put away his wife? Francis often commented on how Jesus refused to answer such questions, “because they thought of the faith only in terms of ‘yes you can’ or ‘no you can’t’”. His central message was that mercy does not alter fundamental moral truths, nor the requirements of justice. Justice and mercy, he preached, “are not two things but a single one, only one thing. In God, justice is mercy and mercy is justice.” The tension of seeming opposites was intended to allow hope among people who felt cut off from the Church; it was also to cause much upset among others. When future historians come to scrutinise in depth the prodigious flow of Francis’s teachings, they are unlikely to find evidence of divergence from the Magisterium—he never denied the indissolubility of marriage. But they will find a consistent Christian counsel of prudence, mercy and clemency that recognised human frailty: the way we are.
His audacious prudence often came across as disruption. He told a young audience that it was crucial “to make a mess”. It was the Francis Effect. He made mistakes, yet admitted them and apologised. On a trip to Chile in 2018, Francis vehemently defended a local bishop, Juan Barros, who had been accused of remaining silent about his knowledge of the sexual depredations of one of his clergy. When he later accepted his error, Francis made a public apology. “I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and my perception of the situation,” he wrote. “I now beg the forgiveness of all those whom I have offended.”
He disliked having his ring kissed and preferred the title Bishop of Rome to Supreme Pontiff or Vicar of Christ. Asked to describe himself, he said, “I am a sinner.” He meant it—and it was no doubt true.
There were surreal moments: he washed the feet of women and Muslims at a prison in Rome, stood cheek-to-cheek with a gay man of colour, and embraced a transgender pilgrim. He shocked onlookers when he kissed the feet of South Sudanese leaders.
He performed somersaults great and small—he made a mess. Disruption is familiar in corporate and economic strategy; therapeutic interventions are common in the treatment of destructive and self-destructive addictions and neuroses. Francis interrupted authoritarian, dogmatic, self-referential clericalism and institutional corruption. He reached out to millions of the baptised who had fallen away. Beyond the Church, he spoke out on major issues of global economy and society: migration, the value of labour, racism, the relief of poverty, and the fate of the environment.
The Francis Effect has proved no sweet balm of the soul. His papacy was a rough ride of paradoxes, shocks and somersaults. Francis interrupted the Church to face the global shocks of the future; he disrupted the walls of separation and taught the interrelatedness of humanity and the whole of nature. Mercy—the key to prudenza audace—was his watchword. He urged service for the common good, sustained by hope and trust in the boundless mercy of God. CH
John Cornwell is the author of Church Interrupted: Havoc and Hope – The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis (Chronicle Prism)
