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.
