Pope Francis dies at 88 years old one day after Easter Sunday
Pope Francis, the first pope born outside of Europe in over a millennia, has died.
The battle over Pope Francis’ reforms opened with a coordinated attack against guidance that eased restrictions on divorced and remarried parishioners receiving communion.
Four conservative bishops challenged Francis’ guidance in a document titled “Amoris Laetita” in a July 2017 letter, issuing a “correction” to “protect our fellow Catholics.”
“Heresies and other errors have in consequence spread through the Church,” the four bishops wrote.
Francis set out to reshape how the church operates, but not what it teaches. “Amoris Laetitia” was the first major attempt at that. The document emerged from a lengthy discernment process that included public input and an assembly of bishops, known as a synod.
But to critics, these bureaucratic changes were a slippery slope to doctrinal erosion.
Francis, born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio and who died April 21 at age 88, leaves a legacy in which an institution that operates under a strict hierarchy made room for women and laity to voice concerns and for bishops to rigorously debate how to best implement church teaching. But those adjustments provoked traditionalists to mount a resistance that rallied supporters using ideological grievances, not ecclesiological ones.
Francis’ posture on issues such as LGBTQ+ inclusion and immigration have frustrated conservative Catholics in the U.S. and led many to become more loyal to the Republican Party and leaders like Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, instead of the Vatican.
“What is the most surprising thing about so many of the Catholic conservatives is they’ve been saying ‘well the pope isn’t saying what I think the pope is saying, therefore he’s not really the pope,’” Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of theology and law at Boston College, which is affiliated with the same Jesuit Catholic order that Francis belonged to. “That suggests the pope isn’t a Holy Father or an authority, but more like a snowplow that you put on your own ideological train that you use it to push people out of the way.”
Before Francis, liberals often protested the more orthodox leadership of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. But Kaveny said the conservative backlash against Francis was different because it often called into question the legitimacy of the pope’s authority.
Doubt about the pope’s authority seeded deeper levels of questioning, leading some conservatives to disregard other policies that were inspired by the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council, a policymaking assembly that convened 60 years ago, aimed to make the church more accessible to a wider audience — a goal that many have compared to Francis’ legacy. But cynicism toward those reforms have driven a conservative fervor for independence from Catholic authority.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and a columnist for Religion News Service, said that independence is ironic because the conservative bishops who attacked Francis were upset over the disruption to an earlier model in which a select few church leaders consulted the pope, who had the final say.
“It’s interesting: the pope gave people the freedom to speak and criticize,” Reese said. “And the conservatives took that freedom and used it to criticize him for making it possible to criticize.”
‘Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’
“Amoris Laetitia” triggered a conservative uprising more for what it said about Francis’ vision to elevate historically underrepresented perspectives.
“What he was trying to do, if I had one sentence to describe Pope Francis, is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” Kaveny said. Francis, drawing from his experiencing ministering to low-income Argentinians during his time as Buenos Aires archbishop, was committed to the ideal of mercy. It’s from that same source he was critical of capitalism and environmental degradation early in his tenure as pope.
But this commitment to a bottom-up view of discourse in the church began in earnest with the 2016 Synod on the Family, which led to “Amoris Laetitia.” Even before the bishops convened for the synod — essentially a time for bishops to workshop church teaching and policy and then vote on what guidance to relay to the pope — Francis encouraged regional episcopal leaders to solicit public input and compile that feedback in a document for the synod to consult.
Ultimately, in “Amoris Laetitia,” Francis advised priests to consider the unique circumstances of divorced and remarried parishioners to help decide whether to grant communion. Beforehand, only divorced couples who received a church-sanctioned annulment were eligible to participate in sacraments. Annulments were rare, often due to the difficult process for obtaining one.
Francis foreshadowed such attentiveness to lay peoples’ concerns within his first year as pope, when he outlined his vision for his papacy in a November 2013 document titled “Evangelii Gaudium.” In “Evangelii Gaudium,” a Latin phrase that translates to “Joy of the Gospel,” Francis supported a “decentralization” of church hierarchy and pushed against “structures that give us a false sense of security, within rules that make us harsh judges,” according to National Catholic Reporter.
But traditionalists felt sidelined by that message, and the 2016 events surrounding guidance for divorced and remarried Catholics was early evidence of that.
“What does appear to be clear is that efforts seem to be in place to prevent traditional voices having any sort of a key influence,” Edward Pentin, a writer for the conservative leaning National Catholic Register, said in an August 2018 column. “Some believe this is simply the culmination of an agenda that’s been pushed since before Francis’ election: to legitimize not so much heterodoxy as homosexual relationships within the Church.”
‘Quite revolutionary’
Conservatives reasoned, and grew increasingly anxious, that Francis would push the boundaries on LGBTQ+ inclusion if he was already willing to do the same on permissions for divorced and remarried Catholics.
Over time, the pope’s posture on LGBTQ+ inclusion did in fact change and it subsequently mobilized these traditionalists. Francis was less combative toward LGBTQ+ Catholics and in 2023 said priests could bless same-sex unions.
Conservative bishops and outspoken critics of Francis based in the U.S. — namely Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó and Bishop Joseph Strickland, among others — responded by rallying allies in the pews, which bolstered an emergent Catholic right led by clerical and political figures. That movement eventually contributed to the strong Catholic support for President Donald Trump and Vance in November’s election.
As conservatives in the U.S. were getting riled up about real or perceived changes over LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church, far more substantive maneuvers were underway at the Vatican. It began with Francis issuing a new apostolic constitution that reordered Vatican agencies and expanded criteria to allow women to run those agencies. Then, the pope gave women and lay people the power to vote in a synod.
“That was quite revolutionary,” said Reese, author of the 1998 book “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.”
These changes in synod participation preceded the 2023 Synod on Synodality. Francis also led the charge on an extensive public outreach campaign ahead of the 2023 synod to solicit public input, a strategy he started with the 2016 Synod on the Family but on a much larger scale.
These changes between 2016-2023 were a huge difference from synods under Francis’ predecessors, Reese said.
“Under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, the synods were more like Soviet legislatures,” Reese said. “You came and praised the great leader. There was no challenging the leader.”
‘Accomplished a discussion’
Conservatives were in full revolt by the 2023 synod.
In addition to the changes around LGBTQ+ inclusion, 2021 restrictions on a certain traditionalist liturgy outraged a contingent of Catholics who developed a cynicism about Francis’ reforms mirroring that of the Second Vatican Council. Then, the constitutional revisions and synodal rule changes to give women more authority fueled conservative concerns about women’s ordination as deacons.
Ultimately, a vote on that matter during the 2023 Synod on Synodality resoundingly defeated a motion to allow women’s ordination as deacons. But the concern was enough to lead five conservative bishops in advance to critique Francis in a formal complaint known as a “dubia,” which was the same type of attack against “Amoris Laetitia” in 2017.
A leading figure behind both those attacks was Burke, who church leadership ultimately stripped of his Vatican salary and apartment in 2023. Around that same time, the Vatican ousted Strickland from his post overseeing the Tyler, Texas diocese and charged Viganó with inciting schism.
“I regard the accusations against me as an honor,” Viganó said in a June 2024 letter, referring to his rejection of Francis’ authority and of the Second Vatican Council. “No Catholic worthy of the name can be in communion with this ‘Bergoglian church,’ because it acts in clear discontinuity and rupture with all the Popes of history and with the Church.”
The church ultimately excommunicated Viganó, who had also become a vocal proponent of Trump and rightwing conspiracy theories. These disciplinary judgments turned Burke, Strickland and Viganó into martyrs in the eyes of their supporters, and was additional confirmation that Francis was silencing traditionalists at the expense of other perspectives.
Even if these changes are as revolutionary as conservatives fear, Kaveny said they’re impermanent. “I would want to see the actual Canon Law implementing it,” she said.
Kaveny alluded to the history of the Second Vatican Council reforms, which didn’t have much bearing on Catholic life for nearly two decades until the passage of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. This ratification happened under a different pope than the one who convened the Second Vatican Council. Likewise, whomever succeeds Francis could either push to enshrine what the late pope set out to do or completely dismantle those modifications.
“He accomplished a discussion,” Kaveny said, noting how bishops still have the most influence aside from the pope. “Francis allowed and encouraged people to express their views and to say, ‘nobody is excluded from the table.’ But the power still is where the power is.”