23 April 2025

Pope Francis’s divided house

Like the Second Vatican Council, he proved the Church to be as human as it is divine.

On Easter Monday the Vatican announced the death of Pope Francis, aged 88. The divine timing might be enough to convince a few lapsed believers back into the faith. It would be a worthy final act.

When Pope Francis first emerged on the balcony above St Peter’s Basilica in March 2013, it was a victory for the liberal wing of a weary Church. His predecessors Benedict XVI and John Paul II were doctrinaire traditionalists of the old model. Francis was their opposite: open to debating the values of the Church, willing to push the needle on questions of homosexuality and abortion. Early in his tenure he declared that, yes, even atheists could go to heaven.

The liberalising Catholics hoped the resignation of Benedict XVI and the elevation of Francis would signify the end of an old idea. Here, finally, was a man who could drag the papacy into the 21st century. His passing will stress-test that ambition. Will the liberal reformation triumph over the conservatism of Benedict XVI and John Paul II? Can Francis’s vision endure beyond his corporeal presence? Ahead of the conclave that will decide Francis’s successor, the late Pope stands not just as a moderniser, but as a metaphor for a conflict at the heart of St Peter’s.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, Pope Francis was a man of conspicuous modesty. He forwent the typical papal ermine in favour of a plain cassock. He swapped out a throne for a wooden chair. Cynics said this was performative humility, fans that it was perhaps just very Catholic. The first Jesuit pope, he derived his name from the ascetic and pious Francis of Assisi and orientated his rhetorical and spiritual priorities accordingly. He was committed to the poor (“I want a Church which is poor and for the poor,” he said in 2013), migrants (his first papal visit was to Lampedusa, a major migrant hub in the Mediterranean), and a general sense of pacifism (“May the sound of arms be silenced in war-torn Ukraine,” he said late last year).

But to properly understand Francis – as a man, a pope and as a metaphor – you have to look to 1960s Rome. (At that time, Francis was teaching at Jesuit schools in Santa Fe, Argentina.) Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, perhaps the most significant event in the Church’s entire history, in 1962. It was born from a nagging anxiety that the whole thing needed updating to contend with the challenges of a secular world. More than 2,000 bishops over three years debated the Church’s future.

What emerged was a transformative writ, emphasising the need for the Church to modernise and soften its hierarchies. There was a gentle shift towards a more inclusive approach to non-believers – though nothing as extreme as Francis’s suggestion that hell might be “empty”. The traditionalists hated the direction: it was adoctrinal, non-binding, heretic. Sixty years later, this conflict still tugs on the soul of the Catholic Church: should it reform in tandem with the world, or conservatively defend its founding doctrine?

The liberalising spirit of 1962 might have been in danger under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but Francis was – so goes the cliché – “the spirit of Vatican II” incarnate. His world-view was forged by it; his papacy defined by the same instincts. He was an adherent of John XXIII and his election to the papacy was a statement of intent by the conclave: the Church needs to adapt if it is going to survive. “We are often chained like Peter in the prison of habit,” Francis said in 2022, “scared by change and tied to the chain of our customs.” Or, as he put it more prosaically last year, his conservative detractors had a “suicidal attitude” about the future of the Church, clinging to tradition at any cost. If his hero, Pope John XXIII, was compelled by a nagging anxiety, Francis was driven by something closer to existential panic.

For all the worthiness of his spiritual project, Francis also had a reputation for spikiness in private. He clashed bitterly with rivals; demoted conservatives and promoted friends; and was accused of turning a blind eye to the bad behaviour of political allies. Sometimes the simmering discontents inside the Church turned into camp melodrama: “They call me a heretic,” Francis once told a coterie of fellow Jesuits in 2017. Liberals had their issues with him, too: he didn’t go far enough, he failed, he was too slow.

Cardinals will descend on the Vatican over the coming days to decide on the direction of the Church. There are 252, most appointed by Francis, but only 135 are eligible to vote (cardinals over 80 can take part in the debate but cannot vote). The winning candidate needs a two-thirds majority. The conclave is an oblique process, the men locked away and sworn to an oath of secrecy; there is jockeying and politicking. Fifteen to 20 days from now, there will likely be a decisive vote in the Sistine Chapel. When white smoke next hangs over the Holy See and a new spiritual leader of the Church is chosen, one question will loom largest: is the liberal reformation durable?

For all Francis’s detractors – their number and depth of feeling is not insignificant – the Church is full of Franciscan allies, too. (And the conservatism inherent to Catholicism tends to favour continuity candidates.) Among the front-runners is Luis Antonio Tagle, a liberal from the Philippines dubbed the “Asian Francis”. Of the Italians (a nation that likes holding the papacy), the progressive Archbishop of Bologna is touted as a likely pick. Even Cardinal Peter Erdo, a conservative from Hungary, is at most a compromise option: traditional, but not entirely hostile to Francis’s ideas.

Francis may leave behind a divided institution and more doctrinal disputes than ever. But ultimately, the dichotomy between left and right in the Church can be overplayed. It is not a political government, but an instrument of faith. Pope Francis was a Jesuit and that informed his political drive for social justice. But far above that, faith was his purpose, an instinct summed up by the motto of the Jesuits, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God).

My grandfather worked as a reporter in Rome for the Irish Independent during the Second Vatican Council that Francis so admired. Yes, the process was flawed: full of lobbying, “less than edifying” machinations, dissent, bitter resentments. But, reflecting on it many years later in an essay collection, “Why I Am Still a Catholic”, he wrote about its power in spite of all that: “We looked upon a body of fallible Christian leaders, desperately wanting to lower their anchors in truth… I thought it altogether more likely that God should use human beings in their natural imperfection than work solely through saints.” We can extend similar generosity here. Francis – whether he failed, or went too far, or left the Vatican more fractured than he found it (and all are probably overstating the case) – was a fallible Christian leader who proved the Church to be as human as it is divine. For a man in search of a legacy, he could have done a lot worse.

[See more: Pope Francis’s illusions]