Jorge Mario Bergoglio, known during his later years as Pope Francis, has died. When someone dies, it is part of social ritual to pay tribute to the person, whether sincerely or hypocritically, or to revile them out of spite. In the case of a personality who rose to be the Pope in an era of political polarisation the tributes tend to fall within the fascist/progressive dichotomy.

However, beyond the heat of the moment caused by today’s hyperpolitics, it is possible to reflect briefly from another angle. Pope Francis was appointed pontiff at a time of historic crisis for the Catholic Church. Despite retaining large resources and concordats with multiple states, the Church’s crisis has deep social and political roots. Having become a front for reactionary sects of the wealthy in the West (e.g. Opus Dei -Tr,) based more on “membership by elite status” than on adherence to an activist faith or Christian ethics, the hegemonic influence of the Church has steadily declined.

The ideological power of the Church as an institution came from its ability to structure itself as a peculiar institution. If the workers’ parties and unions functioned, with all their limitations, as a Promethean embryo of a new state to come, the Church operated as a complementary para-state, capable of containing all classes, even though it was led by a reactionary caste. But without understanding this multi-class character, neither its function of domination nor the emancipatory cracks that ran through it during the 20th century can be understood. Its ability to generate consensus was based on a combination of moral coercion and culture among the popular classes, capable of establishing a political bond.

Class contradictions within the Church

These class contradictions ran through the Church during the 20th century:

• expressed early on with White Bolshevism in Italy in the 1920s, the opposition of certain grassroots Catholic sectors to fascism despite the complicity and passivity of the Church leadership,
• the experiences of the worker priests who shared the workplaces and communities of working people and joined or even led their struggles
• and finally erupted in the heat of the revolutionary wave of the 1960s, around the battle waged by liberation theology emerging in Latin America alongside the new Castroist guerrillas, which sought to renew Christianity and link itself to the desire for freedom of the working and popular classes.

This exceptionally warm, rich, and creative movement was crushed by an alliance between the ecclesiastical hierarchy, led by a militant, Polish anti-communist named Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul), and the local reactionary oligarchies. The restoration of the old order in the Church was celebrated as a great victory for conservative sectors, but it had unexpected effects. Far from restoring the old power of the Church, it accelerated the dissolution of the ties between the Church and the lower classes. The role of the Church has been progressively reduced, replaced by other ideological apparatuses more adapted to the cultural logic of late capitalism. The paradox is that, despite the illusions of progressive liberalism, the decline of Catholicism has not been accompanied by the disappearance of religion as a political factor. In the West, the rise of evangelism particularly in Central and Latin America has been the unexpected counterpoint to this process.

To a certain extent, the election of a Jesuit, Argentine, pro-Peronist pope with a markedly progressive discourse has been an attempt to respond to this decline. However, this attempt has been belated and counterproductive, out of step with the times. Not so much because his criticism of capitalism and warmongering, his calls for environmentalism, or his defense of migrants have been out of place. On the contrary, they have perhaps never been more relevant. Rather, the decisive factor in any process of transformation lies in the ability to turn ideas into social force. In this sense, as we explained above, the rise of a pope like Francis came after the liquidation of the great revolutionary current that swept through Christianity during the 20th century: liberation theology.

Perhaps the best reflection I heard about the pope was said by a liberation theologian in a tribute to Gustavo Gutiérrez,  Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest who was one of the founders of liberation theology in Latin America. His 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology. :

 “The pope is not one of us, but he would not be possible without us.”

 This phrase encapsulates a vindication of the legacy of the defeated, a belated recognition of the militant and revolutionary example of the thousands of Christians who fought to merge with the working people and turn the “people of God” into an active subject of social and political transformation, inserting them into a broad process of change towards socialism. But it also expresses the reality that, despite the generosity with which he was welcomed by sectors still linked to liberation theology, Pope Francis did not emerge as the culmination of a living process, as a victory of the Christian grassroots sectors fighting for emancipation.

Limits of a political discourse without action

Rather, he appeared as the belated culmination of a tragic process of realignment with a new political reality. He was listened to with sympathy by many sectors of society fed up with neo-fascism, but without any real possibility of him driving a transformative process. It is difficult to know whether the Pope consciously experienced this process; whether he was content to appear as a particular voice in a barren ecosystem, or whether he felt frustrated to see that his speeches lacked correlation with a real movement.

This is undoubtedly a classic political lesson: it is not possible to thoroughly reform anything without revolution, and it is obvious that popes do not and will not carry out revolutions. It is always good for Marxists to reread from time to time The Role of the Individual in History, by that Russian curmudgeon who was first a teacher and then a close political enemy of Lenin: Georgi Plekhanov.

That said, the Pope has not succeeded in his task of reestablishing links between the Church and the working classes. As Peter Brown recounts in his incredible Through the Needle’s Eye—possibly the most Gramscian book ever written without quoting Gramsci—the social and political power of Christianity in ancient Rome was established through a twofold operation. On the one hand, it incorporated the poor, who were excluded from citizenship, into the people through their moral and material structuring around the Church. On the other hand, a sector of the rich saw in the Church a way to build a spiritual bond that projected them beyond this world, depositing part of their wealth in it as an investment to gain access to the other side.

If this was the operation on which the Church based its hegemonic power, Pope Francis has failed where Saint Ambrose (339-397 –Bishop of Milan), succeeded. The excluded popular classes are embarking on other religious adventures such as evangelism. The truly wealthy decided long ago that God can be accessed without intermediaries by accumulating obscene sums of money that they have no intention of sharing with anyone.

We do not know who will be elected Pope now. The interest that this event will generate in the coming days will not correspond to its decisive importance for the real course of history. Pope Francis’ legacy, whether praised or reviled, will be fundamentally discursive: what he said or did not say will be evaluated more than what he did. While Pope Francis was able to point out, in a very broad and diffuse way, that evil on Earth is a systemic product of capitalism, the practice of emancipatory Christianity has yet to be recovered.

Apr 23, 2025