Here in Italy it is wall to wall coverage of Pope Francis’s death with immense detail on his papacy and discussion on how far he has or has not changed the Catholic Church. All the state and private TV channels had more or less suspended their normal programming. There is no doubt that Pope Francis evoked a similar sort of positive reaction as another Vatican reformer, Pope John XXIII, who was very popular. He organised the reformist Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s which modernised ritual and gave more power to the laity.
Even the nature of his dying endeared him in public opinion. Despite being close to death in his recent hospitalization he insisted on going out to St Peter’s square and giving the traditional Easter blessing. He died of a stroke and heart attack the day after.
Why does it matter and why should a socialist website bother covering it?
For a start, there are about 1.4 billion Catholics in the world and activists are likely to be fighting side by side with people of this faith in their workplaces, communities and campaigns. Also the Pope has a global platform. The mainstream mass media report his statements and discuss his arguments. At the same time the Catholic Church as an institution and a congregation has a lot of influence in many countries. Just recently he spoke out very clearly against the inhumane treatment of migrants by Trump. He even wrote this in a critical letter to the US bishops.
His positive words supporting migrants legitimizes and supports Catholic clergy and lay people who actively work to welcome refugees in opposition to reactionary governments like Meloni’s in Italy or Orban in Hungary. I witnessed this local activism at firsthand when local Catholics in Vietri on the Amalfi coast organised a wreath laying to remember the tens of thousands of migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean. This action involved local people who were not particularly politically active on other issues. Often the radical priests are better than the official left of centre opposition on this question.
Given the creeping fascism that we are witnessing throughout the world, even the words of a patriarchal religious leader can help all those trying to resist. Socialists should always build the widest possible unity in action against the right wing. We cannot choose where we start from. It always depends on a wider relationship of political and social forces that is usually outside our control. Issues like the defence of basic freedoms, extreme inequality or the saving of our planet affect millions of believers and non-believers. Today’s neo-fascists recognized an enemy when they saw one. Milei the new ultra-right leader of his home country, Argentina, called Pope Francis a ‘filthy leftist’.
Pope Francis did shift the dial
We have to remember the context. Pope Francis came in directly after Ratzinger (Benedict) who was justly christened the Rottweiler of the reactionary wing of the Church, keen to defend tradition and steer clear of any socially progressive pastoral interventions. John Paul II, his predecessor was also a conservative. Elected in 2013 the Argentinia, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was the first Pope from the Global South. His Papal visits and policies reflected a much less Eurocentric focus. Despite being opposed to the original Liberation Theology that emerged in the 1960s when many priests fought and died in armed liberation struggles in Latin American he later evolved to take up some of the basic tenets of that theology.
Francis dedicated two of his encyclicals — the highest-ranking papal declarations — to explicitly political issues. Laudato si (2015) addressed the environmental crisis, while Fratelli tutti (2020) focused on social justice. His choice of the name Francis also reflected a conscious choice to follow the model of the leader of the Franciscan order who lived austerely in the service of the poor.
Pope Francis even opened up a dialogue with a group of European Marxists and socialists called the Dialop Group.
The DIALOP delegation with Pope Francis on 10. January 2024
It has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom.
Pope Francis
Michael Lowy, a contributor to this website, is a member of this group, he is pictured fourth from the left in the photo. The late pope called for greater taxation of the rich and a universal income for the poor.
Whar are the limits of his legacy?
LBGTQ
Francis was willing to welcome LBGTQ Catholics and offer them some sort of inclusion. In 2013, his comment “if a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” offered hope and excitement to many LGBTQ Catholics This was a major turn for the Church. But there were limits to this acceptance: for example, it did not go as far as accepting the rights of gay people to be married within the Church.
In 2023, the declaration Fiducia Supplicans allowed Catholic priests to bless couples who were not married in harmony with church teachings, including same-sex couples. Many church leaders still have homophobic attitudes. Trans rights are even further from being accepted.
Women
Despite campaigns by Catholic progressives Pope Francis did little to change the position on ordaining women priests or changing the veto on abortion or contraception. He even went so far as to call doctors performing abortions ‘hitmen’. The latter policies are particularly consequential in countries where women are still culturally constrained to having large families and it can limit Catholic aid organizations support for women’s needs.
Sexual abuse by clergy
The pope did take more decisive action than his predecessors on this issue, Pablo Castano writes in Jacobin:
Francis sought to end impunity for the offenders with strong measures, as demonstrated by the dismissal of US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was found guilty in 2019 of committing and covering up sexual assaults. Also in 2019, the Vatican held a summit on pedophilia, which established new protocols for reporting abuse.
Brian Casey in another Jacobin piece adds:
One of the recurrent issues within the Church has been the issue of clerical child sexual abuse. Francis established the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2013. This office has faced a wall of resistance or indifference within the Vatican and among some members of the hierarchy.
A leading safeguarding expert, the German Jesuit Rev. Dr Hans Zollner, resigned from the commission, citing difficulties with the Vatican bureaucracy as well as shortcomings in “responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency.” An Irish survivor of clerical sex abuse, Marie Collins, quit the commission for similar reasons in 2017.
One of the more high-profile alleged abusers was the Slovakian Jesuit, theologian, and mosaic artist Marko Rupnik, whose excommunication was rescinded by Francis in October 2022. The investigation against Rupnik, who was accused of spiritual and sexual abuse by several women, was reopened in October 2023. His victims felt betrayed by the slowness of the investigation against Rupnik and criticized Francis for his tardy response to allegations against an influential figure.
His role under the Argentine military regime
During the military junta of the late 1970s he was already the leader of the local Jesuit order. It is claimedt hat he put two Jesuit priests at risk of repression by the regime. One of the priests said that he had helped the military kidnap and torture them, the other has come to the conclusion that this was not the case. I have found no sources providing definitive proof either way. There is no doubt that Bergoglio did keep his head down during this period although he states that he could not speak even though he wanted to. You wonder whether a sense of his earlier timidity made him a little more progressive later in his papacy.
A contradictory legacy
Pope Francis caused anger in the Israeli government by his firm stand against what it is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. He accurately called the IDF action ‘terrorism’ which marks him out to the left of Kier Starmer who took three months of a daily massacre before he called for a ‘bilateral’ ceasefire. The prime minister still refuses to call it genocide and carpeted Lammy, his foreign minister, for daring to suggest international laws were being broken. The pope also helped to repair diplomatic relations between Cuba and America – subsequently broken by Trump, of course.
Nobody really knows about how the immense wealth of the Vatican is managed. It has been infiltrated by Mafia money – the Godfather III film was right on that. It also uses tax havens, which was highlighted in the Panama papers revelations. Pope Francis did make efforts to clean things up and he himself lived very simply and encouraged a different use of the church’s money but ultimately the byzantine Vatican hierarchy and bureaucracy smothered him too as new revelations about shady financial goings on have emerged.
Progress was made to mitigate the worse of the Church’s policies on sex abuse and the LBGTQ community but this is still limited. Women are still very much the second sex in the Catholic world.
Some of the eulogies we have seen are either exaggerated, as though he was a complete game changer, or hypocritical such as the statements by Trump or Vance. As socialists and materialists we take a more objective view, measuring his legacy in terms of how it affects opinion and politics in the real world and how it may benefit or harm the struggle of working people and the oppressed.
Some commentators, for example Castano, suggests that given the march of the right wing globally and the tendency of the Church to historically ‘auto-correct’ back to less progressive positions, we can expect a less radical successor. However the conclaves are very difficult to predict. Over two thirds of the cardinals were appointed by Pope Francis and this might lead us to think his line might continue. As some have said the walls of the Sistine Chapel are thick but not enough to prevent the influence of global political forces. What is unlikely is any outcome similar to what we saw in the Oscar winning film Conclave.
What is very clear from the photo of one of his last diplomatic meetings was the late pope’s attitude to the despicable vice president, J T Vance. Look at the pope’s face and body language.
