Pope Francis has died...and I'm not sure how to feel.

On a spring day twenty years ago, I stumbled up the steps of St. Matthew Cathedral in Washington, DC and into a sea of wavering flame—countless candles keeping deathbed vigil for Pope John Paul II.  Though a haze of tears, I grieved the inevitable passing of my spiritual father.  After he went to his rest on the vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday, I clipped articles about his papacy from the free newspapers in the Metro and filed them away as keepsakes.   My soul glowed with pride in this man of courage and conviction who had shaped my Catholicism from my earliest years.

Though I followed the career of Benedict XVI far less zealously, I admired the incisiveness of his mind, considering him the natural successor to his Polish mentor.  When Benedict shattered precedent by retiring to the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery to live out his final days in quiet contemplation, I honored his decision to seek “the better part” as Mary of Bethany had done.  When he died in 2022, I rejoiced quietly that a man of undisputed integrity had gone to his rest.

By contrast, when I heard yesterday that Pope Francis had died of a stroke. I struggled with the news.  I am still not at all sure how to feel in the aftermath of his passing.

Was Francis any less devoted a son of the Church than his immediate predecessors?  I don’t think so.  His vigorously pragmatic approach to human problems of existence was certainly a wholeheartedly Catholic one.  I admired the Argentine pontiff’s decision to make caring for the poor and marginalized a central theme of his papacy.  As a longtime user of public transportation, I appreciated the fact that he’d chosen to get on the bus and ride to work, even as an archbishop.   I was glad to hear him advocating, from the Chair of Peter, for clean air and water. 

I was less happy, however, to note the way that the mainstream media in this country seemed to embrace Francis as a welcome change in the Vatican, a breath of fresh air after the supposed conservative stuffiness of recent popes.  Observers who chuckled over the pope’s impromptu visit to a Roman record shop had apparently forgotten John Paul’s comic forays from the Vatican to go skiing with close friends, standing in line on the slopes with his ski pass.   

In his time, John Paul was also something of a media darling, a charismatic survivor of the Nazi and Communist scourges, but he also drew fire from the increasingly liberalized press when he voiced increasingly unpopular stances against contraception and women’s ordination.   Pope Francis managed to sidestep the media attacks, largely because some of his gestures of welcome to the outsider accidentally dovetailed with the postmodern credo of “Anything goes.” Nurtured in the doctrinal clarity of John Paul II and Benedict, I thrashed about in the occasionally murky waters of Francis’s teaching. 

This morning, I took a closer look at Fiducia Supplicans, Francis’s controversial declaration on pastoral blessings for same-sex couples, trying to charitably understand the rationale for this extraordinary document.   While media outlets predictably hailed Fiducia Supplicans as a glimmer of hope for the reform of a primordial Church mired in discriminatory and paternalistic oppression, the document did not change the Catholic stance on the sacredness of sex, only to be sanctioned between a man and a woman within the bonds of marriage.  Francis made that position clear, but he followed up this statement with a bewildering discussion of pastoral blessings that appears to undercut this core teaching.

The pope’s genuine desire to welcome all people into the Body of Christ, regardless of the degree of spiritual perfection they have attained, radiates through every line.  In truth, the Church is called to readily and mercifully extend its blessings to every individual who seeks them.  However, in the name of compassion, Francis opened the door to “spontaneous” and “pastoral” blessings of same-sex or cohabiting couples—not, specifically, as individuals, a distinction which would have reinforced existing Catholic norms, but as members of a union recognized to be contradictory to Church teaching.  It is not possible to say, in one breath, that a relationship is disordered, and then to bless that relationship.

Even before the publication of Fiducia Supplicans, but certainly since then, I have found it virtually impossible to follow the words of Pope Francis without cocking a skeptical ear for glimmerings of liberalism.  I dread the emergence of a new supreme pontiff who may fully embrace the progressive agenda that stands in utter contrast to John Paul II’s anointed Theology of the Body.  I pray for a greater awareness of the blessings of holy sexuality, so that Gen Z and Gen Alpha youth can climb out of doctrinal confusion and raise strong, healthy Catholic families.

On Easter Sunday, I received a tiny wooden Rosary from my brother-in-law who had made a recent journey to the Vatican.  During these days of the sede vacante, perhaps I will pull it out to pray for Pope Francis.  Perhaps I will learn to see the simple man of God to which others have testified.  Perhaps I will be able to feel a pang of grief.  Right now, I am haunted by fears for the future of the papacy.  When the white smoke clears above the Sistine Chapel, will we have a pope lauded by the elite for his forward-facing views…or a pope who suffers for the Truth?