Thank The Holy Spirit For Pope Francis's Pontificate & Also That It's Over
And Thank Him For the Next Pope
As we pray for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis today, I have a brief, perhaps unpopular, opinion that I think needs to be shared.
Yes, Francis was confusing and terrible on so many levels for the Church. Yes, he made “pope-splaining” into a real thing, and yes, that activity got harder and harder to do over time. I’ve been through many of the phases of this guide to it that I wrote last year on the topic.
The Pachamama statues, the constant barrage of heterodox planeborne comments to atheistic journalists on contraception, homosexuality, divorce, etc., the whole “synodal” process, and yes, Traditiones Custodes, all those were disturbing. The muddied waters and the spirit of purposefully “making a mess” that have filled the last dozen years have produced much bad fruit, much confusion, much disorder, a great loss of many minds and hearts from the truth and the Church. Many have fallen into despair. Many have left the Church and become Orthodox (on the conservative end) or heathenist pagans (for those who took Laudato Si' a little too far).1 Many, in despair, have gone the sedevacantist route and abandoned the Church in another way.
Ironically, as I cover in my separate satire site, we’re all sedevacantists right now, temporarily, of course.
The cases for harsh critiques are so obvious that they don’t need to be said. We know them. We’ve suffered them. Many of us can barely contain the joy that our trauma is over, as I confess I’ve felt throughout the last month as Pope Francis held on at the edge of life and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski in “The End of a Pontificate From Hades” and
does in “Pope Francis and the Woke Church of Collapse.”But when we merely bemoan the legacy of Pope Francis or merely rejoice that it is over, are we truly looking with a fully historical and Catholic perspective? I know many people who, despairing at the corruption within the Church, have been starting to doubt that the Holy Spirit truly is involved in picking the Supreme Pontiff, believing that it is all the cabalistic backroom double-dealing of disbelieving homosexuals in red capes and hats. Yes, they’ve had their way on a lot of things, certainly, for a while now. Yes, the process is very political and messy and the cardinals are men who can resist the graces offered to them by the Holy Spirit. They can pick poor candidates. Objectively, Pope Francis seems to have been a poor candidate. We should give thanks that our trauma is over. But the darkness has a silver lining, and we should thank the Holy Spirit for what he achieved in us, unwittingly by his measure, through Pope Francis, and not be fearful of the next conclave and whatever is next for the Church.2
Everyone Was Forced to Choose a Side
For one, many of us in the Church who call ourselves “conservative”, “faithful”, and “traditional” were a lot less so in the comfortable, peaceful “good old days” of Pope Benedict XVI. Scandal, troubles, and confusion cause troubles, but they also force long-running problems to be brought to a head, for the complacent to rise from their stupor, and for everyone to be forced to take a side. We may see more problems today because there are more problems in the Church today than there were a decade or two ago. But we may also notice them now because we were too soft, or not all that well-formed back then. It might seem unfair to thank Pope Francis for those who have grown deeper in their faith out of opposition to him. But we don’t need to thank him, only the Holy Spirit, for his continual guidance of the Church in every age.
Tumult forces everyone to choose a side. I’m only 25, but I can remember many sketchy things in many an “average Catholic parish” growing up. Even the “lax” ones today have, on average, moved to the right, toward tradition, and toward reverence from what I remember in my younger years. Yes, there are scandalous pride flags at a few scattered places in big cities,3 and your scattered few 1970s-educated priests still living like Marty Haugen music, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, and “Children’s Liturgy of the Word” are the greatest things ever. But I’ve been to quite a few randomly selected Churches while driving throughout the country over the last few years, and I’m seeing these things less than I remember them. There are certainly more veils and more young children, though. Even with Traditionis Custodes, attendance at Latin Masses is way up from Benedict’s time and becomes more hardcore the more Francis and Cardinal Roche try to clamp down on it. It might seem unfair to thank Pope Francis, as this change was in spite of him, but yes, a lot of it happened during his pontificate.
Genuine Concerns Raised by Pope Francis
More controversially, while “popesplaining” is difficult, I can actually find some things to admire and take to heart from many of Pope Francis’ words and statements. Of course, there are these very orthodox zingers that I somehow missed from the last decade:
But there’s also no real problem with Pope Francis’ reminders to care for the poor and remember the marginalized. There are red lines and moral boundaries that Francis definitely failed to emphasize enough, and quite often even appeared to break in his advice to individuals and in what he permitted rogue bishops and priests under him to permit. But even some of the statements and the general (yes, confusing) spirit of his about treating homosexuals with compassion should make us stop and think for a moment.
What is the most charitable way that we can seek the good and the conversion of homosexuals, of the divorced and remarried, etc? Is it by condemning them first and then offering them baptism and the means of conversion? Of course, we must condemn actions and uphold strict moral standards. Unfortunately, these points were, of course, somewhat absent4 over the last twelve years. But even if Francis’ tone was a gross overreaction, he had valid points about the Gospel in it. We are all called to chastity and conversion as much as the homosexuals are. As Francis, although he never made the second half consistently clear, enjoined, we must welcome the sinner to conversion. But that, as he insists, does require learning how to welcome. Francis’ priorities, while they were certainly missing a lot of clarity and probably intentionally so, are broadly compatible with the Church’s perennial teaching. Just take them generally and in their spirit rather than in following every twist and turn of their messy, scrabbled letters.5
What Would We Do In Francis’s Place?
With Francis, I find, as I do with much of the spirit of Vatican II, faults of omission more than commission. And then, of course, as Pope Francis often repeated, who am I to judge? We know not his heart, the pressures of the office, the threats he could have been under, the flaws in his formation that were not his responsibility. We see deep errors, yes. We can observe that he seemed a poor administrator, a poor communicator of the truth, as someone who allowed perverts to remain in the Church and even promoted them. And yet, who is to say that if we were put to the test that we would even perform any better? There but for the grace of God go I, of course.
Hard Times Create Strong Men
Yes, the future history of the Church will probably not look kindly on Pope Francis himself. Yes, I have high hopes that the Holy Spirit will give us respite under someone like Cardinal Robert Sarah, Gerhard Müller, or Mykola Bychok. But future history will also remind us, as the past history of the Church already does, that the Holy Spirit was working even throughout the dark times. Only in the dark times is our faith truly tested—and for many of us, by grace, purified and strengthened. For many of us, that challenge was through Pope Francis. Hard times create strong men, as the saying goes, and even hard times in the Church can be a good thing for us, something given by God for our benefit.
Let’s thank the Holy Spirit for choosing Pope Francis, and let’s thank Him in advance for the next Pope.
And if you need something more to feel positive about immediately, this article from Catholic Family News, taking a deep dive into many of the current Cardinal-electors, is quite interesting:
Various commentators have claimed that Pope Francis has stacked the of Cardinals with liberals, and yet this doesn’t take into account the number of more orthodox cardinals that Pope Francis has appointed.
For a variety of reasons, Francis has appointed not a few cardinals with traditional views on sexuality, women, and doctrine more generally. Some of these were ‘surprise’ appointments from the West and Latin America, but also many from the third-world. Many of them are surprisingly young, too. The notion of Francis appointing any conservative cardinals is shocking and confusing to many and deserves a detailed analysis.
…
Added to the dozens of conservative cardinals made by Francis they together make up roughly 50 cardinal electors, more than the one-third necessary to veto a modernist cardinal from becoming Pope. Together with the moderates, the conservatives have more than two-thirds of the cardinal electors on their side. If the deck is stacked against anyone it appears to be against the liberals because of the many cardinals from the peripheries and younger cardinals who are more of the John Paul II variety of Catholicism and less influenced by the so-called ‘spirit of the Second Vatican Council’.6
On this point, while it’s cavalier to say this as we must pray for their souls, when liberals leave the Church, they stop corrupting it.
“I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined. … There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!” - Cardinal Ratziner
However, I have yet to see one in person unless you count the sketchy Year of Faith signs. I don’t like those. I hate them even more than the Luce mascot itself:
Though not entirely.
I know there’s more nuance here as to how this all reconciles with Papal infallibility and supremacy, but that’s the basic point.
This is a thoughtful and respectful farewell to Francis. Thank you for showing us some of the good
Lots of good things in here; thank you!
I would, however, echo the warning of Cardinal Ratzinger against claiming that the Holy Spirit chooses the pope, at least in a strict sense. When asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope, he said:
“I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.”
He continued:
“There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!”