In March, 2014, Pope Francis went to confession in St. Peter’s Basilica. A little more than a year after his election, he was leading a penitential service, which had been organized to encourage Catholics worldwide to fulfill their obligation to confess their sins (in the sacrament now called reconciliation) before Easter. Priests were stationed in confessional booths that had been arrayed around the basilica. The plan was for the Pope to man one himself, but he broke away from the person escorting him to his booth and strode to a different one, where he knelt, crossed himself, and spoke quietly to the priest, startling onlookers, who had expected the Pope to absolve others of their sins—not to confess his own.
In retrospect, the intent seems obvious—the Pope was leading by example, entering into the ritual rather than holding himself above it. The act itself was unexpected, though. There was no memory of a recent Pope going to confession in public: not John Paul II, who led a “Day of Pardon” at St. Peter’s, in 2000; not Benedict XVI, who expressed concern over the slackening of the practice of frequent confession, following the Second Vatican Council. But now there was a Pope, on his knees, a sinner asking for mercy, just like the people he serves.
On March 13th, Francis celebrates his tenth anniversary as Pope, and such acts have become a hallmark of his tenure. Just as John Paul II altered the profile of the papacy through his world travels, Francis has done so through his spontaneity and candor. To the distress of traditionalists, he has shown that the Church is an institution whose leader can face unresolved questions openly, rather than dismiss them as out of bounds. He has made it clear that a humble, personal search for the right way to live one’s life is a good fit with twenty-first-century Catholicism all the way to the top.
Francis’s pontificate was tagged as surprising from the start. In February, 2013, Benedict resigned, the first Pope to step aside in nearly six hundred years. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of Buenos Aires, Argentina, was elected the next month: the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, and the first to take the name Francis—in emulation of Francis of Assisi, the medieval Italian saint known for “holy poverty.” Once the new Pope assumed office, he lived in the Vatican guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, often rode to papal events in a Fiat instead of a Mercedes-Benz, and brought an anything-goes playfulness to the regular audience outside St. Peter’s. His rapport with the public suggested that he had been changed by his election—that a man known to many Argentinians as dour and circumspect had been infused with what he calls “the joy of the gospel.”
Since then, Francis has made the unexpected seem obvious again and again. Of course, the Pope should confess his sins before hearing the confessions of others; wade into a crowd outside St. Peter’s and embrace a man whose illness had left his face marred; visit a camp for migrants and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos (and bring some refugees back on the papal plane to settle in Italy); go to a mosque in the Central African Republic in the midst of a civil war fuelled by Christian-Muslim strife; and admit that he was wrong to have defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up priestly sexual abuse. (Though the bishop, Juan Barros, has denied these allegations, the Pope accepted his resignation and averred, “I was part of the problem.”)
Francis has also brought his knack for the unconventional to the everyday workings of the Vatican. He assembled a council of advisory cardinals, making it clear that he would consult with others; launched an investigation of the Vatican Bank, which was long suspected of corruption and money laundering; made efforts to streamline the Vatican administration, called the Roman Curia; and appointed a woman, Sister Nathalie Becquart, of France, to a key role in the Dicastery for Bishops, one of the most influential Curial offices. These were not giant steps, but they were steps beyond those that his two predecessors had taken during their combined thirty-four years in office.
At the same time, Francis has purposefully directed the papacy outward: devoting his second encyclical letter, “Laudato si’,” to the climate emergency; travelling to about a dozen predominantly Muslim countries; opening the Secret Archive of documents pertaining to the Vatican’s diplomatic machinations during the Second World War; and speaking to the press with an offhand ease that is rare for any public figure. In July, 2013, during his first press conference aboard the papal plane, he genially answered a reporter’s question about a supposed “gay lobby” at the Vatican with a now famous remark—“If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has a good will, then who am I to judge him?”—and set the tone for a pontificate whose aims he has spelled out in interviews and discussions as much as through encyclicals and other formal documents.
But the image of Francis as the people’s Pope has stirred resentment among Catholic traditionalists, who cherished John Paul for his popularity, which he gained while holding to an unswerving line on Church doctrine. Francis’s willingness to join arms fraternally with other religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, and his diplomatic opening to China, a stark contrast with John Paul II’s anti-Communism at the end of the Cold War, also stoked displeasure. Perhaps more than anything else, though, the traditionalists are rankled by Francis’s habit, in interviews (urging support and care for “hurting couples”) and in face-to-face encounters (with a gay couple, with trans people), of distinguishing between Church teaching and pastoral practice, an approach which suggests that the Church must reëxamine its approach to sexual matters—not only homosexuality but marriage and sex outside of marriage. Traditionalists have pressed the anti-Francis case aggressively—whether cranky podcasters, guests on the EWTN cable network, or powerful cardinals in Rome.
