I’ve heard the word “humble” used a lot in the last few days as I read obituaries for Francis. But how humble was it to literally pontificate about such vital issues which he knew next to nothing about, and where his ideas would cause many millions to die while stunting the lives of millions more.

What are you prepared to do now?

I was suspicious of Pope Francis from the moment I learned that he was a Jesuit and that he’d risen through the Catholic ranks in Argentina in the 1970’s and 80’s.

One joke told about the Jesuits is that, when confronted about their reluctance in supporting Pope John Paul II in his efforts to clear out the gay clergy in the 1980’s and 1990’s, their response was that they always supported the Pope – just a Pope in future who would agree with them. Pope Francis may not have been that Pope:

In 1992, Jesuit authorities asked Bergoglio not to live in Jesuit residences due to ongoing tensions with leaders and scholars; concerns about his “dissent”, views on Catholic orthodoxy, and opposition to liberation theology; and his role as auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. As a bishop, he was no longer subject to his Jesuit superior. From then on, he no longer visited Jesuit houses and was in “virtual estrangement from the Jesuits” until after his election as pope

The stench of liberation theology hung over Francis anyway, despite that “opposition”, and I see that the Wiki article has no footnote link to that claim and contradicts itself later on:

He had praised liberation theology founder Gustavo Gutierrez. In 2024, while meeting with representatives of the Dialop group, a discussion group between Christians and Marxists, Pope Francis stated that Marxists and Christians have a common mission.

Given the theology’s objective is the “liberation of the oppressed” it fitted very nicely with his endless attacks on capitalism. As this article points out:

Pope Francis shares some of the main theological concerns as pontiff with liberation theology. Although the pope remains an outsider to liberation theology, he has in a sense solved the conflict between the Vatican and the Latin American social movement.

Some outsider. Some opposition. He saw the rich, state-corporatist, crony corruption of Argentina and thought that was capitalism. The Wall Street Journal certainly didn’t believe the Wiki nonsense, starting with the sub-heading used in their op-ed on Francis the other day, “He championed the poor while favoring ideas that keep them poor”:

Alas, Pope Francis believed ideologies that keep the poor in poverty. One of those earthly dogmas is radical environmentalism, which isn’t about keeping the earth clean for human beings but keeping the earth for itself and treating man as the enemy.

In one of his first writings as pope, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis cited air conditioning as an example of the “harmful habits of consumption” that will lead to mankind’s self-destruction. He didn’t seem to realize that escaping poverty requires greater energy consumption.

His papacy was marked by anti-Americanism, and not merely against Donald Trump. He seemed to believe that Latin America is poor because the United States is rich. That’s a recipe for stagnation and despair because the real reasons so many in Latin America languish in poverty are at home: Lack of the rule of law, business-government collusion, protectionism, and other barriers to human flourishing.

Because the WSJ loves cheap labour they weren’t going to raise a specific aspect of his anti-Trumpism, which was his support for open borders – something that puts him in bed with Anarcho-Capitalists and Objectivists (“Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea”), even as they excoriate the whole concept of sacrifice in general, starting with JC. In 2016, he declared that someone who built a border wall was “not a Christian.” In February 2025, he sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, excoriating Trump for securing America’s southern border. He repeatedly insisted that welcoming any and all migrants was a Christian duty, and rejected “any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

In other words he certainly was, while not a radical, a bog-standard Leftist, which was why he was so often praised by Leftists and atheists (including people I know) who had total contempt for the Church and not the slightest intention of ever darkening the doors of one, let alone a Mass.

And that goes to the heart of the problem I had with him. While he pontificated about the environment, more taxation of the rich, more welfare (like a Universal Benefit Income), war and geo-politics he ignored the growing theological problems inside his own church or even made them worse.

He punished traditionalist bishops who disagreed with his direction, did all he could – short of an outright ban – to destroy the Latin Mass, allowed the Chinese Communist Party to actually pick his bishops and said nothing about their persecution of publisher Jimmy Lai, who is China’s best-known imprisoned Catholic.

He also had little to say about the endless, horrendous slaughters of Catholics and Christians in general in Africa and the Middle East by Islamic Jihadists, which was not just gutless but ironic in that the Church is thriving in Africa while his progressivism was most popular in places like Europe where the Sunday pews are increasingly empty, aside from white-haired folk, even as that progressive attitude produced amoral bilge such as his obliquely justifying the 2015 murders of cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo who had lampooned the Islamic prophet Muhammad:

You can’t provoke, you can’t insult the faith of others, you can’t make fun of faith…..It is true that you must not react violently, but although we are good friends, if [an aide] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then (something can happen). In freedom of expression, there are limits.”

FFS, that’s basically submitting to Islamic blasphemy laws.

For all his efforts to attract people to the church, especially the young, he ignored the fact that the Catholic parishes thriving in the West were precisely the ones he wanted to leave behind, even as they filled with younger orthodox Catholics trying to escape the trendy Lefty stuff in all other areas of their lives. Who needs to go to Mass to listen to some priest bloviating about the evils of war (esp. wars involving America), Trump, or Climate Change, when you can get all that everywhere else. But those priests were echoing Francis:

[Energy analyst Robert Bryce explains]… His 2023 apostolic exhortation, “Laudate Deum,” reads like it was written by Greta Thunberg and a horde of Brussels-based bureaucrats. Francis claims that “millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts, and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift. Conversely, the transition to renewable forms of energy, properly managed, as well as efforts to adapt to the damage caused by climate change, are capable of generating countless jobs in different sectors.”

After which he went on to advocate solar and wind power, which takes us right back to the same point the WSJ made:

Claiming we should give up coal, oil, and natural gas — which, according to the latest IEA data, provide 80% of all global energy — ignores physics, economics, and the needs of the world’s poorest people.
…
According to the United Nations, about 660 million people still have no access to electricity. Further, … about 2.3 billion people are still cooking with fuels like wood, dung, and charcoal. According to the World Health Organization, about 3.2 million people, most of them women and girls, are dying every year due to the indoor air pollution caused by those fuels.

A death toll that leaves far behind deaths from most diseases.

What about food? This is where Francis’ anti-hydrocarbon dogma hits a moral wall. Vaclav Smil, the Canadian author and polymath, has explained that without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, “we could not secure enough food for the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world’s population, or roughly three billion people.”

I’ve heard the word “humble” used a lot in the last few days as I read obituaries for Francis. But how humble was it to literally pontificate about such vital issues which he knew next to nothing about, and where his ideas would cause many millions to die while stunting the lives of millions more. It’s no wonder that Argentine President Javier Milei actually derided Francis as a “Communist”.

As to the theological side of things that he didn’t talk as much about, what he did say was bad enough, to the point that the old joke, “Is the Pope a Catholic?” began to be treated as a serious question:

In 2023, Pope Francis responded to a series of dubia (“doubts”) that Cardinals Walter Brandmüller and Raymond Leo Burke, along with the support of three other Cardinals, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Robert Sarah, and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, had sent him the previous year, asking him to clarify his position on five issues where he had appeared to depart from the actual teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Vatican News identified these as “the interpretation of Divine Revelation, the blessing of same-sex unions, synodality as a constitutive dimension of the Church, the priestly ordination of women, and repentance as a necessary condition for sacramental absolution.” 

The most striking aspect of this incident was neither the questions nor the pope’s answers, but the fact that it had happened at all, and that it had been necessary to question the guardian and anchor of the Roman Catholic faith over his own adherence to that faith. There was no parallel to this in modern times, and it exemplified how much Francis was a very different kind of pope from the great majority of his predecessors.

He also clearly wanted to keep it that way as he has appointed about half of the current College of Cardinals, populating the ranks with fellow progressives: like any good politician, he wanted to embed his basic policies by ensuring his successors are more like him than not.

And I think he will win that fight, at least for the next Pope.