Within the Church, his efforts to elevate the marginalized met institutional granite. He opened financial records and made progress on Vatican transparency — no small feat for a notoriously corrupt and insular cabal. But when it came to the most intimate struggles — divorce, contraception, same-sex love —he left nearly all doctrine unchanged. Women remain excluded from the priesthood. Abortion remains condemned. Even the ban on condoms, in a world still touched by HIV, remains technically intact.
Yes, he allowed for blessings of same-sex couples and made overtures to the divorced and remarried. But the gap between compassionate rhetoric and Church teaching never closed. He gesture without decision, mercy without action. He had the heart of a reformer but not the appetite for schism. In the end, alas, his inclusivity was mostly atmospherics.
Beyond the Church, Francis cast himself as a moral compass in a collapsing world. He wept at war zones, stood beside refugees, and begged for global compassion. His pleas for peace in Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza were ignored by all. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ remains one of the most powerful calls to ecological stewardship in our time (invoking the words of St. Francis of Assisi about “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us”). It was ignored.
He tried to be the conscience of humanity. Humanity shrugged, and the Americans twice elected Donald Trump, a man who laughs at Mother Earth and thinks conscience is a scam to rip off the United States.
Indeed, Trumpism was the loudest possible rebuke to Francis’ vision: It stands for walls, not bridges; slogans, not parables; vengeance, not mercy; pettiness, not wisdom. Trump’s reelection is the greatest moral collapse in a major democracy of our lifetime; Francis had a chance to speak clearly and did not.
In recent months, Francis spoke out against Trump’s deportations and other actions. But did he do much before the election to prevent the calamity? He preferred the soft rebuke, the indirect admonition. In hindsight, another grave miscalculation. Moral authority unspoken is moral authority unspent.
Would enough Americans have listened? It is an odd moment for religious authority, and it would have been fascinating to find out.
Francis arrived at a moment when religion, long in decline in the West, was surging in the Global South. It is an irony apparently lost on many Western progressives that while they decry colonialism, and imagine seeing it everywhere, Christianity — arguably history’s most successful colonial export — is thriving most vigorously in the very regions once colonized. The global Catholic population now exceeds 1.4 billion, with Africa alone seeing a 3.31% rise last year to 281 million faithful, and Asia adding another 0.6%. (If only it could be monetized, perhaps Trump might come on board! Has it been monetized already? One mustn’t be too cynical.)
In theory, Francis might have bridged all these divides. In practice, the very forces that made him a historic figure — the Argentine roots, the Jesuit intellect, the pastoral approach — left him isolated in a digital world of short attention spans and hard algorithms.
And yet, there may be another turn of the wheel. As AI and the tech revolution upend people’s lives, a spiritual void yawns open. Work becomes automated. Truth fractures. People, confused and unemployed, will search for meaning. Some call for a return to religion as an anchor. In this dystopian future, perhaps old stories will feel new.
If the Church is to truly matter for more than pageantry and tradition, it might try speaking the language of the world. That is not Latin, that fossil tongue of incense and mystery, but English, the lingua franca (if you will) of every global summit, every UN dispatch, every smartphone prayer app. Francis did a sort of English (a little like Trump himself). But for a pope to have true impact, oratorical fluency will be a requirement, not a grace.
Latin still has its place — but mainly to whisper sic transit gloria mundi. That is the most fitting eulogy for every power, every period and every pontiff.
Now let us take a moment to remember the group of people who may be the most profoundly affected by the passing of Pope Francis — the poor journalists who will have to cover the selection of a successor.
I was the newly minted editor of the Associated Press in Europe and Africa when John Paul II died in 2005. My team on the ground – and legions we sent in to join them – were hurled into the Kafkaesque theater of covering the papal conclave. For days that felt like weeks we staked out the Vatican, aiming live TV shots at the little chimney, trying to read the mood of the College of Cardinals like Kremlinologists. We filed endless stories —on papal garb, cardinal diets, chimney engineering, whatever came to mind to keep the imaginary news monster fed. By the time habemus papam rang out and Ratzinger emerged as Benedict XVI, we were utterly spent. And we were lucky then. We had huge resources and staff.
Today’s journalists are in for an even tougher time. After the digital culling, the press corps is skeletal and exhausted while also expected to tweet, film, edit, and publish all at once. As the next conclave looms, my thoughts turn to those now few, hardy souls who will pace the cobblestones, clutching smartphones instead of notebooks. Let us, them, remember these men and women too, chroniclers of the sacred and the absurd. In a world that’s lost its mooring, they deserve our empathy as well.
