VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
National Catholic Register - EWTN [Irondale AL]
April 21, 2025
By Francis X. Rocca
Pope Francis changed a deeply traditional institution more than most observers could have imagined possible in only a dozen years.
As soon as the new pope was announced to the world on March 13, 2013, even before he came out to greet the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, the world knew that it had a very different sort of pontiff. The conclave had elected the first pope from the Americas, the first from the Global South, the first Jesuit, and the first to the take the name Francis.
Then the Pope stepped out onto the loggia in front of the Basilica and the changes began. He declined to don the red mozzetta cape traditional for such an appearance. Later, when the cardinals who had just elected him boarded buses taking them to a celebratory meal, the Pope shunned his private car and got on the bus with them. It was soon announced that he would not move into the Apostolic Palace but remain in the Vatican guesthouse where he had lodged during the conclave.
With these and many similar gestures, Pope Francis, who died Monday morning at his Casa Santa Marta residence at the Vatican, repeatedly telegraphed rejection of anything that smacked of royalty, drawing widespread praise for his humility and earning the informal title of the “People’s Pope.”
He also showed the boldness with which he would assert himself throughout his pontificate, changing a deeply traditional institution more than most observers could have imagined possible in only a dozen years.
In October 2012, a few months before Pope Benedict’s resignation, the Vatican played host to a synod on the New Evangelization, a major project of the German pope focused on reviving Catholicism in an increasingly faithless West. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, one of the leaders of the assembly, decried a “tsunami of secularism” overwhelming modern society. Other speakers echoed the countercultural note, with warnings against relativism and the decline of traditional values exemplified by the rise of same-sex marriage.
The Vatican under Pope Francis was a different story. It hosted five synods, the last including women as voting members, where participants called for liberalizing Church teaching or practice on issues that included divorce, homosexuality, married priests and the ordination of women. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith permitted the non-liturgical blessing of same-sex couples. Officials at the Pontifical Academy for Life publicly argued that contraception, traditionally forbidden by Catholic teaching, could be licit in some cases.
The Pope who urged young Catholics early in his reign to “make a mess” relished disrupting norms and flouting traditions. He was revolutionary not only in the shift he brought about in the Church but in the methods with which he did so. He hardly changed the letter of Catholic doctrine, other than strengthening the language of the Catechism against the death penalty, but he reset the emphases, less through official magisterial statements than in his interactions with the press.
Pope Francis held more than 40 in-flight news conferences and granted more than 200 interviews, including more than 70 of book length, according to a count by the veteran Vatican journalist Luis Badilla. No pope had done anything like it.
His most famous statements were those he made to journalists, above all a rhetorical question about homosexuality and the priesthood he posed during his first press conference in 2013: “Who am I to judge?” Those words became the unofficial motto of his pontificate, widely understood to reflect a lenient attitude on sexual ethics and more generally a conciliatory approach to contemporary culture. It was an impression he did nothing to dispel, and much to reinforce, over the succeeding years.
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis told Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro in an interview a few months after his election. While he said that that he adhered to Catholic teaching in those areas he suggested that Church leaders had become “obsessed” with them. “We have to find a new balance,” he said.
Though the Pope often voiced his hatred of abortion, which he likened to hiring a hitman to solve a problem, he gave greater attention to economic inequality, the rights of migrants and protection of the natural environment. That emphasis led to tension with a majority of U.S. bishops who continued to affirm that opposition to abortion was their “preeminent priority.”
Pope Francis changed the Church’s leadership in remarkable ways. He named laymen and women to run major offices of the Holy See and Vatican City State. He put a nun in charge of overseeing religious orders around the world, with a cardinal serving as her deputy. Those were small changes by the standards of the secular world, but inside the Vatican they felt radical.
The late Pope brought unprecedented regional diversity to the College of Cardinals, shrinking the proportion from Europe and North America as he boosted the share from the Global South, including the first cardinals in history from various countries with minuscule numbers of Catholics, such as Laos, Tonga and Myanmar. He broke with the tradition of giving a red hat to the archbishops of major sees such as Milan, Los Angeles and Sydney, and he was more likely to choose men of a progressive bent. These changes will undoubtedly affect the dynamics of the upcoming conclave, though in ways that are hard to calculate, since Pope Francis called his cardinals together for open discussion only once, in February 2014, and most of them are strangers to each other.
The late Pope’s changes to the Synod of Bishops are potentially among the most significant of his institutional overhauls. By adding laymen and women to the voting membership of an assembly that had been limited almost exclusively to the hierarchy, and by adopting its final report, in 2024, as part of his ordinary magisterium, Pope Francis set an important precedent for wider consultation of Catholics in the development of doctrine. He also used the synod as a forum for discussing some of the most controversial issues in the Church, including those involving sex and gender.
Yet the great paradox of Pope Francis is that the champion of synodal decentralization and scourge of “clericalism” — that accusation was one of the gravest in his rich lexicon of denunciation — wielded the power of office as forcefully as any other pontiff in modern history.
Pope Francis issued almost twice as many motu proprio, the papal equivalent of executive orders, as did his two immediate predecessors combined over a period almost three times as long. He could be arbitrary and monarchical, removing one cardinal from the ranks of electors for alleged crimes before his trial. During the investigation of the failed London property deal that culminated in that epic trial of 10 defendants, Pope Francis changed Vatican law several times in ways that defendants’ lawyers said favored the prosecution and undermined the fairness of the proceedings.
The men who will soon choose Pope Francis’ successor may be looking for someone less willful, or at least more restrained, and with him a reversion to the norms that the late Pontiff often disregarded. Yet, even if the next pope charts a different course, the changes of the past decade will not easily be undone. Pope Francis remade the Church not only in structure and personnel but in sensibility, shifting its center of gravity in ways that will shape Catholicism for years to come.
Francis X. Rocca Francis X. Rocca is senior Vatican analyst for EWTN News. He has covered the Vatican since 2007, most recently for The Wall Street Journal, where he also reported on global religion. He has written for Time, The Times Literary Supplement and The Atlantic, among other publications. Rocca is the director of a documentary film, “Voices of Vatican II: Participants Recall the Council.”