There may come a time when we look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis — the figurehead of these years, and a radical by the standards of the Catholic hierarchy — is gone, and we are now likely to see a major shift in the political orientation of the Holy See. Ultimately, and ominously, the death of Francis could well mean that the papacy ends up finding itself aligned with the global far right.
It didn’t have to be this way. Elected in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Latin American pope in history, brought to the Vatican a concern for social justice rooted in the radical liberation theology of his home region — along with an unprecedented focus on environmental issues and migrants’ rights. This was a dramatic shift in priorities after the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom were more concerned with upholding traditional morality than with reviving basic Christian values of equality and fraternity.
In contrast, Francis dedicated two of his encyclicals — the highest-ranking papal declarations — to explicitly political issues. Laudato si (2015) addressed the environmental crisis, while Fratelli tutti (2020) focused on social justice. The latter famously asserted “the right of every individual to find a place that meets their basic needs” — a sign of Francis’s unwavering support for migrants against the backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States. Francis was fairly open in his public disregard for far-right populist leaders like Donald Trump and his fellow Argentinian Javier Milei (Milei responded by calling Francis a “filthy leftist”).
Bergoglio’s papacy also saw a shift in the Church’s attitudes to gender and sexuality, though not nearly to the extent initially expected. His stance on sexuality was considerably more liberal than those of his predecessors — as…
Auteur: Pablo Castaño
