Opinion | Pope Francis’s Decade of Division
Instead, Francis’s opening gambit involved a controversy much more clearly entangled with Catholic doctrine — the question of remarriage after divorce, where the very words of Jesus are at issue. Meanwhile, his larger approach has been to open controversies on the widest possible array of fronts: Sometimes through his statements, sometimes through his appointments, and for a while through the bizarre strategy of conducting repeated conversations with an atheist Italian journalist who famously did not take notes, leaving ordinary Catholics to puzzle over whether the pope had really denied, say, the doctrine of hell, or whether he was just content for readers of La Repubblica to think so.
All of this Francis has supplemented with a running critique of conservatives, and especially traditionalists, for being rigid and pharisaical and coldhearted, for being “all stiff in black cassocks” and wearing “grandma’s lace” — the equivalent of the father in the parable turning his elder son and chewing him out for being such an uptight weirdo. And when the traditionalist faction became, predictably, a locus for sometimes paranoid online opposition, the pope who preached decentralization and diversity embraced a micromanagerial cruelty, attempting the strangulation of Latin Mass congregations through such merciful gestures as forbidding their masses from appearing in parish bulletins.
And yet with all this the pope has not actually delivered all that much concrete change to the church’s progressive wing, pulling back repeatedly instead — retreating into ambiguity on communion for the divorced and the remarried, pulling up short when it appeared he was going to allow new experiments with married priests, permitting his office of doctrine to declare the impossibility of the blessings for same-sex couples that many European bishops wish to license.
Which, also predictably, has created both disappointment at unmet expectations and a constant impulse to push as far as possible, even toward the liberal Protestantism that the German church especially seems to seek, on the theory that Francis needs to be forced into embracing the changes he’s always contemplating but never quite delivering.
Seen now at its 10-year milestone, then, this pontificate hasn’t just faced inevitable resistance because of its zeal for reform. It has needlessly multiplied controversies and exacerbated divisions for the sake of an agenda that can still feel vaporous, and its choices at every turn have seemed to design to create the greatest possible alienation between the church’s factions, the widest imaginable gyre.
