Pope Francis Versus The Vatican: The Battle To Re-make The Church

The gestures have continued. The Pope who took his papal name from Saint Francis of Assisi, an apostle to the downtrodden, has urged admirers from his native Argentina to donate money to the poor instead of spending it on a trip to pay their tributes in Rome. He has chosen to reside in the Vatican’s modest guesthouse rather than the comparatively lavish Apostolic Palace and makes it clear that he prefers to carry his own bags. On Holy Thursday, Pope Francis washed the feet of two women in juvenile detention, one of whom was a Muslim, breaking from the tradition that restricts the ritual to men and mostly to priests in the Vatican entourage.

Such expressions of modesty and humility have come as a shock to many observers. From October 1978, when Karol Józef Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, until this past February, when his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, renounced the throne, the world became accustomed to a very different style of Vatican leadership. The last two Popes appeared to rejoice in elevating themselves above the laity with theatrical displays of pontifical pomp. Both permitted clericalism to flourish, sometimes (as in the case of child sexual abuse by priests and its cover-up by higher-ranking officials) with horrifying consequences. Both appeared to delight in upbraiding the Western world for its (mostly sexual) sins.

Progressive Catholics—demoralized and marginalized in their Church for much of the past 34 years—have responded enthusiastically to Francis’s change in tone. And their excitement only intensified after a freewheeling press conference during his plane ride back from the World Youth Day festivities in Rio de Janeiro at the end of July. Responding to a question about gay priests, Francis spoke about homosexuality in language far less condemnatory (“Who am I to judge?”) than John Paul or Benedict would have chosen.

In a blog post titled “This Extraordinary Pope,” Andrew Sullivan, an outspoken gay Catholic, expressed the sentiments of many like-minded Church members: “What’s so striking to me is not what he said, but how he said it: the gentleness, the humor, the transparency. I find myself with tears in my eyes as I watch him. I’ve lived a long time to hear a pope speak like that,” Sullivan wrote. “Everything he is saying and doing is an obvious, implicit rejection of what came before.” This conviction—that the Pope is in the process of making a radical break with the past—has fast become conventional wisdom. Even an analyst normally as sober and sensible as John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter has gone so far as to conclude that nothing less than a Vatican “revolution” is underway.

It isn’t. Francis’s renewed emphasis on the poor is certainly welcome and valuable, and there are circumscribed areas in which the Pope may achieve real reforms. But when progressive Catholics pine for change, they mostly mean that they want to see the Church brought into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality. And that simply isn’t going to happen. To hope or expect otherwise is to misread this Pope, misinterpret the legacy of his predecessors, and misunderstand the calcified structure of the Church itself.

But let’s say Francis decided to pursue a progressive agenda anyway, and started by attempting<smallcaps_roman> to lift the ban on married priests. In an interview he gave in 2012, then-Cardinal Bergoglio indicated a willingness to consider a reform of the celibacy requirement. “It can change,” he said, since it’s a “matter of discipline, not of faith.” What he meant is that the rule is neither a dogma nor a doctrine of the Church. And though he made clear that he was in favor of maintaining current Church practice “for the moment,” he did so in a statement full of conditional language, acknowledging that celibacy has many “pros and cons” and speaking “hypothetically” about a future process of reform.

Jumping off those remarks, it is possible to sketch out how Francis might seek to guide the Church toward permitting priests to marry. The first step would be for him to set up a pontifical commission to study the celibacy rule, its impact on the lives and work of the clergy, and above all its role in the alarming collapse in priestly ordinations throughout the Western world. (In the United States, the population of priests has decreased from 59,000 in 1975 to around 39,000 as of last year, with many of that number nearing or past retirement age.) Presumably the commission would also attempt to build on the fact that the Church permits married Anglican clergy to become priests when they convert to Catholicism, a practice that has already produced many married priests in countries around the world. Most important, it could identify historical grounds for reform. Clerical celibacy wasn’t uniformly enforced in the Western Church until more than a thousand years after the ministry of Jesus Christ, and it never took root in Eastern Orthodoxy at all.

Those rationales, or something very close to them, would have to emerge from the commission and then be stated clearly and authoritatively by Francis himself as he and the relevant Curial offices defend the change. (What neither the Pope nor the commission would say in public is that permitting priests to marry would also make the priesthood a less attractive hiding place for sexually conflicted men who wind up molesting children.) The Pope would also probably try to co-opt a handful of prominent conservative pragmatists—such as Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York; John Onaiyekan, the archbishop of Abuja in Nigeria; or Odilo Scherer, the archbishop of São Paulo—and get them on board.

And still, many Church officials would refuse to accept married priests. Not so much because conservative Catholics are particularly wedded to clerical celibacy, but because of their generalized suspicion of any change at all. One of the legacies of the Second Vatican Council is a widespread consensus within the Church’s hierarchy that a proposed break with tradition can’t even be entertained unless it can be framed as supporting a deeper continuity. First laid out by John Henry Newman in 1845, the concept is known as “development of doctrine,” and it holds that any shift must reaffirm the underlying changelessness of the Church. Appropriated by conservatives amid the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it has served as a remarkably effective brake on innovation or reform.

But even on issues that don’t rise to the level of doctrine—like allowing priests to marry—there is an inchoate presumption among many members of the hierarchy that change as such should be resisted. Vatican II convinced these conservatives that doctrinally justifiable reforms merely inspire calls for evermore audacious ones. These same conservatives view the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as having reimposed crucially important authority on a Church that came perilously close to collapsing into chaos during the late ’60s and ’70s. They are loath to support any change bold enough to risk a return to those tumultuous times.

For the Pope to attempt to surmount those obstacles would be to risk sparking a grassroots schism along two fronts, with conservatives pitted against liberals within the West, and the generally more conservative global south arrayed against the far more progressive global north. These are precisely the fissures that have opened up in the Anglican Church in recent years, as it has wrestled with an identical set of issues tied to the culture war. Progressive Catholics can argue about whether such a schism would ultimately prove to be a good or a bad thing for their institution. But no one should expect a Pope to deliberately provoke it.

And indeed, this is precisely what Bergoglio’s biography shows. When he was chosen as Pope, critics zeroed in on his alleged accommodation of the military junta that ran Argentina during the “dirty war” that stretched from 1976 to 1983. But the most serious charge against him—that he turned over two priests to Navy torturers—has never been substantiated. What is clear is that he refused to speak out publicly against the regime, even as he reportedly worked behind the scenes to help people flee the dictatorship. Critics such as Nobel Peace Prize–winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel havesuggested that, during a dark time in the country’s history, other, less celebrated priests did much more to stand up for human rights.

The portrait that emerges is of a man whose mix of virtues and vices somewhat resembles that of Pope Pius XII, who discreetly saved thousands of Jews during World War II but officially declared the Vatican neutral in the battle against the evils of the Nazis. At critical moments, both were triangulators more than moral leaders, trying to help the victims of tyranny when they felt they could do so with impunity, while also continuing to do business with the authorities and refusing to risk the well-being of themselves and their institutions by undertaking more direct acts of insurrection.

Unlike his predecessors, Francis holds an apparently sincere belief in dialogue, bridge-building, conciliation, and the adjudication of differences. It seems important to him to appear cheery, tolerant, cosmopolitan. He has made respectful, open-minded statements about the members and beliefs of other Christian churches, as well as about Jews, Muslims, and even atheists. But in every case where Francis has reached out to those who disagree with him, he has done so while indicating that his own beliefs grow out of Catholic bedrock. In the same airborne news conference during which he made headlines for seeming to counsel against damning gay priests, he responded dismissively to a question about women’s ordination, stating bluntly, “That door is closed.”

The one area where Francis may end up fulfilling reformers’ hopes is in his willingness to clean up unsavory elements of the Vatican bureaucracy—precisely because it has nothing at all to do with a drive to overturn the elements of Catholic doctrine that progressives find so gallingly out of touch with modern liberalism. The Roman Curia draws its long-term, mid- level members mostly from Italy, and as a body, it has come to mirror the corruption and inefficiencies of Italian political culture. Regardless of their ideological disposition, the Church’s cardinals and archbishops (who are drawn from around the world) are able to get behind a push to purge those pathologies.

That’s why the politically savvy new Pope has moved more aggressively on this front than any other—demanding accountability on the part of Vatican bureaucrats, appointing large numbers of laypeople (and non-Italians) to commissions he has empowered to study how the administrative apparatus should be overhauled. It’s exactly the kind of un- revolutionary good-governance step that one would expect from an ultimately un-confrontational pontiff.

Even as Francis’s gestures make headlines, the Church does not think in terms of news cycles or election cycles, but rather in terms of centuries. A new Pope appoints the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who will govern the Church of the future and in turn elect the next Pope, who will then make his own appointments, and so on, down through the decades. It may seem crazy to progressive Catholics that they’ll likely have to wait another 100 years for their Church to declare the use of condoms to be morally licit or to permit a woman to celebrate Mass. But something has to set the wheels of change in motion, and that just might be the modest but vital reform that Pope Francis ends up being remembered for most of all.