Francis

Pope Francis has died. Two things lept to mind.

First, JD Vance was one of the last people to see him alive.

Second, while the rule is to wait a decent interval before speaking ill of the dead, his leaving of this world had been expected for a long time, and it seems many observers already had obituaries in the can regarding his legacy. So I will add my thoughts.

I’ll start off by stating up front that I am not a Catholic. I have a number of Catholics in my immediate family and circle, so the Church is not alien to me and I have a great deal of both familiarity and sympathy for it.

The next thought is that institutions work best when they remain “tethered” to their founding principles. A balloon that is connected by a tether to the ground may rise or fall, but it isn’t going to go floating off into the wild blue yonder.

One of the problems we have in this country is that our political institutions and culture, while superficially remaining the same, have become untethered from the founding principles of natural rights and social contract.

A problem with many Christian churches is that they have become untethered from their core doctrines whether those are rooted in biblical interpretation or a form of dogma. That is not to say that there aren’t debatable issues within either, but those debates become unduly influenced by social factors.

While we like to think we are defined by what we claim to be, we are better rooted in what we claim that we are not, which provides the boundaries necessary within our inherent human frailties (especially the limits of human reason) to function.

There have been many battles within the Catholic Church over the centuries. The most recent is centered on the issue of “modernization” that was accelerated by Vatican II. As one can expect, Francis’s embrace of this process is celebrated by the Left.

Francis was not only a Jesuit but from Argentina and the more “liberal” precincts of the Church. While his ascension to the papacy was seen as a way to spur needed reform after various scandals involving clerical sexual abuse and money, it also marked a radical turn from the conservative theology espoused by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

In this Francis did not disappoint. He suppressed the recent re-introduction of the traditional Latin Mass. His various pronouncements, using his traditional authority to promote liberal goals — such as seeming to endorse gay clergy, the blessing of same sex couples, and artificial birth control — ran contrary to established church doctrine, in favor of a more libertine culture for no more reason than “modernization.”

More depressingly, for an office that rests its legitimacy on its being the descendant of Peter, the rock on which Christ built his church, he seemed to endorse the idea that other religions offered other pathways to God.

Douthat states that such actions as the above have led to the Church suffering the same fate of other untethered institutions in that:

“That’s because the conservatives whose convictions he unsettled were the last believers in the imperial papacy, the custodians of infallibility’s mystique. And by stirring more of them to doubt and disobedience, he kicked away the last major prop supporting a strong papacy and left the office of St. Peter in the same position as most other 21st-century institutions: graced with power but lacking credibility, floated on charisma without underlying legitimacy, with its actions understood in terms of rewards for friends and punishments for enemies.”

I don’t believe in doctrinal ecumenism, but the various Christian churches all benefit from each other’s remaining tethered to their respective core principles, and from the avoidance of doctrinal scandal. The descent of the various mainline Protestant denominations into heresy has been mutually reinforcing, and the drift of various evangelical and Baptist conventions into progressive heresies has only extended the trends of untethering the faith at large from orthodoxy and of casting it afloat on the waves of modernity.

We will see what happens over the next month or so as a papal conclave is convened and a new pope chosen. Various media outlets who celebrate the transitioning of the Catholic Church to a less Eurocentric institution may be shocked to find that Africa and Asia are far more conservative than they can tolerate, but more than we can hope.

All Christians benefit from a strong and orthodox Catholic Church. Let’s hope better times lie ahead.