In Memoriam: Pope Francis

It is cliche to say that we are products of our environment.  Usually this cliche is deployed to talk about the family dynamics, and that's part of it.  But it is more than that.  We are all formed by the physical locations where we reside, the culture or cultures we live in, the specific events we encounter both directly and in the background of our lives.  These elements both provide insight into some aspects of life and hide other aspects or scenarios.  Most people to one degree or another work understand these formative elements and try to move beyond them, but I don't think it is possible to do it completely.  If you want to understand someone, it is important to understand what elements formed them, because those elements will make their mark on what they do.

At the same time, I am becoming increasingly convinced that being a good person is an irreducible, almost existential quality.  In particular, I think being a good person is orthogonal to the environmental elements I mentioned previously.  Good people are going to have blindspots that prevent them from fully understanding certain situations, leading to bad decisions and bad outcomes; not good people are going to have certain areas where they really understand the situation and act correctly.  But over the long hall, good people will show their goodness despite those blindspots and not-good people will display their true nature eventually.  There is a lot to be said about how good people become good and how people end up in the opposite place, but when you look at the end product it will always come through in the end.

Pope Francis (1936-2025), the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was a good person.  This is important to say, because there are lots of people in high positions of religious leadership who are absolutely not good people, including but not limited to Roman Catholic popes.  Anyone who has spent any amount of time interacting with religious leadership, of whatever tradition or denomination, knows that there are some horrible people who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion.  Pope Francis was not one of those people, and I think we are going to be hard pressed to find anyone who can or would argue otherwise in good faith.

Pope Francis was also far more willing to interrogate the ways in which he was product of his environment than his two predecessors.  In some respects this is damning with faint praise, as I believe the defining commonality between Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI was a complete unwillingness consider any possibility that their experiences and paradigm might limit their vision and worldview.  Still, it should be said that Pope Francis genuinely seemed to listen to people from other perspectives and incorporate them into his decision-making (which is not surprising, in light of the problems I will be discussing in a bit).  This matters, and is worth pointing out.

But I think people will look back at Pope Francis with some level of frustration, viewing his time as an era of missed opportunities.  For all of the energy we saw from Pope Francis, especially in the first couple of years, what has really been accomplished?  It is less about whether the initiatives of Pope Francis were good or bad, but more about whether there actually were any initiatives at all.  An enormous amount of time and effort was spent on this synod process, with no discernable result.  I think there is a very real question as to whether Pope Francis will have much of a legacy at all.

The problem, I think, comes from the most distinctive feature of Pope Francis as Pope--he was the first Pope who was a Jesuit.  Any time the Jesuits are mentioned, the folks that have had their brains poisoned with conspiracies get geared up, but none of this discussion actually gets to the heart of what it means to be a Jesuit.  The Jesuits are different from every other religious order, men's or women's, in the Roman Catholic Church because they are founded not on a specific mission, or the personality and charisma of a founder, but upon a process.  

The Jesuit Order, and the Jesuits themselves, are the products of a single book, The Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola, and that book lays out a process by which the practitioner determines what God wants you to do.  In more secular terms, it is a decision-making process.  This process has five hundred years of application and analysis behind it, but in its simplest terms it involves taking in as much information as you possibly can (both from your environment and from yourself), going through a well-described method for sorting that information, and then reaching a decision.  Described this way, this might not be particularly noteworthy, but the real genius of The Spiritual Exercises is that involves what we today might call a fractal decision making structure.  Each individual participating the process is supposed to engage in their own complete, individual discernment of the question at hand, which in turn is passed up the chain to the higher level decision-maker as key input into their own decision-making process.  Thus, while on paper the authority of the ultimate decision-maker is absolute, if everyone participates in the process it is highly collaborative and highly participatory, leveraging the wisdom of talented and thoughtful people into a single unified effort.  And because the final decision-maker has ultimate authority, it avoids the problem that plagues other collaborative and participatory decision-making structures--endless consideration and no actual decision. 

Pope Francis attempted to bring Ignatian spirituality and decision-making to the Roman Catholic Church.  This is not surprising, as he was a Jesuit.  The problem is that the Jesuits are a group of people who, by definition, have agreed ex ante to follow and abide by this process.  The Spiritual Exercises do not address, and have no solution for, what to do when some people won't follow The Spiritual Exercises.  Pope Francis faced resistance not just to particular policy positions being debated but to the process of debating them itself.  His system did not prepare him for, or offer solutions to, this problem.

Let's take three examples.  Pope Francis was famously harsh on "the trads"--the slice of the right wing of the Roman Catholic Church who wanted essentially to wind the clock back to before the Second Vatican Council.  His decree putting restrictions on the Latin Mass was deeply out of character for Pope Francis.  It felt petulant and unconsidered, two things that are not part of the Pope Francis experience.  But if you think about what the trads ultimately stand for, it is the notion that there is no need to engage in any real decision-making of any kind, as all of the answers we need can be found by looking to canonical sources from the past.  I believe that Pope Francis's out-of-character actions (and I think this is borne out by the text of his statement on the topic) had little to do with the merits of the pre-Vatican II Mass versus the current one, and everything to do with frustration with a group of people who were ideologically committed to not "playing ball."  To Pope Francis, the trads are not just wrong but bad faith actors, refusing to engage with, literally, the work of God.  And he had no real tools in his paradigm for dealing with bad faith actors of this type--there is no such thing as a Jesuit who refuses to engage with The Spiritual Exercises, because such people just leave.  Eventually, his frustration boiled over into what was ultimately a rash and unhelpful action.

Consider the synod.  The synod is an attempt to spur, and then gather, as much discernment as possible from an organization as vast and diverse as the Roman Catholic Church.  As mentioned above, this is essential to the proper working of the discernment process set forth in The Spiritual Exercises.  Such a process, given its scope, was inevitably going to be incredibly slow.  But I am not sure Pope Francis counted on how slow it was going to be.  And I really not sure that Pope Francis really internalized how bureaucratically-oriented actors who were suspicious or actively hostile to Pope Francis and his program were going to deal with such a massive project.  They were going to do what bureaucratic actors in every context do with initiatives like this--pretend to engage in the process but not actually engage in the process, while at the same time slow the process down to the maximum extent possible, knowing that loss of momentum is the #1 killer of these sorts of initiatives.  And, from my vantage point, that's exactly what happened.  This is not a problem that Jesuits or The Spiritual Exercises deal with in general, because it presumes that everyone wants to come to a decision. But, like the shoes that give rise to the term, sabotage is the greatest enemy of any process or machine.

Finally, let's look at the Germans.  In essence, the Germans said "your process is too slow, so we have engaged in our own process and come to conclusions on many of these topics that we want to implement."  Implicit but nevertheless inherent in this formulation is the corollary "and we don't really care what other folks think about these questions."  With all of the harsh bluntness for which the Germans are known, the Germans have basically said that they care only about what Germans think about, say, LGBTQ+ issues and don't care what, say, the Africans think about those questions.  From the perspective of The Spiritual Exercises, this is every bit as bad faith an approach as the trads, because it limits artificially and ex ante the information taken in to use in the discernment process.  Whatever Pope Francis thinks of the ultimate conclusions reached by the Germans (and I think, deep down, he probably agrees with them, or at least doesn't reject them out of hand), the process they undertook was unacceptable from his perspective.  And what matters from a Jesuit perspective is the process, because the system is predicated on the idea that the proper process will reach the proper outcome.  For those who are ultimately outcome-oriented, and in all transparency this includes myself, the unwillingness to "cut to the chase" on any level is enormously frustrating and pedantic.  Especially where the discussion topic so clearly and centrally implicates the real lives of real people.  

Having said all of this, these issues should not be overshadow the many and varied virtues that Pope Francis embodied.  He was a good man and a good priest, who tried to understand the world as it really was and live consistent with that knowledge, but had some limitations and blindspots.  In truth, nothing more or better can be said of any of us.  These blindspots were magnified because of his public position, and while they should be acknowledged and understood for the lessons they can teach to those that come after him, they should not be oversold.  He deserves his rest, and may the light perpetual shine on him.