| Anna Rowlands was personally appointed by Pope Francis to a two-year governance role at the Vatican; in their first extended conversation, he teased her about the tribulations of her football team, Manchester United. Still, she said wryly, he was always sceptical of theologians like her. “A theologian was the worst thing you could be,” she said. “The idea of spending a lot of time debating abstract ideas that made very little difference in reality – he thought that was the antithesis of how you changed the world.” That practically minded outlook defined his papacy. At the same time, Rowlands said, “he was deeply convinced of certain metaphysical truths. He believed that most of the core truths of life are simple, that they can be communicated simply, and that mercy, forgiveness, and the joy of faith could bring transformation.” What were the expectations of his papacy? When the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, the first non-European to be chosen in more than 1,200 years and the first-ever member of the Jesuit order, his selection was seen as evidence of the church’s understanding that its future lay in the global south, where most Catholics live. He was viewed as a steely administrator and reformist who might help deal with the administrative and moral crises that beset the Vatican under his predecessor, Benedict XVI – the first pontiff to resign in almost 600 years. (Julian Coman’s excellent analysis explains the cliques, corruption, and “bunker mentality” that had taken hold in Rome as Benedict defined the church through “hostility to ongoing secularisation and alleged relativism in the west”.) Even against that backdrop, few observers understood quite how significant a figure Francis would turn out to be. There were signs right away. As Peter Stanford’s truly fascinating obituary notes, he was the first pontiff “to take on the name of the radical saint from Assisi who had turned his back on privilege and status in this world, and lived with and for the poor”. He wore simple white robes instead of a fancy cape, and relinquished the gilded papal apartment in favour of a simple two-room residence. As Stanford also writes: “On the day after his election … he slipped away on foot to collect his suitcase and settle the bill at the modest pensione where he had been booked in before the conclave began.” All of that was echoed in his will, which specified that he should be laid to rest in a tomb that is “simple, without particular decoration”. Popes are traditionally buried in three nested coffins of cypress wood, lead, and elm; Francis will be buried in a simple coffin of wood lined with zinc. What approach did those gestures signify? The symbolism of those steps was followed through in practice. “He turned out to be more radical than anyone anticipated,” Rowlands said. “Other recent popes have been quite conflict-averse. He was unafraid of conflict, and he understood the difference between tension that could lead to transformation and conflict that had nothing productive about it.” She places him alongside John XXIII, who instituted major changes through the Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) in the early 1960s in an attempt to modernise an increasingly out of touch church – but whose reforms, from decentralising power away from Rome to prioritising pastoral care over dogma, were left incomplete. “He is a bookend figure with John XXIII,” she said. “He had this sense of urgency about completing the reforms that John had set in motion. He understood that if you wanted to implement Vatican II, you had to upend the pyramid, and start with the grassroots. He wanted people to feel empowered as ordinary Catholics – to know that they didn’t need to wait for Rome to take action.” Was he a liberal figure? There is something unintentionally hilarious about the way Francis was co-opted as a political liberal in some quarters: for a while, his every step was viewed through the prism of a reductive kind of progressivism that wanted to understand him as a straightforward ally, to take his place alongside former supreme court president Lady Hale and former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern in the imaginary FBPE Avengers. That was never likely to hold true: “Is the Pope Catholic?” is a rhetorical question, after all. “There were real reasons that progressives got excited,” Rowlands said. “He supported the rights of migrants, he said ‘Who am I to judge?’ when asked about gay Catholics, and he met with transgender people at the Vatican. He wasn’t doctrinaire.” He made his first pastoral visit outside Rome to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where refugees were arriving in vast numbers, and saw their plight as inextricably linked to the climate crisis. “And when he wrote his environmental cyclical, Laudato Si’, which was the most read cyclical since the one about the Cuban missile crisis, a lot of people thought: Wow, this is our pope, we can embrace him.” But even if those were all important parts of his papacy, “he still maintained a position of recognisably Catholic doctrine”, she said. As Catherine Pepinster writes in this piece, he refused to countenance women becoming priests; meanwhile, he did not change the church’s stance that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered”, or that priests should not marry. And the church is, unsurprisingly, still opposed to abortion as a grave sin. How did he appear to conservatives in the church? Traditionalists were disappointed, too, Pepinster notes: after he decided to let parish priests make individual decisions about whether divorced Catholics who remarried should be allowed to receive communion, “his fiercest opponents published an unprecedented document – a dubia, or expression of doubt, about his teaching”. “Conservatives felt he was at war with them, almost,” Rowlands said. “One of the most political battles was over his decision to limit the use of Latin mass – they couldn’t understand why he was taking away something that they felt to be precious and countercultural. Some of them felt persecuted. They didn’t see all the other ways that he very much was a conservative.” Some even viewed him as illegitimate, saying that Benedict’s resignation was illegal, and that he remained the “true” pope. To Francis himself, none of his stances had a straightforwardly political valence. “He didn’t see himself as progressive or conservative,” Rowlands said. “He was always confused by these kinds of criticisms, because he just believed that he was doing what was in the gospel. In a way, that was part of what made him a pope of his time: he arrived as these kinds of labels were breaking down in lots of other spheres, and the church had its own version of that.” What kind of a legacy does he leave? When we talk about US presidents, we’re accustomed to the idea that they make change in two ways: the aggressive and short-term, often through executive orders, that can be swiftly reversed by their successors; and the cumulative, consensus-driven reforms that come through legislation, which are very much harder to unpick. It is the latter form that usually leads us to conclude that a president was truly consequential. The analogy is obviously imperfect, but something similar applies to popes: do they make an impact through bold statements from the pulpit, or do they set about lasting reform? Francis’ greatest achievement, Rowlands said, was to pursue the second kind of change. She points, above all, to his chewily named “synod on synodality”: a mass listening exercise that canvassed the views of Catholics around the world on an unprecedented scale. “That was the most interesting example of how he thought change would happen inside the church,” Rowlands said. While some viewed its outcome as underwhelming, she classes it as “the cleverest thing he did – almost the pope as community organiser. It included women as full voting members, and it gathered up the views of every parish and religious order and grassroots community and moved them upwards so that any decision in Rome was loyal to what they said.” Now the question is whether the changes that Francis began – from reforms to finances and safeguarding to a more active role for women in governing the church – will endure after the college of cardinals picks his successor. (You can read more about the conclave, a little different from the one in the movie, in Harriet Sherwood’s piece here, and see some potential candidates here.) “There’s always a degree of factional rivalry,” Rowlands said. “While it’s not like having a single new executive who can just change everything, these changes are fragile.” But the implementation phase of the synod continues until an ecclesial assembly in 2028, which will include women and lay people alongside bishops. “That is very significant,” Rowlands said. “It will be very difficult for another pope not to remain loyal to what it says.” | 