Francisco did not repress the opinions with which I did not agree and believed in a patient process in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before advancing.
It could be said that the most drastic change that Pope Francis contributed to the Catholic Church, as his fans used to affirm, was perhaps the simplest: the will to open issues to debate, planting the seeds of a deep and lasting change. On one occasion he spoke of an “Apostolate of the ear: listen before speaking.”
Once he told the Reverend Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and his friend: “The opposition opens paths. I love the opposition.”
Some of Francisco’s predecessors did not like it so much.
Pope Pius X purged Catholic theologians who adopted a modernist approach to biblical studies. John Paul II tried the theological disagreement as a profane dissent, and with his doctrinal guardian, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – more late Benedict XVI – the Vatican silenced theologians with different visions of the Church. When he became Pope, Benedict ordered the dismissal of the director of a Jesuit magazine, America, because he held anatema ideas for conservative orthodoxy.
Francisco did not repress the opinions with which I did not agree and believed in a patient process – he called him discernment – in which ideas and proposals could weigh before moving forward.
“The bosses cannot always do what they want,” he told Reuters in 2018. “They have to convince.”
His closest allies said the slow and constant approach worked.
“It has been 10 intense years,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Vatican, on the anniversary of Francisco’s election. Restructure the Roman bureaucracy that governs the Church, deeply resistant to change, he said, “required a lot of time and a lot of energy.”
Although some of Francisco’s most fervent defenders feared that his fondness for debate and discernment would result in a pontificate who stayed largely in words, made undeniable substantial changes, such as the extension of the norms that punish the sexual abuse of the clergy, and others apparently bureaucratic, such as the decentralization of the power of Rome and the consolidation of the hierarchy in the United States with liberals. These efforts have the potential to produce even greater changes.
His meeting of bishops in the world of October 2023, which for the first time included women and laity as members with the right to vote, promoted a greater role of women in the church and addressed some of the most delicate issues, such as celibacy and marital status of priests. In the following weeks, papal equivalents of executive actions issued to allow priests to bless homosexual couples.
For many liberals, that impulse stagnated and the progress he promised never materialized. But, in many ways, Francisco’s disposition to discuss issues that were previously considered taboo was a great advance.
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If, at the beginning of his pontificate, his supporters predicted a “Francisco effect” that would fill the banks of faithful, in the end they claimed a more modest achievement: that he had opened ecclesiastical doors that had been closed to lime and song decades.