Saint or anarchist? Pope Francis and the battle for the soul of the Catholic Church

There is a battle raging in the Catholic Church, with some believing the very soul of the 2,000-year-old institution is at stake.

At the heart of the conflict is the Bishop of Rome himself, Pope Francis, a saint to some, a servant of the Antichrist to others.

Francis has alienated and dismayed conservatives and traditionalists within the church while emboldening and giving hope to a large swath of Catholics who are craving reform. In a radical move late last year, he approved blessings by priests of same-sex couples. An earlier decision by Francis softened the stance on divorced and remarried Catholics to allow them to participate in the church and receive Holy Communion.

Francis wants to be non-judgmental, but traditionalists argue that in a world of sin and sinners, that is part of the role of the church.

As the great reformer, Francis must juggle two roles: the caring, compassionate, listening Pope and the disciplinarian not afraid to censure and excommunicate clerical enemies.

In July, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, an arch Francis critic and a former envoy to the United States, became the latest casualty to be excommunicated. One reason for his punishment was his refusal to submit to the Pope’s authority.

Such is the disruption under Francis that a new book by a veteran Canadian Vatican watcher ponders whether the Pope is presiding over the end of the papacy.

One cannot respond to the Francis mystique disengaged, writes Michael W. Higgins (no relation to this journalist) in The Jesuit Disrupter.

“Why his charismatic and magnetic appeal for many coexisting with his seemingly bottomless capacity to arouse resistance among others? Is he presiding over the end of the papacy as we know it or is he reconfiguring it for a new age?” wonders the Toronto academic, public intellectual, author and journalist.

But if Francis is ushering in a new era, what will it look like? Who will support it and oppose it? And does Francis have the will — and the authority — to carry out such a radical transformation?

“For some of his more fringe critics, Francis is the Antichrist, sundering the church from within, playing with dogma, more pap and mush than rigorous orthodoxy, playing to his fans, weakening his authority, allowing the gates of hell to prevail against the church,” writes Higgins.

But to understand Francis, says Higgins, one must understand the Jesuits, their history, their spirituality, their practices and their politics.

Francis is the first Jesuit ever to occupy the Chair of St. Peter and the man cannot be separated from the order.

The Jesuits, formerly the Society of Jesus and originally the Company of Jesus, were founded by the soldier-mystic Ignatius of Loyola. Born into a minor noble Spanish family at the end of the 15th century, Ignatius’s dreams of glory were cut short when he was wounded by a cannonball fighting the French.

Lying in a hospital bed, with nothing to read but the life of Jesus and the saints, he underwent a conversion that would see him dedicate his life to God and form a mendicant order of priests and brothers.

“Ignatius put the Jesuits directly under the suzerainty of the pope,” says Higgins in an interview with the National Post. “He made them the pope’s special servants. They would go wherever the pope wanted them to go.”

One of the defining practices of the Jesuits is the Spiritual Exercises, a compilation of meditations and prayers developed by Ignatius.

The Exercises “have as their purpose the conquest of self and the regulation of one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment,” Ignatius wrote.

The Exercises are as much about self-discovery and a call to action as they are about spirituality.

It is one of the reasons that missionary work would be the hallmark of the Jesuits, as it is with Francis.

“Without the Spiritual Exercises, there is no Ignatian identity. You can be many and different things, but you are not going to be a Jesuit,” says Higgins. “That seems to me to be at the heart of everything that Francis does. So, when he talks about love, when he talks about discernment, when he talks about the spirit moving you, he’s actually using the language of the Spiritual Exercises. So, in an important way, he’s shaped by this organic, theological book.”

By 1611, 71 years after their founding, the “Blackrobes” were in Canada ministering to the Indigenous population.

But it was not all smooth sailing for the new order, says Higgins, Basilian Senior Fellow in Contemporary Catholic Thought at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.

“The Jesuits have a bit of a checkered history in relation to Rome,” he says.

For centuries, the Jesuits became the schoolmasters of Europe, becoming pre-eminent scholars and founding schools and colleges.

But by the mid-1800s, they were up against the deists and their new “philosophes” as well as the kings of Portugal, France and Spain, who objected to the order’s power and politics.

“They ran afoul of Rome largely because of the influence they had in certain governments, but also because of the jealousy, the fears, the pettiness, and the banality of the royal families in Portugal and Spain, in particular,” says Higgins.

Pressure was put on Pope Clement XIV, who ordered the Jesuits suppressed.

For 40 years, the order was dissolved and they were taken in by the Russians and the Chinese and they went underground for a very long time, says Higgins. When the order was restored in 1814, they had changed.

Before the suppression, the Jesuits had been regarded by many as “ultra liberal,” says Higgins. When they came back, they were “ultra conservative.”

“They became the theologians of the pope,” he says.

But there was also an underground movement of “progressives” within the Jesuits that would go on to shape the liberalism that defined the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.

“By the 1960s, they’re now back to where they kind of were in the very early centuries of the church,” says Higgins, from liberal to conservative to liberal.

In many ways, the turbulence, shifts and swings of the Jesuits is also illustrative of Francis’s life.

In the early 1970s, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Pope Francis) was rising through the ranks of the Jesuits, Argentina was a country where tensions between Marxists, moneyed power and the military were never far from the surface.

Bergoglio was no “liberationist,” writes Higgins. “He was in many ways the scourge of politically liberal Jesuits.” He cleared radical Jesuits from the University of Salvador, ordered the wearing of traditional clerical wear and imposed community living on the order, “establishing through all these measures his firm and authoritative leadership style.”

Bergoglio’s “hard authority” came as Argentina was in the midst of the Dirty War, when political dissidents, socialists, left-wingers and any opponents of the junta were “disappeared” by the security forces. Up to 30,000 people may have been killed.

“Bergoglio did not come out of this period unscathed,” writes Higgins.

After Argentina’s military coup in 1976, Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuits in that country, tried to find a moderate way of dealing with the military powers rather than through confrontation.

When two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francesco Jalics, were arrested and tortured at the notorious Navy School of Mechanics detention centre, Bergoglio intervened to get them free.

But the episode has haunted Pope Francis with accusations that he failed to protect them. Graciela Yorio, the sister of Fr. Yorio, accused Bergoglio of declining to support the two left-wing priests doing social work in the slums of Buenos Aires, which enraged the junta.

“I see a lot of joy and celebration for Pope Francis, but I’m living his election with a lot of pain,” she was reported to have said shortly after he became Pope in March 2013.

Francis has denied any wrongdoing and said that later, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was questioned about his role and “my innocence was established.”

When Bergoglio’s time as head of the Jesuits in Argentina came to an end, his superiors decided to curb his “intransigence” and “authoritarian tendencies” by sending him to the Argentine city of Cordoba.

After two years in exile, Bergoglio emerged a new man, writes Higgins, more humble, chastened, one “who cultivated a greater sympathy for and identification with the poor.”

Just as the Jesuits had once changed their political and spiritual worldview, so had Bergoglio.

His star was on the rise again.

In February 1998, Bergoglio was appointed archbishop of Buenos Aires and became known for shunning the more luxurious perks of the office — living outside the episcopal palace and travelling by public transit. (Pope Francis has adopted a similar lifestyle, shunning the Apostolic Palace in favour of a suite in a Vatican guesthouse.)

In 2001, Bergoglio was created a cardinal, one of the princes of the church, and a member of an informal cabinet for the pope. In 2005, he was at his first conclave, the meeting of papal electors who decide on a new pope. In this case, they chose Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) but Bergoglio was believed to be a runner-up.

His time was not long in coming. In February 2013, Pope Benedict dropped a bombshell with news he was renouncing the papacy. A month later, Bergoglio was elected and became Pope Francis, a break from convention, since the name had not previously been used by another pope.

Francis later explained why he chose to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, a 12th century mystic, poet, and the man who abandoned a life of luxury to serve the poor with his Franciscan order of monks.

A fellow elector, congratulating Francis on his election, said, “Don’t forget the poor.”

“And those words came to me: the poor, the poor,” Francis told journalists three days later. “Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being counted.

“Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, don’t we?”

Francis of Assisi “gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man who wanted a poor church. How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor.”

From his very election, Francis was highlighting the way of his papacy. As a Jesuit, Francis would engage the world in a “new and revolutionary way,” Higgins writes.

The Catholic Church is not a perfect institution and needs reforms, says Higgins in the interview. “And that’s what I think Francis is about. I think Francis is about reforming. He’s not about demolition. He’s not about making a new church. He’s about reforming the church.”

But those reforms would alienate many.

Days after being accused of “schism” by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (previously called the Holy Office of the Inquisition), 83-year-old Italian Archbishop Viganó issued a blistering broadside against Pope Francis.

The former apostolic nuncio to the U.S. said he was honoured to be accused of the crime along with charges of denying the legitimacy of the Pope, breaking “communion” with Francis, and rejecting the Second Vatican Council.

“It is no coincidence that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the rejection of Vatican II: the Council represents the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis,” wrote Viganó. And he was only warming up.

The faithful were witnessing “the systematic destruction of the Church by its leaders, just as other subversives are destroying civil society.”

He charged Francis with promoting uncontrolled immigration; authorizing the blessing of same-sex couples and imposing on the faithful “the acceptance of homosexualism”; worshipping Pachamama (a Mother Earth type of goddess revered by the Indigenous people of the Andes); and mandating the use of “experimental gene serums” (a reference to COVID vaccines.)

He accused Francis of being silent when governments expanded abortion and euthanasia and not speaking up for the persecuted Catholics in China.

“In these eleven years of ‘pontificate’ the Catholic Church has been humiliated and discredited above all because of the scandals and corruption of the leaders of the Hierarchy, which have been totally ignored even as the most ruthless Vatican authoritarianism raged against faithful priests and religious, small communities of traditional nuns, and communities tied to the Latin Mass,” wrote Viganó.

“The Catholic Church has been slowly but surely taken over, and Bergoglio has been given the task of making it a philanthropic agency, the ‘church of humanity, of inclusion, of the environment’ at the service of the New World Order. But this is not the Catholic Church: it is her counterfeit,” he added.

And the final denunciation: Bergoglio and his circle were a “lobby, which conceals its complicity with the masters of the world in order to deceive many souls and prevent any resistance against the establishment of the Kingdom of the Antichrist.”

Viganó did not turn up for a Vatican hearing and, to no one’s surprise, was excommunicated in July.

“(Viganó) regularly denounces Francis for all the excesses in the church, its collapse of discipline, its blanket liberalism, its weakening of identity in the face of the assaults of postmodernity, its hidden socialist agenda, its morally dissolute bishops protected in office by an ideology-fixated pope,” writes Higgins. “You name it, according to Viganó, Francis has done it.”

But Viganó is not alone.

American Cardinal Raymond Burke has been a fierce critic of the Pope since the early days of his papacy. In 2014, Burke was removed from a Vatican tribunal after saying the church under Francis was “like a ship without a rudder.”

Burke has been extremely critical of one of Francis’s most far-reaching decisions, which continues to reverberate: allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion.

In the document Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Francis said divorced and remarried couples should be made to feel part of the church. “They are not excommunicated and should not be treated as such.”

For Burke, and other traditionalists, this is a change in church teaching.

“In the whole history of the Church, it’s never been possible that someone who was living publicly in a state of sin — for example, a person who is bound in matrimony to one person, is living in a marital way with another person — it has never been permitted that such a person could approach to receive Holy Communion,” Burke told the podcast Thinking With the Church.

For conservatives, it’s about upholding the teachings and doctrines of an institution that is two millennia old; it’s about what is right and wrong in a world of ambiguities, it’s about being true to God’s word.

For Francis, it’s about not judging people; it’s about encouraging clerics to help people, it’s about discerning the right course of action rather than reverting to the rules.

Only months after his election, Francis surprised reporters with his candid comments when asked about gays.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” the Pope said.

“It was clear to the world only a few months into this pontificate that this pope was cut from a different cloth,” writes Higgins.

Last December, the Pope approved same-sex blessings on the condition that they were not given at the same time as a civil union or by priests using rituals and clothing that might suggest a marriage.

People looking for God’s love and mercy should not be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it, he said.

He’s embraced gay leaders, says Higgins in the interview. “He’s listened to them. He has spoken with them on more than one occasion. He took initiatives to allow blessings, not your traditional liturgical blessing, a blessing with rather constrained circumstances, but a blessing nonetheless because of his argument, perfectly legitimate theologically, that when one asks for a blessing, one should be given a blessing.

“It’s not a reward for merit. It’s a call for help.”

But the announcement sent a “shockwave” through the African continent, according to bishops there.

“The African Bishops’ Conference emphasize that people with a homosexual tendency must be treated with respect and dignity, while reminding them that unions of persons of the same sex are contrary to the will of God and therefore cannot receive the blessing of the Church,” according to a statement.

Meanwhile, an archbishop from Central Asia issued a public rebuke to Francis

Archbishop Tomash Peta of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, together with Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider, issued a statement to highlight the “great deception” and “evil” that resides in same-sex blessings.

“Such a blessing directly and seriously contradicts Divine Revelation and the uninterrupted, bimillennial doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church,” they said.

But Pope Francis’s fiercest critics lie in America.

Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, was removed from his post by Francis last November after repeatedly attacking the Pope on social media.

Strickland accused Francis of undermining the “Deposit of Faith”; he opposed the blessing of same-sex couples; warned against the ordination of women as deacons; preached about the “evil and false message” that had invaded the church and refused to implement a Francis order to restrict the Latin mass.

In response to the removal, Michael Matt, editor of the conservative Catholic newspaper The Remnant, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “This is total war. Francis is a clear and present danger not only to Catholics the world over but also to the whole world itself. It appears now that he is actively trying to bury fidelity to the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Gerald Murray, a New York priest, told The Washington Post, “I know of no canonical crime that he is accused of having committed that would deserve the punishment of removal.”

On the thorny issue of the ordination of women as priests, Higgins says Francis has said no to that. But the Pope did launch two commissions looking into whether women could become deacons. The work of the commissions has not been published.

“They appear neither to have achieved any consensus and Francis doesn’t move unless he has consensus,” says Higgins.

Francis has also outraged traditionalists with restrictions on the Latin mass. The traditional, or Tridentine Mass, was first restricted under reforms instituted by the Liberal Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that aimed to transform how the church interacted with the world in light of the social and political upheavals of the previous decades.

However, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI allowed for it to be used more widely. But Francis ordered bishops to restrict its use unless adherents did not deny “the validity and the legitimacy” of the Second Vatican reforms.

In response, American and British intellectuals, politicians and personalities pleaded with Francis not to impose further restrictions.

Catholics and non-Catholics were dismayed by the Pope’s move, said a letter sent to Francis with signatories including Dana Gioia, former chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, music producer Blanton Alspaugh and Nina Shea, a religious freedom advocate.

“All of us, believers and non-believers alike, recognize that this ancient liturgy, which inspired the work of Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven and generations of great artists, is a magnificent achievement of civilization and part of the common cultural heritage of humanity,” the letter said, adding that, “It is medicine for the soul, one antidote to the gross materialism of the postmodern age.”

A letter to The Times newspaper in Britain echoed those concerns and was signed by 48 intellectuals, artists, politicians and celebrities, including Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the New Zealand soprano, historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Tom Holland, celebrity personality Bianca Jagger, and Nina Campbell, the interior designer.

Meanwhile, as well as moving against Strickland, Francis has also acted against another archnemesis, Burke, the cardinal and canon lawyer, by removing his privilege to a subsidized apartment in Rome and a salary. Reports said Francis acted because Burke had been a source of “disunity” in the church.

Certainly, he had been provocative, once saying that there are times when the pope must be disobeyed.

“The American hierarchy is essentially conservative,” says Higgins. “And as a consequence, it’s been a major problem for Francis.”

But Francis has also upset Ukrainian leaders after telling a group of young Russian Catholics, “Don’t forget your heritage. You are the descendants of great Russia: the great Russia of saints, rulers, the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire — educated, great culture and great humanity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Ukraine is part of Russia and has evoked the theme of empire to justify his invasion of the country.

“It is precisely with such imperialist propaganda, the ‘spiritual ties’ and the ‘need’ to save ‘great Mother Russia’ that the Kremlin justifies the killing of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukrainian cities and villages,” Oleg Nikolenko, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook, criticizing the Pope’s language.

Francis has also been attacked for his conciliatory dealings with China, especially over the ordination of bishops, some seeing it as a betrayal of the underground Catholics in that country.

The Pope has made clear his desire to visit China and many saw last September’s tour of Asia by Francis as a dress rehearsal for a possible visit to Beijing.

That tour saw Francis embroiled in controversy when he said “all religions are a path to God.”

“They are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God,” he said.

Some Catholics, such as Strickland, fear such language denies Catholic doctrine declaring Christ as the saviour of the world.

“Please pray for Pope Francis to clearly state that Jesus Christ is the only Way. To deny this is to deny Him. If we deny Christ, He will deny us, He cannot deny Himself,” wrote Strickland on X.

Still, there are some who believe Francis needs to worry less about his critics and more about the dangers facing the church.

“Francis worries about corrupt restorationists, ‘right-wing ideologies’ and priests who go into neighborhoods to ‘dogmatize’,” wrote Francis X. Maier, a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the U.S. Ethics and Public Policy Center, for First Things, a religious journal.

“But they’re hardly the most dangerous problems facing the Church. Western civilization is drowning in elitist scientism, economic inequities, sexual anarchy, crackpot transhumanist dreaming, and assaults on marriage, family, and biblical anthropology. These might warrant some priority.”

But one of Francis’s most important priorities was a weeks-long meeting in October, part of a multi-year process that has already been on the firing line.

In October, Francis, bishops, priests, religious and laypeople met for more than three weeks to conclude “Synod for Synodality”, which sounds tedious and unfathomable, but may be the means through which the Pope will transform the Catholic church.

Synod usually refers to the Synod of Bishops, a body that offers advice and guidance to the pope on governing the church.

But Francis seeks to expand synod to include not just bishops, but laypeople — “the entire people of God.” For the Pope, every diocese, parish and country across the world would engage in synodality.

Critics charge that synodality would undermine the fundamental structure of the church, taking power away from ordained bishops and putting it in the hands of laypeople.

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, claims the Synod on Synodality offers two opposing visions for the church.

“On the one hand, the Church is presented as founded by Jesus on the apostles and their successors, with a hierarchy of ordained ministers who guide the faithful on the journey toward the heavenly Jerusalem,” Zen wrote in a critique.

“On the other hand, there is talk of an undefined synodality, a ‘democracy of the baptized’ (Which baptized people? Do they at least go to church regularly? Do they draw faith from the Bible and strength from the Sacraments?)”

Another critique in a blog post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who has served in both America and England, wondered what reforms the Synod on Synodality was trying to achieve.

“Is it a change in doctrine or disciplines of the church or is it more fundamental — a reform of the basic way the church works? Does it mean moving from an episcopal and clerical power structure to a ‘synodal’ one — with ‘synodal’ being a code word for a parliamentary or democratic form of church governance?”

Higgins writes that Francis has pledged his papacy on instituting a synodal church.

“From the outset of his pontificate, he has worked to implement a pastoral strategy that will bring the church back to a pre-Constantinian era, a time of institutional humility and simplicity, shorn of the accoutrements of power, disengaged from political ideologies with no ties to both the ancient regime and ascendant orthodoxies of the current era,” writes Higgins.

Higgins quotes Emilce Cuda, an Argentinian theologian, that for Francis, the “wisdom of God” doesn’t come from the doctors or teachers of the church or the professors on the balcony, but from the “entire people of God.”

But the Synod wasn’t just about power structures. It was also discussing gay Catholics, the role of women and whether they could become deacons, and the sex abuse scandal, among other issues.

However, even before the Synod opened, there was controversy.

A group of cardinals from the United States, Asia, Europe and Africa sent the Pope some formal questions, known as “dubia” (“doubts” in Latin) to clarify Church teaching. They wanted a clear reaffirmation of the Church’s teaching that homosexual acts are sinful, according to Reuters, and sought more clarity on the Church’s ban on women priests.

A “penitential” mass held by Francis at the opening of the Synod also came under attack for promoting what German Cardinal Gerhard Muller called “un-Catholic ideologies.”

Muller criticized the service at St. Peter’s Basilica for listing “sins newly invented by humans.”

The list of sins “reads like a checklist of woke and gender ideology, somewhat laboriously disguised as Christian,” wrote Muller for a German website, Kath.net.

The list of new sins included: using church doctrine as a stone “to be thrown at others”; sinning against “creation, indigenous peoples, and migrants”; failing to build “a truly synodal” church and the “sin of a lack of courage” to recognize the dignity of everyone.

At the Synod, many of the controversial topics, such as the role of gay Catholics and the possibility of women deacons, were handed over to study groups. Francis is not expected to make any changes until receiving the study group reports in June 2025, and after they have been thoroughly analyzed by theologians.

“Any hope of timely attention to the real crises LGBTQ+ people are experiencing has been crushed,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, a group that supports LGBTQ Catholics.

At the service to open the Synod, Francis also dismayed some supporters hoping for major institutional reform when he stressed “ours is not a parliamentary assembly.”

But some, like Burke, believe the Synod could be used to change Catholic doctrine on morality and sexuality.

“Synodality and its adjective, synodal, have become slogans behind which a revolution is at work to change radically the Church’s self-understanding, in accord with a contemporary ideology which denies much of what the Church has always taught and practised,” wrote Burke.

Higgins says that we are witnessing not the decline of the papacy, but a new pastoral style.

“I think for Francis, what is important is to recapture that fundamental openness to the world, which is non-judgmental, which is welcoming and which has about it the caress of mercy,” he says.

And Francis “welcomes a change of era,” Higgins writes in his book.

But one man’s change is another man’s revolution; dogma and democracy do not sit easily together. Francis’s reforms might well transform the papacy until, to some at least, it is unrecognizable.

What is beyond doubt is that there are storms ahead for the See of Peter and the Catholic church.