After Pope Francis died Monday morning, a few hours after blessing a crowd on Easter Sunday, the New York Times started rolling out tributes to the pontiff at nytimes.com, plus a standard 7,000-word obituary by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, the current and former Rome bureau chiefs for the Times., respectively.
Horowitz adored Francis as pontiff, and the obit predictably hailed the left-leaning pope as a force for “inclusion” against “doctrinaire” conservatives (as if “doctrinaire” is a dirty word when talking about religious doctrine!). However, the phrase “liberal” was scarce in the early coverage, while “conservative” opponents of Pope Francis were easy to find and framed as the enemy of openness.
Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88.
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His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.
One didn’t expect the Inquisition so soon in Pope Francis's obituary.
Conservative Catholics accused him of diluting church teachings and never stopped rallying against him. Simmering dissent periodically exploded into view in almost medieval fashion, with talk of schisms and heresy.
Horowitz and Yardley only briefly noted Francis was a daft hand at stifling dissent, in favor of his own ideological leanings.
Francis showed a deft political hand at isolating opponents....only days after leaving the hospital after undergoing colon surgery in 2021, Francis introduced sweeping restrictions on the Latin Mass, arguing that its proponents had exploited it to undermine the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to create divisions in the church.
Apparently the only hostility and divisions came from conservatives, not the Catholic left or Francis himself.
The spats mostly remained internal, but the ascendance of Mr. Trump in the United States gave traditionalist forces in the Vatican a rival power to rally around. A constellation of conservative Catholic news sites, blogs and television channels, many financed by sources in the United States and Canada, constantly sought to weaken the pope….In 2018, Francis criticized the hostile tenor that often reverberated throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere.
The reporters did criticize Pope Francis for not fighting sexual abuse in the church hard enough, writing “The pope also seemed less than sensitive to the appeals of victims,” even after major investigations in European countries.
The most dishonest portion of the obituary came under the subhead, “A New Openness,” which cast conservative popes as narrow-minded while denying Pope Francis’s own ideological blind spots.
Arguably the most dramatic change Francis brought to the church, his supporters say, was perhaps the simplest: a willingness to open questions for debate, planting the seeds for deep, long-lasting change. He talked in 2018 about an “apostolate of the ear: listening before speaking.”
He once told Father Spadaro, the Jesuit priest and friend: “Opposition opens up paths. I love opposition.”
Some of his predecessors had been less fond of it. Pope Pius X purged Catholic theologians who took a modernist approach to Bible studies. John Paul II treated theological disagreement as profane dissent, and with his doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, the Vatican silenced theologians with differing visions of the church. When he became pope, Benedict ordered the removal of the editor of a Jesuit journal, America, because it entertained ideas anathema to conservative orthodoxy.
Francis did not stifle views he disagreed with and believed in a patient process -- he called it discernment -- in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before going forward.
Really? Transgenderism, immigration, global warming, homosexuality, the Latin Mass – Pope Francis used his power to stifle church conservatives on many fronts.
The rolling live news feed covered similar ground, under the flattering subhead, “His groundbreaking pontificate worked to make the Catholic Church more inclusive. Cardinals will now decide whether to continue his approach or restore more doctrinaire leadership.” Again, the only quibble was that the pope failed to lead left-wing ideology to triumph within the church, as in Ruth Graham’s piece, “Francis faced defiant, conservative U.S. Catholic leaders.”
Francis led an increasingly ideologically fractured church, including a boisterous right wing that often openly defied him. The United States, with a heated cultural and political battle over abortion and other social issues, was a stronghold of that conservative opposition....Yet those appointments did not fundamentally shift the balance of American church leadership in a more liberal direction. The church hierarchy in the United States remains staunchly conservative and plays a significant role in the nation’s searing debates over abortion, sexuality and gender….
The Times doesn't broach the argument of papal hypocrisy, as Ed Condon did in The Spectator (UK): “And while Francis preached a vision of synodality, consultation, and collegiality, he showed himself willing to depose bishops from all corners of the world – seemingly on a whim, without due process and sometimes without any reasons given – if they were considered ideologically out of step with him.” Neither did the paper bear down on the theological confusion Pope Francis leaves in his wake.
