With apologies to WaterGirl for stepping on the On The Road thread, some breaking news: The Vatican is reporting that Pope Francis died early this morning. He was 88.
From the BBC:
From the moment of his election, Francis indicated he would do things differently. He received his cardinals informally and standing – rather than seated on the papal throne.
On 13 March 2013, Pope Francis emerged on the balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square.
Clad simply in white, he bore a new name which paid homage to St Francis of Assisi, the 13th Century preacher and animal lover.
He was determined to favour humility over pomp and grandeur. He shunned the papal limousine and insisted on sharing the bus taking other cardinals home.
The new Pope set a moral mission for the 1.2 billion-strong flock. “Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” he remarked.
Francis was a ground-breaker on a number of representational fronts: the first non-European pope in about 1,300 years; the first from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere, and the first ever pope who was a Jesuit, a controversial and frequently suppressed religious order within the Catholic priesthood. He tried to be a ground-breaker on other fronts: he tried to drag the focus of the church back toward compassion for the poor and marginalized; he tried to heal rifts between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches; he demonstrated greater tolerance for LGBTQ+ people than other popes had done. He also disappointed: he seems to have accepted the framing that Russia was “provoked” into attacking Ukraine, he declared that contraception destroys families; he failed to take any kind of meaningful action to root out or punish clergy who abuse children.
He’d been in the news the past few days due to his reception of our Vice President, JD Vance. At the last minute, Francis decided not to attend a scheduled audience with Vance, instead sending Cardinal Pietro Paroline to give him a “lecture on compassion,” which was probably about as useful as giving a lecture on gardening techniques to a slug. (Vance and Francis met briefly and informally yesterday.) Vance represents a rising vanguard of right-wing “celebrity” converts to Catholicism: people who want not just the bells, smells, and Latin, but a full about-face on everything Francis tried to promote. This effort, as reported by Kathryn Joyce last autumn in Vanity Fair, had faltered in recent years:
In mid-2021, when conservative members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) tried to pass a measure denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians—effectively excommunicating Biden—the Vatican blocked their plans. Pope Francis began speaking more openly, and derisively, about his American critics, calling them rigid, reactionary, backward, suicidal. He issued new restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass, the dominant form of liturgy before the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) introduced various modernizing reforms. And the Church hierarchy neutralized some of the loudest voices of clerical dissent. The Wisconsin priest behind a viral video claiming Catholic Democrats would go to hell was removed from his church. Another priest, who’d once delivered a pro-Trump speech with an aborted fetus on his altar, was defrocked. Leading Pope Francis opponent Cardinal Raymond Burke was stripped of his monthly stipend and lavish Vatican City apartment. Strickland, who’d begun claiming that the pope supported an “attack on the sacred,” lost his diocese. In July, the Vatican excommunicated Viganò for fomenting schism by refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and Vatican II.
None of this endeared the pope to his critics or ended the division.
Now these revanchist freaks have an opportunity to install their own reactionary pope, an even more cartoonish version of the conservative cardinal played so memorably by Sergio Castellitto (and his vape pen) in last year’s Conclave. Francis’s pontificate represented a tentative step forward for an institution that still retains incredible power to shape world events as well as the family lives, consciences, and political attitudes of millions of believers. I hope the College of Cardinals will surprise us, but it’s not a very robust hope.
Open thread.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Pope Francis Dies at 88Post + Comments (12)
Open thread
