Pope Francis (1936-2025): Messianic Reformer or Machiavellian Revisionist?

 By Dr. Jules Gomes

THE STREAM

Apr 21, 2025

The most controversial pontiff in living memory has just died at the age of 88.

Pope Francis – born in Argentina as Jorge Mario Bergoglio — passed away after a lengthy battle with thrombocytopenia blood disorder, a mild acute kidney injury, and renal insufficiency.

Like a Greek tragedy, Francis will be remembered as the pontiff who radiated a utopian vision of unifying the world under Friedrich Schiller’s rousing call of fratelli tutti (brothers all) — but left his own church fatally fractured.

Ironically, Francis hated President Donald Trump, but was himself a toweringly “Trumpian” personality — one people either loved or hated.

Millions of Catholics around the globe revered him as a prophet of mercy, an apostle of peace, and a spartan workaholic who rejected the pomp of the papal palace, choosing to live in the Santa Marta hostel instead.

They hailed his unflinching emphasis on social justice, equality, immigration, climate change, ecumenical outreach, interfaith dialogue, the decentralization of power, and his far-sighted chess maneuvers to include the marginalized, especially women, in the highest echelons of the church.

But his critics saw him as a Screwtape-like character in a white zucchetto — a Marxist wrecking ball scheming to dilute and eventually dissolve distinctive Catholic doctrine by turning the glittering wine of Catholicism into the tepid water of a bland Anglicanism.

DEEPLY POLARIZING

The pope’s cheerleaders portrayed him as the long-awaited messianic reformer who spoke truth to political power — and even in his final days, challenged their nemesis, Donald Trump, by egging the U.S. bishops to defy his efforts to deport illegal aliens.

For his detractors Francis was nothing short of Machiavellian — a manipulative micromanager, a megalomaniacal dictator, and a Neville Chamberlain redivivus who struck Faustian bargains with Islamic jihadists, globalist vaccine peddlers, pro-Palestinian antisemites, and Beijing’s communist nabobs while trading Catholicism for kitsch.

In the journalistic laundromat of dirty papal linen, Francis’s garments will be seen as indelibly stained by the favoritism he showed his friend Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik — a celebrity artist accused of sexually abusing more than two dozen nuns — as well as covering over the crimes of high-profile clerical sex abusers.

Papal historians will remember him for his grandest ecclesiastical experiment — the amorphous Synod on Synodality — hailed by progressives as unprecedented and damned by conservatives as a Trojan virus designed to subvert Catholic teaching.

STRANGE OMENS

Traditionalist Catholics will forever despise Francis for Traditionis Custodes — the pope’s guillotine on the Traditional Latin Mass, and his unrelenting diatribes against their “rigidity,” “backwardness” and toxic tendency to “safeguard the ashes” of the past.

Social media wags will persist in portraying him as a temperamental windsock: from slapping the hand of an Asian woman to flinging poisoned javelins at paleo-conservative priests frocked up in laced vestments, and zealous faithful engaged in evangelism.

Francis’s ascension to the throne of the fisherman was an anomaly. The waters of the Tiber parted to make way for him only because his predecessor threw in the pontifical towel.

The gods made their displeasure over this seemingly arbitrary act felt: Lightning struck St. Peter’s Basilica twice on February 11, 2013, the day Pope Benedict XVI resigned. A year later, a crow and seagull savagely attacked two doves Francis released from the iconic window of the Apostolic Palace.

OBJECTIVES

What was Bergoglio hoping to accomplish as the 266th Roman pontiff? His first greeting to the world was a homely Buona Sera; would he change Church substance along with style? “I hope you don’t regret this later,” he jokingly told cardinals at his inauguration dinner in March 2013.

The next day, he ditched the papal Mercedes with the license plate SCV1 for a standard-issue black saloon, dumped the ermine-trimmed mozzetta and gold pectoral cross, traded red shoes for black, and quit the apostolic palace for the Casa Santa Martha hostel.

For the media, it was love at first sight; the modern Francis was virtue-signaling the qualities of Francis of Assisi. It seemed like the pope’s honeymoon with the chattering classes would last forever, with the media devouring his daily soundbites that veered dangerously off script, especially during high-altitude press conferences on the papal plane.

Francis, ad libbing on how atheists would go to Heaven and the existence of a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, confirmed that his would be a papacy of improvisation — and, adventurous, perhaps even risky, innovation.

And then on July 29, 2013, during an press conference on the plane while flying back from Brazil, he uttered five little words that would become the signature of his papacy: “Who am I to judge?” he said when asked about gay priests in the Church.

CEMENTING HIS LIBERAL LEGACY

As his health continued to fail, Francis devoted his attention to creating the optimal conditions for his successor to seal his legacy. In a series of consistories, the pope nominated cardinal-electors who align with his agenda on LGBT rights, synodality, climate change, migrant issues, and social justice, most recently in October 2024.

I suspect that Francis’s greatest achievement (depending on where one sits on the question of papal supremacy) was to perform a Samson-like suicidal feat and bring the bloated concept of the papacy crashing down for the sake of ecumenical unity.

In June, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity released a 151-page document inelegantly titled “The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in Ecumenical Dialogues and Responses to the Encyclical Ut Unum Sint.”

The dossier is a time bomb carefully calibrated to keep ticking until it detonates the theory and practice of papal supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church. It totally reverses the supremacist claims of Pope Pius IX, who at Vatican I declared that papal supremacy and universal jurisdiction are “supported by the clear witness of Holy Scripture.”

Pius IX’s claims were hotly contested by Archbishop Peter Kenrick of St. Louis, Missouri, who demonstrated that most of the church fathers did not believe that the “rock” of which Jesus spoke in Matthew 16:18 was the Apostle Peter. While Pius IX claimed “the primacy of Peter over the whole Church,” Francis admits that “the Pope is not, by himself, above the Church; but within it as one of the baptized.”

Progressives will regard Francis’s last will and testament as an act of supreme humility for the sake of Christian unity. Conservatives will view it as a betrayal of the doctrine that exclusively defines Catholic uniqueness and its claims to be the one, true Church.

Francis has succeeded in bequeathing to Catholics something they never had: a hermeneutic of suspicion that will, from this point forth, no longer accept papal pronouncements as authoritative or definitive. Even Martin Luther never have dreamt of achieving such a monumental feat.

In the post-Francis church, the question “Is the pope Catholic?” will no longer be the punchline to a joke.

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.