Modern popes, for better or for worse, tend to be defined in soundbites.
John Paul II’s clarion call of “Be not afraid” became emblematic of his invitation to young Catholics to embrace their faith and his rallying of the West against the specter of international communism. Benedict XVI’s great theological career, and his term as a pope in the model of priest and professor, remains summed up in his simple declaration that Deus caritas est. For Francis, the world will likely remember, in the immediate weeks after his death anyway, his often quoted, though often misrepresented, motto of “who am I to judge?”
Uttered during one of his habitual in-flight press conferences in response to a question about gay clergy who sought to live their ministry and their lives faithful to the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, it became a shorthand for a pope committed more than anything to a radical posture of welcome – a “Vatican Council II pope,” he was dubbed in the media, dedicated to throwing open wide the Church’s doors to Catholics, and indeed to everyone, without censure or reservation about their complicated lives.
But if that is how the world saw Francis, those living with and within the bubble of the daily life of the world’s largest Church will remember a different kind of pope – a contradictory and mercurial pontiff who often appeared less like a sure helmsman of the bark of St. Peter and more like a man struggling to ride a horse bolting in several directions at once.
Few now remember that when he stepped onto the famous balcony over St. Peter’s Square in 2013, he emerged as a pope elected with a clear mandate, not to renew the faith but to reform a Vatican plagued by scandal and corruption.
By that measure, his legacy is easy to see, though harder to sum up.
Francis instituted wave after wave of financial and legal reform at the Vatican, while visibly turning on his own reformers, such that he reigned to see both the conviction of Cardinal Angelo Becciu, his former chief of staff, for financial crimes related to a London property scandal, and also the public defenestration of Libero Milone, the auditor who caught him.
If overt criminality in the Vatican is now much reduced, the Holy See is closer than ever to a full-blown liquidity crisis, if not actual bankruptcy.
For a pope who often railed against “doctors of the law,” he ironically proved to be one of the most prolific papal legislators in recent history – redrafting the Vatican constitution and revising the entire internal penal code of the Church. At the same time, he showed himself to be a confirmed scofflaw, often ignoring his own major legislative changes on matters as petty as the election of largely ceremonial positions, like the dean of the College of Cardinals, or as major as the prosecution of favored bishops when they were accused of sexually abusing their own clergy.
Major sexual abuse scandals involving bishops and cardinals led to a global summit and landmark legislation in 2019 – yet few of the new rules and none of the promises of transparency were brought to bear when friends of Francis, like Argentine Bishop Oscar Zanchetta, found themselves indicted for crimes of abuse.
For those – and they were many – who expected Francis to be the pope to break with centuries of Church teaching on issues like gay relationships or the role of women in the hierarchy, he proved himself an equally dramatic actor but unreliable figure.
In 2023 his doctrinal department published, to global headlines, authorization for the blessing of gay couples, only to then spend weeks walking it back, variously insisting that nothing had changed, that gay people could be blessed but never their unions, and that the entire Church in Africa had been granted an opt-out of the entire issue.
During his signature legacy project, a global, multi-year synod meant to usher in – as the saying always has it – “a new way of being Church,” Francis insisted that issues like women’s ordination and married priests were not up for discussion, while pointedly entrusting the project to some of the most vocal advocates for those causes.
While often invoking the sense of Vatican Council II’s call for a more global, decentralized way of “being Church,” Francis proved himself to be an often obsessive micro-manager, allowing his Vatican to police local parish weekly bulletins for the wrong (too traditional) kind of liturgy.
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.
Francis’s most favorable interpreters, myself among them, have long seen in him a pope with a great personal touch and an almost preternatural ability to communicate with the world on an emotional level. The hope and theory was his pontificate would, in the final reckoning, be appreciated as a time of re-scoring, rather than revolution – of setting the lyrics of the Church’s teachings to new music and new rhythms.
Instead, he penned not a new symphony but a violent cacophony, leaving behind him a Church more divided – geographically, theologically, and liturgically – than it has been in decades, and a Vatican teetering on the brink of insolvency.
Many might insist that it is too soon to judge the legacy of the man who himself famously withheld judgment. But others might recall his words in Paraguay in 2015, when he enjoined the crowd to “Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up.”
In his nearly 12 years as pope, Francis certainly made a mess. It’s now for someone else to help tidy it up.
The Wall Street Journal: The Rise of Conservative Catholics in MAGA
Across the country, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. Their ranks have been infused with the zeal of young, brainy converts like Vice President JD Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35. Vance spent Easter weekend at the Vatican, where he held a brief meeting with Pope Francis before Francis died Monday morning.
Some in the conservative movement were unhappy with the direction the Church took under Francis, who had advocated for social and economic justice. During his tenure, Francis stocked the College of Cardinals that will eventually determine his successor with loyalists who shared his more liberal outlook. Still, America is home to the world’s fourth-largest Catholic population, and it’s a big source of wealth for a Vatican under financial strain. And while the conservatives’ numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential—in both the Church and the nation.
They are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. There are echoes of their beliefs in the Trump administration’s policies—most recently, its introduction of sweeping tariffs. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets, like the Augustine Institute, to educate future cadres.
“Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the same path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity,” said David Deane, a theologian who gave a recent lecture on Catholicism and the new right. “The seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this.”
A landmark 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests carried out by the Catholic Project, a research initiative at Catholic University, confirmed this. Among those ordained since 2020, some 80% identified as “conservative/orthodox.” Those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a “virtual collapse.”
“Among priests, it’s a massive shift,” said Stephen P. White, the Catholic Project’s executive director, who views the conservative Catholic renewal as “a piece of the populism that seems to be spreading not just in the United States but over most of the Western world.”
The conservatives are bound together by a conviction that liberalism in its many guises—political, social, theological—has run aground. While it may have generated material wealth, they say, it has undermined communities and wrought the social “carnage” that President Trump invoked during his first inauguration in 2016.
“When They Go Low, You Gotta Dig For Oil”
“Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison,” said Bhavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters’ attention, where we’re stuck saying boring pablum. I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging — I’m a big fan of ‘dark woke.’”
“Dark woke,” for now, is a meme that lives mostly online. But its roots have been sown throughout the party for years. In the waning days of the Biden administration, memes about “Dark Brandon” often referred to the version of the former president that conservatives most feared. Outside the party, the “dirtbag left,” the term for a cohort of leftists provocateurs who eschew civility politics, inspired headlines for their unrestrained derision of conservatives and liberals alike.
Every so often, these political currents would come to a head. During a meeting of the House Oversight Committee last May, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, found herself in a spat with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, after Ms. Greene made a jibe about “fake eyelashes” that the chair, Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, declined to prosecute under the committee’s rules on decorum.
“Mr. Chair, a point of order,” Ms. Crockett said. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
Ms. Crockett’s moment became a meme. It was printed on T-shirts. It got her an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel. And now, Democratic strategists say, it has become a perfect example of “dark woke.”
The reach of Ms. Crockett’s comment seemed to show that Democratic clapbacks could permeate into cultural spaces, giving the leaders who delivered them new platforms to spread their ideas. To a new, younger generation of Democratic staffers, this was exactly the link they had seen their opponents exploiting for years.
“All these new staffers, we grew up seeing extremely vile content overflowing from right-wing spaces into regular spaces,” said Caleb Brock, 23, the director of digital strategy for Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. “We’re ready to combat that by any means necessary.”
Democrats have looked within their own ranks. Chi Ossé, the Brooklyn councilman whose meme-fluent, sometimes confrontational presence on X has put him on the radar of national Democratic organizers, says he was recently asked to help the Senate Democratic Caucus with their social media strategy.
“Being able to use this strategy of being raw and unapologetic and unabashed about our beliefs is something our base really wants,” Mr. Ossé said. He referred to a quote by one of Mayor Eric Adams’s advisers, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who said, “When they go low, you gotta dig for oil.”
Evangelicals Huge For Trump’s 2024 Win
Ryan Burge Graphs About Religion:
It should come as no surprise that evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in 2024, because they gave him a tremendous amount of support in both 2016 and 2020. But, it’s noteworthy that Trump continued to make inroads among evangelicals - his share of the vote went from 70% to 75% in the last three elections. The Democrats have not done well at all with evangelicals. Their best effort was in 2012 when Obama got 30% of their votes. But Harris did slightly worse than Biden - 23% vs 25%. But it’s notable that Biden got the same share of the evangelical vote as Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Of course, Trump’s real base of support is specifically among white evangelicals. In 2016, Trump’s vote share was no different than McCain in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012 - about 77%. But in 2020, Trump ran up the score just a bit - garnering 81% of the white evangelical vote. The data from 2024 says he continued to win over the white evangelical vote at 83% - the highest on record.
However the breakdown of the non-white evangelical vote may tell the story of the 2024 election when it comes to religion. Republicans have historically struggled with this group of voters. In 2008, Obama enjoyed an 18 point advantage and that expanded dramatically in the next couple of election cycles. In 2012, the non-white evangelical vote was D+30 and it was D+25 in 2016. But then in 2020, Trump managed to make some inroads - getting back to 40% and narrowing the gap to 18 points. But look at 2024 - a huge shift. The non-white evangelical vote was essentially split in 2024 - Harris 49% and Trump at 48%. Harris lost at least ten points with this constituency - a huge blow.
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Quote
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what you call remembrance is the last part of pleasure.”
— C.S. Lewis