The Woke Gospel of Pope Francis

He was populist, woke, and Marxist — but always pure of heart

Pope Francis died yesterday and the most beautiful thing I read about him in the quiet hours that followed was something the writer Jarvis Best posted:

Pope Francis said during an interview one time that he fell asleep during prayer. The interviewer asked him whether that was allowed, and he said that fathers always love it when their children fall asleep in their arms. That always stuck with me. Rest in peace.

This may be the most touching remark I’ve ever heard attributed to him, and a lovely metaphor for death. In fact, I love it even more than what he really said:

When I go to pray, a few times I fall asleep. Saint Therese said the Father likes it when one falls asleep. There is Psalm 129, 130. The little one that says that I am in front of God, as a child in his father’s arms. This is one of the many ways in which the name of God is sanctified. To feel as a child in his hands.

As with so much that is said in the memory of Pope Francis, what rings loudest is perhaps not the fact of who he was but the version that gets passed around by those who loved him most. He is remembered as a loving and gentle soul who lived a simple life and walked among the poor. And all of that is true. But to really honor him, we must also remember not merely the myth that lingers, but the man who lived.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1936, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the son of Italian refugees who had fled the reign of Mussolini. Young Bergoglio studied chemistry before entering the Jesuit order in 1958, where he kept a simple life and worked among the poor. He soon became the archbishop of Buenos Aires, then a cardinal, and in 2013, he was elected to become the first Jesuit pope and the first pope from the Americas.

As a sign that his papacy would focus on compassion, he renamed himself in honor of St. Francis of Assisi — and God bless him, he lived up to the name.

Pope Francis died on Easter Monday at the age of 88, hours after appearing one final time in St. Peter’s Square. He passed away in his residence at Domus Sanctae Marthae, reportedly from a stroke. Now, after the novemdiales or “nine days” of mourning that accompany the passing of a pope, the conclave will elect a new bishop of Rome. But whomever they select, that person will assume leadership of a Church that did not exist before Pope Francis slipped on his red leather shoes.

But to understand the legacy of the man, you have to understand the context in which he emerged, as well as the internal Vatican politics that made his rise possible.

Pope Francis was a populist, progressive pope and the utter opposite of his predecessor Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, or Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger had a profound impact on Catholic doctrine during his time as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog. He defended absolute truth and orthodoxy and opposed the idea that all beliefs are equally valid, famously calling this a “dictatorship of relativism.” He saw the Church as a moral authority in a world of lost sheep, rather than merely a spiritual community to comfort the weak, and fought efforts to modernize or “water down” Church teachings to follow popular culture. Instead, he believed the Church should lead culture.

This tension was captured in the film The Two Popes, in which Anthony Hopkins plays Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce plays Pope Francis. In one scene, Hopkins warns Pryce, “A Church that marries the spirit of the age...” and Pryce finished the sentence, “Yes, yes, will be widowed in the next.”

As pope, Benedict took special aim at liberation theology, a movement that uses Marxist analysis to interpret the teachings of Jesus Christ as a call to liberate the poor and oppressed from unjust social, political, and economic conditions. There’s also black liberation theology, feminist liberation theology, Palestinian liberation theology — the same cast of characters you know from the world of woke Marxism, except these are their Christian cousins.

Benedict feared the subversion of Catholic doctrine at the hands of woke actors, not to mention communists. He worried not only about what this would mean for the Church, but what it could mean for Western society overall. He issued official condemnations, such as the Libertatis Nuntius of 1984, silencing or disciplining prominent liberation figures such as the Brazilian priest and Marxist teacher Leonardo Boff, who openly praised the communist dictatorships of Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China. When Benedict formally condemned Boff, the communist apologist accused Benedict of “religious terrorism.”

Pope Benedict XVI also silenced the Peruvian priest and Marxist philosopher Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation helped establish liberation theology throughout Latin America and who claimed that Marxism is “simply the best theory available for ensuring that theology is adequately contextual.” Gutiérrez wrote at length in pro-Marxist, anti-capitalist terms, spoke often about “the bourgeois,” cited Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as noble figures, and felt that the project of Christianity and the project of decolonizing the West were the same.

Pope Benedict XVI, on the other hand, saw communism as antithetical to the teachings of Christ and, though communism paid lip service to the needs of the poor, he believed Marxism and atheistic materialism were failed ideologies that had proven themselves distinctly harmful to humanity.

But his campaign against the Marxist subversion of the Church was reframed by his critics as an imperialist Old World retrenchment of outmoded traditionalism over the needs of the brown and black poor people of the Global South. In the end, he lost the battle and control of the Curia. Indeed, his own butler was arrested for stealing and leaking papers. One strike against him was that he was naively good faith, an intellectual who believed having the facts and arguing the point was good enough. In other words, unlike John Paul II, he did not seem to fully understand his role was as much that of a politician as a spiritual leader. Or at least, he didn’t play politics well.

The other strike against him was the existence of a “deep Church,” if you will, a network of woke cardinals who wanted him out so they could install a progressive, if not openly Marxist, pope. Foremost among them was the infamous St. Gallen Group, a.k.a. “the Mafia,” so named because they regularly met in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and so nicknamed because they were ruthless in achieving their agenda. Their members included the group’s spiritual leader, the Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who has been dubbed “the pope who never was” because of his almost papal influence within Vatican politics. What kind of influence, specifically? Martini was the progressive counterweight to Pope John Paul II’s more traditional approach.

Other members of the St. Gallen Group included Cardinal Godfried Danneels, whose legacy has been tarnished by sex scandals and who was a close friend of Gutiérrez, indeed he was the man who helped block Gutiérrez’s formal condemnation. Other members, such as Bishop Ivo Fürer and Cardinal Walter Kasper, were arguably less extreme and more interested in moderate reforms concerning attitudes around gay members of the Church, divorce, celibacy, and so on. But they all worked together, and in the end, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in 600 years.

In the 2013 papal conclave that followed, the key influencers and power brokers were St. Gallen members, including Danneels, Kasper, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of the United Kingdom. Thus, the Argentine son of Italian immigrants, Jorge Bergoglio, became Pope Francis. But how closely did Pope Francis align with liberation theology and the Marxist subversion of the Church?

The theology of Pope Francis was primarily rooted in a pastoral, Jesuit tradition that emphasized mercy over judgment and personal encounter over ideology. Instead of eternal truth, he valued lived experience and interpreted the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, especially its call to engage the modern world, through a Latin American lens shaped by poverty, dictatorship, and yes, Marxist analysis.

In contrast to the tradition of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Pope Francis believed in moral relativism, that culture should lead, and that the Church should provide a community of comfort rather than a rock of moral guidance in a storm of lost meaning. When asked if there was a gay lobby in the Vatican, he famously replied, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” This was praised for its tolerance, and few bothered to notice he had dodged the question.

As for his misguided relativism, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in which Muslim terrorists murdered 12 people over a cartoon of Muhammad, Pope Francis said that it is wrong to kill in the name of God, but added, “You cannot provoke, you cannot insult other people’s faith, you cannot mock it. Freedom of speech is a right and a duty that must be displayed without offending.”

That perspective is not only wrong, but immoral. Especially given the context. Another major criticism he faced early on had to do with sex abuse scandals. Though many of the sex abuses of children took place under Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI had pushed to swiftly defrock abusive priests and met with victims, whereas Pope Francis pursued a course of forgiveness and reform. Benedict sought to centralize abuse cases in the Vatican so that it would be easier to defrock abusive priests, and in fact, he defrocked nearly 400 in just two years. But Francis was less judicial, emphasizing mercy and rehabilitation, which critics saw as overly soft on abusers.

To his credit, Pope Francis did eventually defrock former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — a sitting cardinal at the time, making this a rare and historic act. He also created the Vos Estis Lux Mundi law in 2019, mandating accountability even for bishops, and shut down entire orders and groups accused of abuse, such as Sodalitium in Peru. But he was initially slow to act, and his reform talk is awfully similar to that of social justice activists who stress “restorative justice” for the offenders rather than justice for the victims.

And yes, Pope Francis was a liberation theologian. Indeed, one of the first things he did in office as pope was to invite Gutiérrez to meet with him. Specifically, he belonged to the Argentine branch of liberation theology known as Teología del Pueblo, which is more populist and less focused on ideology. It also rejects the Marxist call to revolution and emphasizes cultural over class identity. But it is not entirely severed from its Marxist roots, indeed just last year, Pope Francis claimed that Christians, Marxists, and communists have a common mission.

Now, looking at the likely hopefuls soon to be announced in the coming days, I fear that there is no turning back for the Church. The last 13 years under Pope Francis have set the Church down a path from which it may never return. And look, I have welcomed many of the changes. I agree with large parts of Pope Francis’ efforts to modernize the Church and push it more left. But I also reject the demonization of Benedict XVI, who is woefully under-appreciated.

I almost did not attend university myself, because I had instead planned to become a Jesuit monk. The idea of spending a lifetime immersed in contemplative study, and teaching the public what I learned, felt like my true calling. I later became a university lecturer and a journalist, so I don’t think I strayed far from the path. But the point is, I was happier than most to see a Jesuit pope. But I had grown up with the anti-communist Pope John Paul II and appreciated the conservatism of Pope Benedict XVI, and did not want to see the Church move away from their contributions.

What I perhaps value most about Pope Francis is simply the man himself, rather than his theology. At a time when the Church had grown distant and bureaucratic, Pope Francis was a new kind of shepherd. A pope who rode the bus, carried his own bag, paid his own hotel bill. He kissed the feet of prisoners, embraced the disfigured, and slipped out at night to feed the homeless. He welcomed the outcast, chastised the powerful, and lived not in a palace but a guesthouse. He was the leader of the Church, but also a dissident voice inside it. Theologically, I reject his views. But he was a dissident also in his everyday practice, and set the very best kind of example.

In closing, let us consider his reference at the top of this essay to St. Therese of Lisieux, the French nun popularly known as the Little Flower, which comes from her autobiography Story of a Soul:

I am far from being a Saint … the fact that I often fall asleep during meditation, or while making my thanksgiving, should appall me. But I am not appalled. I bear in mind that little children are just as pleasing to their parents asleep as awake, and that doctors put their patients to sleep when performing operations, and that “God knows our frame. He remembers we are but dust” (Ps. 103:14).

Whatever we think of the politics of his papacy or the political machinations that made it possible, Pope Francis was a shepherd who loved his flock and lived an honest life. He was philosophically misguided, but pure of heart. His legacy is therefore complex. He helped along the Marxist subversion of yet another aspect of our society, the Catholic Church itself.

But he also harbored in his heart the deepest love for people, all people, always. For that, I choose to remember him with some grace, and I like to think of him sleeping in the silent prayer of God’s embrace, where we will all go to rest our heads one day.

The Lord be with you.