Pope Francis in 2024 – a year in God’s time
His biographer says the Pope is alive, alert, calm and very much in charge. His greatest test in the year ahead will be how successfully he is able to hold the tension between truth and mercy.
When you consider that this time last year Francis’ opponents were salivating over what they were convinced was his imminent resignation, 2023 now looks like a remarkable one for the Pope and his reforms. Expect no less from 2024, a year in which Francis will be even more prophetic in speaking out against war and populism, and in defence of migrants and the care of Creation, and will press home, above all, the pastoral conversion of the Church.
The opposition to his pontificate remains furious and well-resourced, but is these days mostly confined to small circles in mutual disarray. In January 2023, those circles were busy mobilising in Rome, anticipating a conclave. Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Benedict XVI’s secretary, published his memoir about the former pope even as Benedict lay in state in St Peter’s Basilica, taking catty swipes at Francis and disclosing private conversations intended to exaggerate differences between the two popes’ visions.
Then the 81-year-old Australian cardinal George Pell, who died suddenly after hip surgery at a Rome hospital, was outed as the anonymous author of a vicious anti-Francis “Demos” pamphlet that had circulated even as Pell was praising Francis in public. The Spectator then ran an article that he had given them, deploring the global synod on synodality as a “toxic nightmare”. Shortly afterwards, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the doctrine chief sacked by Francis back in 2017 for undermining the Pope’s teaching on marriage and family, published an acidic book laying out, in essence, an alternative pontificate to Francis’.
Rumours had been circulating that the Pope had a condition that was being covered up, and was only waiting to bury Benedict before standing down. The missives of Gänswein, Müller and Pell were designed to shape a conclave expected last March. Asked by journalists on his way back from South Sudan in February whether the death of Benedict had created a rift in the Church, Francis said: “I think Benedict’s death was instrumentalised by people wanting to score points. The people who instrumentalise such a good person are people without ethics. They are people who belong to a party, not to the Church.” The Pope didn’t have to spell out whom he was talking about.
In the course of 2023 his patience ran out with many members of the “party”. After sending Gänswein back to Germany, he ordered an investigation into a notorious radical-traditionalist, pro-Trump bishop in Texas with a noxious anti-papal Twitter feed. The removal of Joe Strickland as Bishop of Tyler was followed in November by the removal of Vatican privileges from the US traditionalist cardinal Raymond Burke, who met the Pope in the library of the Apostolic Palace last week. Media reports said that Francis had moved against his critics. But he doesn’t mind critics. What he objects to is their bad faith and the resources they put into turning Catholics against Rome, fomenting schism.
The opposition manoeuvres in early 2023 had a consolidating effect on Francis. In tenth-anniversary interviews in March, he made clear that he had never considered resigning. While it was always possible for popes to stand down for health reasons, the papacy was ad vitam, for life. He also opted to be more transparent about his age and health, to prevent rumours and speculation. Without trying to hide the limitations his frailty imposes, these days he happily discusses his funeral arrangements while making clear that for now he is fine. But many noticed an acceleration in tempo last year, an awareness that time is short. He knows that the desire to reverse his pontificate is still strong in some quarters and that the opposition seeks to ally the Church to national-populist culture-war campaigns, which are growing in strength.
In the conservative Catholic mind, the papacy should be leading the culture war against liberal agendas on abortion, gay rights, same-sex marriage, the trans movement, ecology and migration. Francis knows that yoking the Church to the culture war in this way would be disastrous, and that radical traditionalism does not speak for ordinary Catholics, whose voice has been heard through the synod on synodality. In 2024, expect more moves against those who claim a special charism of authority above that of St Peter’s successor.
Francis is determined to go in the opposite direction, to align the Church’s teaching and theology more with the mainstream “sense of faith of the faithful”. This is not a liberalisation of doctrine but the embrace of pastoral prudence and discernment. Most Catholics recognise in gay relationships (and the call for same-sex marriage) not self-indulgent hedonism but the same opening to God-given virtues (fidelity, loyalty, love) they see in Christian marriage. They might continue to believe the Church’s teaching that sex is ordered to marriage between a man and a woman, open to the begetting and raising of children. But – at least in the West – they are scandalised less by same-sex unions than by the shunning of people in loving relationships. To them, the militant conservative Christian party seems pharisaical, content to ignore the gospel of mercy in order to pursue its war on relativism.
What Francis is reflecting is this desire for a Church that is attentive to the realities of people’s lives. The global summary of the national synod syntheses in October 2022 quoted the England and Wales report’s dream of “a Church that more fully lives a Christological paradox: boldly proclaiming its authentic teaching while at the same time offering a witness of radical inclusion and acceptance through its pastoral and discerning accompaniment”. The call has perdured through the synod’s various stages. The working document of the October assembly of bishops in Rome distilled the same idea by quoting Psalm 85, asking how the promise that “love and truth will meet” can be made credible.
Holding the truth-mercy polarity in tension, paying attention to both poles, is the object of the “pastoral conversion” Francis spoke of in Evangelii Gaudium. He spelled it out at World Youth Day in Lisbon last August with his reminder that the Church was for all – “todos, todos, todos!” – and that its welcome was not conditional on a person first changing. Instead, he has explained, the Christian community welcomes everyone, and each person finds their “way forward”, growing step by step in prayer and in dialogue with “pastoral workers”.
Since Lisbon, Francis has been able to press the pedal on pastoral conversion because he is flanked, finally, by a theologian worthy of this pontificate. In appointing the Argentine theologian and longtime ally Victor Manuel (“Tucho”) Fernández to head the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, Francis has finally been able to continue the project begun by Amoris Laetitia in 2016, whose key sections were drafted by Fernández. That project, taking the Church out of the ghetto of beleaguered moralism while avoiding the temptation to accommodate Catholic doctrine to liberal modernity, is for Francis key to the Church’s future. It is not driven by a search for “relevance”, as his conservative critics love to claim, but by the embrace of discernment rather than moralism as the Catholic modus operandi, vivendi and cogitandi. Discernment demands pastoral action, priests and lay people who listen to and accompany the wounds and dreams of humanity. In his appointment letter, Francis asked Cardinal Fernández to develop a way of thinking that would show God as loving, liberating and forgiving, always inviting us into fraternal service, wherever we are in our journey.
Fernández has been doing this through a stream of clarifications underpinned by common-sense pastoral theology. They urge pastoral openness (transsexuals may receive Baptism, be godparents and witness a marriage, for example) while stressing “pastoral prudence”. None has made more waves than Fiducia Supplicans, a 5,000-word declaration “on the pastoral meaning of blessings” of couples in “irregular” unions – cohabiting couples, the divorced and remarried, those in polygamous relationships, same-sex couples. Spontaneous blessings in private can be given by pastors in response to requests from same-sex couples, as long as they are not seeking approval of their union, for such requests reflect an opening to God’s grace, which is never refused. The document moves the Vatican’s official position considerably on from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s March 2021 blanket refusal on the grounds that “the Church cannot bless sin”, which Francis was deeply unhappy about. But the new declaration also reflects his disapproval of the Flemish and German bishops’ advocacy of “approved prayers” and even, in the German case, of liturgies, which de facto create a pseudo-marriage. Although some bishops – particularly in Africa – have rejected Fiducia Supplicans, most across the world have welcomed it as a judicious holding together of truth and mercy. Nevertheless, the culture warriors are already painting it as “ambiguous” and a surrender to liberal modernity.
How will all this play in the run-up to the concluding synod assembly in October? The Pope will hope that Fiducia Supplicans will forestall the enervating polarisation that has so distracted the Churches in the Anglican communion in recent decades, and had been leading to ill-natured clashes on same-sex relationships between Church leaders in Poland and Hungary on the one hand and Germany, Belgium and Holland on the other. But African Church leaders, angry that they have not been listened to, might use the concluding assembly to complain. And if the Germans and Dutch are allowed to dig in against Fernández’s calls to them to pause the introduction of “official” same-sex blessings, it will inflame conservative suspicions that the Pope cares less about the truth dimension of the truth-mercy polarity.
The fallout from Fiducia Supplicans and the direction of the German Church’s “synodal path” will be key tests of the synodal conversion to which the Pope is calling Catholics. The focus of the synod process that concludes in October is synodality itself, specifically, how ordinary pastoral activity on every level can be made more inclusive and open, and how bishops, priests and lay people can better share responsibility for the mission of the Church. The real test of its success will be whether the assembly’s delegates end up with a renewed faith that the tensions and differences in the Church can be fruitfully settled through synodal processes, or whether they choose to resort to wordly power moves – campaigning to install a pope who will impose “their” agenda. The challenge to listen, exchange, discern and ultimately to trust the wisdom of the Church will test both those who fear the synod as a liberalising agent and those who fear that it is a means of reinforcing the status quo.
Whatever happens in October, the next conclave, whether sooner or later, will take place against the largest consultation process of ordinary Catholics in the Church’s history. Francis’ bid to root the authority of the Church more clearly in the sensus fidei fidelium has, in that sense, already born fruit. In age of growing distrust and rejection of democratic institutions as remote and unaccountable, and at a time of polarisation, populism and post-truth, what the world’s largest global institution does to re-order its internal culture through listening and consensus is being watched carefully, not least because the Church, like the world, is increasingly multi-polar and diverse.
So, too, will the Pope be closely watched and listened to as the world order continues to disintegrate. About 70 countries will go to the polls this year, and national-populists are expected to increase their share of the vote. The UN and Nato have been unable to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine, or Israel from killing 20,000 mostly women and children in its response to the 7 October attack by Hamas. If Donald Trump wins in May and withdraws the US from both those bodies, we may see a slide into world war. The Pope’s constant, prophetic voice, insisting that war as a means of securing objectives is always a failure, will continue to earn him the enmity of religious and political leaders alike. But he already looks like the only world leader who sees beyond the justifications for war to the truth about war itself as driven by a death-trap logic and arms sales.
In 2023, Francis went to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, Hungary, Lisbon, Mongolia and Marseille, but lung inflammation prevented at the last minute his attending COP28 in Dubai. His overseas trips will be shorter and probably fewer in 2024. He has spoken of a trip to Belgium in September to mark the founding of the world’s oldest Catholic university at Leuven, and he is looking into a trip to Polynesia. But the highlight will be Argentina: not confirmed yet, but very likely, perhaps after Easter.
The gradual implementation of the Curia’s new constitution will continue: many curial dicasteries are waiting for new heads and mergers. But the Vatican already looks and feels a very different place to what it was in 2013. The pre-Christmas court conviction of (among others) Cardinal Giovanni Becciu, who was sentenced to five years for his role in a London property investment scandal, appeared to prove what many have doubted – that the Vatican judiciary has the capacity to prosecute complex white-collar crimes. But Becciu’s appeal may yet prove the opposite: it was a long, convoluted and at times farcical case, and the conviction may not hold. Equally important for the credibility of the Vatican’s legal authority will be the outcome of the abuse investigation into the Slovenian former Jesuit Marco Rupnik, accused by dozens of adult women.
Francis has declared 2024 a year of prayer in advance of the 2025 Jubilee, which will be on the theme of hope. It all feels quite fin du pontificat. But the Pope is alive, alert, calm and very much in charge. He never stops working, and never loses his joy. For as long as God gives him the strength and the astuteness to carry on, he will work to lay sound foundations for a synodal, pastoral, missionary Church capable of carrying us through this change of era. He knows that God’s time, the kairós – which doesn’t map neatly onto the chronos of our time – is where he needs to keep his focus.
Austen Ivereigh’s new book, First Belong to God: On Retreat with Pope Francis, will be published next month by Messenger Publications.
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