Pope Francis: A new direction for the church

“Is the pope Catholic?” said Candida Moss in TheDailyBeast.com. That’s what church traditionalists must be anxiously wondering after their new spiritual leader used a lengthy interview last week to question the Vatican’s “obsession” with sexual morality. Expanding on his famous “Who am I to judge?” line on homosexuality, Pope Francis said the church “cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” referring with evident disdain to “authoritarian” decision-making and “small-minded rules.” Instead, he said, the church must bring Jesus Christ’s mercy to a “wounded” world, and comfort, not condemn, people. He even admitted that church teaching had been mistaken in the past. “We must be humble,’’ he said. “We grow in the understanding of the truth.” No wonder Catholic conservatives are cringing, said William Saletan in Slate.com. On nearly every issue, including sex, the role of women, and economic inequality, “Pope Francis is a flaming liberal.”

Traditionalists can rest easy, said George Weigel in NationalReview.com. Our new pope wants to return the church to its roots in “evangelization and conversion,” and to win people over, Catholics must first introduce them to the profound beauty of Christ’s love. Francis has made it clear he “believes and professes all that the Catholic Church believes to be true about the moral life,” including the right to life from conception until natural death, and the proper role of human sexuality. Indeed, days after his interview he denounced abortion as a symptom of our “throwaway culture.” Some may find it “jarring” that Francis is so “radically Christ-centered” in his emphasis on love and forgiveness. But he won’t be making doctrinal changes “that would be approved by the editorial board of The New York Times.”

True—Francis will probably not change actual church doctrine, said John L. Allen Jr. in the National Catholic Reporter. But for Catholic conservatives, “it must now seem powerfully obvious that this isn’t their pope.” You have to wonder: “Did the other cardinals know what kind of priest they were voting for?” asked Amy Davidson in NewYorker.com. Francis has spurned the Vatican’s elegant trappings, denounced the global economic system for worshipping “a god called money,” and in his most radical statement, said God “reveals himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths.” In other words, the church must evolve along with history. “This looks like an unpredictable moment in Rome.”

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