In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion columnist David French speaks with the writers and Catholics David Gibson and Leah Libresco Sargeant about the legacy of Pope Francis’ leadership in an age of sharp social division.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David French: I’m David French. I’m an Opinion columnist at The Times, where I write about law, politics and religion. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve always admired Pope Francis. He was empathetic. He was compassionate. He cared for the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society.
But I also knew that he’d become a bit of a lightning rod within the church, both because of his own statements and decisions, and because he was pope during a particularly divisive time in world history. And, of course, the church itself struggled with its own sharp divides over everything from gay rights to women’s rights to the traditional Latin Mass.
Pope Francis came into office promising to make a mess and to shake things up. So, to talk about how that played out in a fractured world, I’m here today with David Gibson and Leah Libresco Sargeant. David is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and he once covered the Vatican as a journalist. Leah is a writer and author of the upcoming book “Dignity of Dependence.”
David and Leah, thank you so much for being here.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Thank you for having me.
David Gibson: Great to be here.
French: Let’s just start with your own personal reflection.
I’m very curious, how are each of you going to remember Pope Francis as a spiritual leader and as a person?
Libresco Sargeant: I think of him first as someone with such a gift for the personal and pastoral.
When he became pope, I think a lot of us, including me, were really seized by particular details of him taking the bus like a normal person, settling his own hotel bill, wanting to live simply and close to other people.
And I think we saw throughout his papacy that he was always at his best when he was confronted by an individual and had the opportunity almost to be an ordinary parish pastor to them, alongside being the pope. Bringing that heart for individuals to the papacy was an enormous gift.
At the same time, I think he really struggled as an institutionalist, both to reform some of the abuses — financial and sexual — within the church and to leave a legacy that the following pope can build upon.
Gibson: I’d second much of that. His real legacy and his identity were as a pastor, as Leah said, and I think that’s how he connected with people. That’s how he connected with me to a degree. I was there in St. Peter’s Square on the March evening in 2013 when he was elected. He walks out on the balcony and you’re wondering: What’s he going to be like? Who is he? And he just says those simple words: “Bueno será.” It was so affecting.
But then before he blesses the crowd, he asks the crowd to bless him. There are so many stories like that that went on in those initial days that I think cemented that feeling.
He always asked you to pray for him. He said, I’ll pray for you, but please pray for me. This is a hard job. And I think that’s very much who he was.
I think it’s important to remember that vibe shift, if you will, that shift in the Catholic Church, to the pope as pastor, is something that’s been going on for half a century or more since John the 23rd, and Francis accelerated that.
French: I’m an evangelical Protestant. I did not grow up in the South, to say the least, immersed in a Catholic world. The role of the pope was always a little bit mysterious to non-Catholic listeners, or to people who are on the outside looking in.
How would you describe the role of the pope right now in the life of an ordinary Catholic? And did Pope Francis change that at all?
Libresco Sargeant: I think one of the challenges is that mass and immediate media has changed the role of a pope in a way that’s a real strain for ordinary Catholics.
In my own media diet, I try to get, if not all the way to the life of a medieval peasant, a little closer, because a medieval peasant does not track which cardinals are entering into the conclave. They don’t know who they are. It was actually a serious sin to bet on a conclave.
And an ordinary Catholic doesn’t usually get breaking news reporting of what the pope said on a plane to an individual. Something that’s been a real challenge has been the flattening of the pope’s communication.
For example, a pastoral comment to a particular individual in front of him goes around the globe in seconds, often in sketchy translations, as guidance, in a binding way for the whole church. And that’s really shaken people’s confidence in what is it that the Catholic Church teaches. I think it has made it hard for Pope Francis to do what he does best — speak to individuals as individuals — when everything he says is then picked up and reported as a teaching.
Gibson: I’d pick up on a couple things Leah said. One, it’s important to realize that historically speaking, you’ve had 266 popes over almost 2000 years. And for the vast majority of that time, nobody knew what the name of the current pope was.
French: Yeah, absolutely.
Gibson: And, again, I grew up a Billy Graham evangelical, and John Paul and Billy Graham got along together, which shocked my evangelical mother. The first time I ever came to Madison Square Garden was for a Billy Graham crusade, as we called them back then.
But again, the pope started traveling around. Popes had never traveled around before, and they became the world’s pastor. And Catholics love that and were so proud of that. That’s terrific, but it has real downsides because your actual parish and your actual pastor are where you live out your faith. You can’t live out your faith through any pope, no matter how wonderful you think they are.
French: How much authority does the pope have over church doctrine?
A lot of the debates from the outside appear to be that the selection of the pope could potentially result in changes in millennia of church teaching. But it’s not necessarily the case that the pope can just walk in the door and change church teaching. It’s a bit more complicated than that, as I understand it. And yet at the same time, you can’t minimize the role of the pope in the doctrine of the church.
Help a non-Catholic listener understand the pope’s authority over church doctrine and how that plays into the theological and cultural fights around the pope.
Libresco Sargeant: The pope is a steward of what’s been handed on to him. He’s someone taking care of the deposit of faith and the faithful in a tender way at his best. But he is taking care of something that exists. He’s not the author of the faith.
What you see is not that the papacy works the way the presidency does, where someone comes in, signs executive orders, flips things on, flips things off. There are things that can change, but the church has had one truth all through the centuries. How do we share that truth with the world when there are different errors or different questions people are posing to us?
You can think about the start of the church being a time of asking: Who is God? And then answering that question. After that, tensions about who Christ is within the church.
Today, a lot of the questions that the church speaks to in a relatively secular world are: Who is man? Who is woman? What does it mean to be a human being? And I think Pope Francis spoke well to questions about what he called the throwaway culture, where the world is often asking the question: Which people aren’t people? Which people is it permissible to kill? In the womb? At the end of life? Because of disability?
Gibson: David, I think you really put your finger on the issue. And you, as an evangelical, have understandable difficulty comprehending the role of the authority of the pope. What in the church can change? What cannot change? Well, you’re in good company because Catholics themselves don’t understand that, so don’t worry about it.
We get a lot of these things conflated, and we have issues of dogma, doctrine, discipline. These things have various levels of authority. The pope has supreme authority in the Catholic Church, and it’s supremely limited. There are certain things that the pope can’t do and he won’t do.
Unity is so important. No pope wants to divide the church. A council that comes together, as in Vatican II — people might be most familiar with in the 1960s — that’s when you’re most likely to see actual changes.
So it’s a very slow process. But the question that you put your finger on is: Can the church change?
There’s an old joke: How many Catholics does it take to change a lightbulb? And they’re like: “Change? What do you mean change? We don’t change.”
French: We tell that same joke about Presbyterians, so ——
Gibson: Oh, really? [laughs]
The question really, to my mind, that Pope Francis made room for discussion on is: Can the church change? Yes, it does. Let’s be honest about it. How does the church change?
French: Some of the divides and the controversies are not just within the church, but are also where the church is reflecting divides and controversies outside the church. Because it’s living in a culture — a national culture in the United States and a world culture around the globe.
I want to bring up something that my colleague Ross Douthat wrote. He wrote this week about how Pope Francis may have signaled the end, or the decline, of the imperial papacy — that the institution of the church itself seems to, perhaps, be weakening, perhaps not.
There have been elements where some divisions have spilled out into public life, such as when Pope Francis raised the possibility of blessing same-sex unions. That led to strong pushback from bishops in Africa, for example.
What do you make of this analysis that perhaps the institution itself or the authority of the papacy itself might be in the process of weakening?
Gibson: It is in the process of weakening, but it’s been that way for centuries, and especially in that institutional model — that monarchical model is deliberately and intentionally going away.
It gets back to what we were talking about earlier, which is this great visibility and oversized presence of the pope within the Catholic Church in this past century. That has created an illusion that we have a command and control church where the pope says this and people do it.
That’s kind of the impression of Catholicism I grew up with, and that’s not really how it works, nor how it ought to work.
Pope Benedict 16th was very, very good on the primacy of conscience. Even the church, he said, should not violate your conscience. You need to make these choices out of freedom.
I think the authority of the pope, even over the centuries, has been exaggerated. There are kings and princes and paupers who didn’t do what the pope said, no matter what. No matter how many bulls he issued. So I do think Ross is right. But I think it’s sort of part of a process of the church shifting away from not just an institution, but also a kind of default culture and community.
That’s the more troubling part, I think. Losing that sense of culture and community that led people to act organically in a sense of faith. That whole command and control thing of edicts coming down from on high is not a great way to operate, and it was always overrated.
Libresco Sargeant: This is where I want to return to that tension between Pope Francis’ gifts for the individual and his struggles as an institutionalist. Because when we talk about how Pope Francis is doing as pope, as the person in charge, we think about things like, when is he speaking in a way that people have to follow? And that really leaves out a lot of his role of corralling and managing and leading what is a large and complicated system of laws and banks and people and offices, where I think by his own measure, he fell short of what he wanted to do, and there’s been lasting harm in wounds as a result.
When Francis became pope, he said he wanted to lead a poor church for the poor. And one thing I’d really highlight is it is the poor who benefit most from a system of rules and processes that are transparent and predictable.
And I think in both the sexual abuse domain and the financial crimes domain, we really saw Pope Francis fail to offer a poor church for the poor. A church with clear, predictable rules applied transparently makes it easier for someone who is poor, who is dispossessed, who is marginalized, to come and ask for justice and believe they will have it heard.
I think we saw that very strongly in the case of Father Marko Rupnik, a repeated abuser of religious sisters who received kind of delayed consequences after delayed consequences, and remained in a position of influence in Rome. The religious sisters who he hurt didn’t get an audience with a pope. They didn’t get that personal touch that he excels at. But they also didn’t get the benefit of law because Pope Francis liked to operate informally. And that left less room for the poor to appeal and expect their appeal would be heard.
French: I think we are living in a really interesting time here in the United States. You have a lot of alliance and a lot of unity between theologically conservative Catholics and theologically conservative evangelicals. And this is something that has only kind of grown and deepened over the course of my lifetime. So coming from that theologically conservative perspective in the evangelical world, I’ve been exposed to a lot of critiques of Pope Francis.
It appears from my perspective that Pope Francis’ leadership impacted American Catholic conservatives in a way that was perhaps particularly provocative.
How do you see Francis’ leadership impacting the Catholic conservative community in the United States?
Libresco Sargeant: I think this is where it’s helpful to think about different gradations of what “conservative” means.
French: Yeah. Thank you for that.
Libresco Sargeant: Pope Francis is sometimes lauded by the press as a very liberal pope because of his pastoral outreach to people who are gay or lesbian or transgender. He cares a great deal about the environment. But when he talks about abortion he says it is like a mother hiring a hit man to kill her child.
He does not fit neatly into the liberal or conservative boxes of America. He can’t be claimed or owned by either political party.
However, the biggest tension is for folks who are deeply engaged in the church, who love the church and belong to more conservative parishes in the sense of the traditional Latin Mass in particular. To put my cards on the table, I’ve been to traditional Latin Mass a number of times, but I wasn’t really directly affected by his suspension of it in ordinary parish churches.
People who had found community, who felt like they loved the church, who were there for Jesus, they didn’t feel like they had any of the pastoral accompaniment that he extends to other people. That people who are fully outside the church or doubting the church get the really warm personal Pope Francis who says: “Look, I want to walk with you. I want to explore your questions, your doubts, and bring you fully in.”
And the people who were there every Sunday, who loved their community, also had some crazy people as part of their community, didn’t get any of that. They said, “You are the problem,” and it didn’t feel pastoral. It felt punitive and purely punitive; it didn’t feel paternal, either.
Gibson: David, I just want to get back to the taxonomy of conservative opposition, unrest, unease with Pope Francis. Part of it is, this Latin Rite Mass that the council and various popes since the 1960s have said: Look, this is a dinosaur that has to go away.
There are people who defend that Mass and are very passionate about it. They’re very small. But there are other conservatives — regular old political conservatives — who think Pope Francis, like the media says, is a liberal: He talks too much about the poor, he talks too much about migrants, et cetera, et cetera. Just old-fashioned, as a lot of Christians in America are.
There are also culture war conservatives who, for them, the main issues — abortion, contraception, gender issues, gay marriage, gay rights — should be the main things. And they think Francis has not been good enough on those.
I just want to cite — because data is always nice with these things — that Pew Research put out a comparative statistic that said that when Pope Francis took office, 84 percent of right-leaning Catholics, however you want to describe them, had a favorable view of the pope. In 2025, those numbers were down to 69 percent. When he took office in 2013, 77 percent of left-leaning Catholics had a favorable view of the pope. In 2025, this year, that was up to 88 percent.
In terms of the pope’s approval ratings, any president would envy those. The worst papal approval ratings are the best any president could ever hope for, but it also goes to the fact that they do call him the Holy Father.
He’s seen as a very grandfatherly figure. You saw this outpouring of support when Pope Francis was sick going into the hospital in February. He’s a spiritual leader above all, and people were united spiritually, across the spectrum. Even people outside the church really had an affection for him. They had a good thought for him.
In a sense, everybody’s like, “What’s going to happen if the pope doesn’t get back into the office and start running the church?” That’s not how it works, actually. But I think there’s like 2,800 people who work in the Vatican and there’re 1.4 billion Catholics around the world — that’s pretty hard to run. Even DOGE couldn’t run the federal government with that few people.
The pope is a symbol, but a potent symbol. Catholics believe symbols are really important. People love the pope for what he represents, but they don’t always follow what he says. That gives them a kind of liberty to say, “Oh, I love the pope — but I’m still going to do whatever I do.” You know, they always love the singer, but they don’t always like the song.
So those kinds of popularity numbers, they still do tell us something of a significant degradation.
French: So let’s move on to the “What now?” question. The conclave will commence; it’s going to be a black box of mystery until the decision is revealed. But I want to hear from both of you on, what are you hoping for and praying for in the next leader? And also, if you’re paying close attention to this process, are there any individuals to watch or any particular individuals who you think might emerge from the conclave?
Libresco Sargeant: David, I don’t bet on the papabili, and I don’t prognosticate about the papabile because for me, it’s like for alcohol for some people: I can’t touch it. Not a drop.
I pray for all of them, and I know that God will raise whoever he needs to for the purposes he has. But I don’t speculate on the horse race. What I pray for is just a man of great personal holiness and resilience, and with a certain amount of fearlessness to take on some of that sclerotic or informal law to make it so that we do have a poor church for the poor that protects them through process as well as through pastoral accompaniment.
I also pray for someone who did one thing that Pope Francis did: when he met with John Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Boehner resigned the day after meeting him with tears in his eyes and a whole new outlook on life. I would like a pope who is a little frightening for world leaders to meet with, because they don’t know what might happen.
Will they go in for a photo op and come out crying, with a whole new sense of how to live their life? I want there to be a little tension when someone goes in for a photo op with the pope because he just might beckon them into a new life. That’s what I want.
Gibson: Well, JD Vance is still a vice president and he met with Pope Francis the day before Francis died. So I don’t know if that Boehner magic was still enduring. But, David, I think you can grade different levels of papal expertise by how willing they are as a commentator to pick the next pope.
If you do that, the fool’s errand, and I empathize with Leah — what you want in a pope and you know the danger of picking the horse race, but the cardinals don’t have that luxury. This is their one job — to go in and vote for the next pope, and they go in there and they have to choose among their number. There are about 135 of them. They’re all gathering now in Rome as we speak, and they’re going to begin something called the general congregations.
As they talk about different candidates, they don’t know each other. This is the real, I think, key dynamic that people need to understand about the College of Cardinals. It’s seen as an old boys’ club, but it’s actually the opposite: They don’t know each other.
These next couple of weeks are critical for them to get a sense of who each other is. You’re making the most important vote you could possibly make in the church, and they need to get to know each other. So that’s what’s happening now.
French: So there’s about 1.3, 1.4 billion Catholics in the world. That’s a lot of people. But there are still many more non-Catholics than there are Catholics. But the pope’s legacy goes well beyond the church. I have been deeply influenced by popes throughout my life, and I’m not Catholic. What do you think Pope Francis’ legacy is going to be?
Gibson: His legacy is going to be as a pastor, as a human, as someone who could connect on a human level with so many people. And that can seem like it’s something that will die with him. But I don’t think that’s the case.
I think this has set the bar as John the 23rd did back in the early 1960s.
A Good Pope John, as he was called, or Hannah Arendt in her essay on him, called him “a Christian on St. Peter’s chair.” That’s the process that we’re talking about, moving from this monarchical institutional church to a more pastoral church. And Pope Francis has supercharged that.
Libresco Sargeant: I think his gift to the Christians of the world, not just the Catholics, is his profound witness against throwaway culture, which comes out, as David says, in his personal presence with people, people with disabilities, with prisoners, with babies, with the elderly.
I think what the church gives that not all Protestant denominations know how to give, is it manages to pair that personal attention with the intellectual and theological foundations to support it. So it’s not just a matter of liking the person or having a positive feeling toward the person.
We can ground our question of: Who is a person? Who is it licit to kill? Who is it licit to throw away? — both on that startling witness of his love, and then the theological chops to back it up. I think Pope Francis’ personal witness underlines the urgency of not treating people as trash. And that’s only going to become more urgent as a question. He draws attention, and the church has the materials to back up his witness.
Gibson: If I could just add, his appeal is not just for believers; he had a great appeal to those outside the faith, outside the church.
Maybe they have some vague belief, maybe they have no belief whatsoever, but I think that was also part of his genius and part of his legacy. And some of these things are life issues — climate change, human trafficking, all of these things that he was so strong about. In many ways he was a prophet without honor in his own country, in his own church.
Things that alienated many American Catholics attracted many people outside the church to what he was preaching. Whether that has any effect in the pews, that remains to be seen. It’s probably doubtful, but it’s an important aspect of his witness, which is fundamentally what the pope is — a witness to the faith.
French: David and Leah, this has been educational for me. I can guarantee you that. And I really, really appreciate the time you’ve taken for this conversation. So thank you so much for joining me.
Libresco Sargeant: Thank you for having me.
Gibson: Thank you. It’s been great.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
The post After Pope Francis: A Round Table With David French appeared first on New York Times.
