When Pope Francis convened Roman Catholic bishops at the Vatican in 2019 to discuss the ordination of married men in remote parts of South America, the meeting raised expectations about the possibility of revolutionizing the celibate priesthood.
The bishops recommended he do it, and Francis himself had long said he wanted change in the church to come from the bottom up.
But Francis ultimately balked, deciding that the church wasn’t yet ready to lift a roughly 1,000-year-old restriction. Many of his supporters, who expected him to be a pope of radical change, felt let down.
It was a salient example of how Francis, who died on Monday at 88, was a pope of great, often outsized, expectations. His revolutionary and freewheeling style led Catholics across the spectrum to invest him with their most ambitious — at times unrealistic — hopes and fears, sometimes independent of what he said or did.
Some liberal Catholics, forgetting Francis was the leader of a deeply conservative institution, expected him to make women priests, change teaching on birth control or throw his weight behind same sex unions and gay marriage. Some conservatives, including a few who convinced themselves that the Argentine pope was a secret Communist, worried he would torch the church doctrine, even though he never touched it.
Transparency advocates appreciated the increased clarity he brought to the Vatican Bank, but wanted more financial reforms. Advocates for victims of clerical sex abuse appreciated new protection measures, but wanted universal zero tolerance measures.
“If you are a left-wing Catholic you may think the pope talked a great game but didn’t deliver as much change as you would like,” said John L. Allen Jr., a longtime Vatican analyst and the editor of Crux, a publication specializing in the Catholic Church. “For every one of those, there’s a conservative Catholic that thinks the pope went way too far.”
Now, as cardinals descend on Rome to discuss the church’s challenges, they will soon choose from their ranks a successor to Francis who will carry a whole new array of expectations — about whether he will breathe life into a certain region of the globe, work to reform or restore, follow through on Francis’ promised upheavals or roll them back.
“There’s a lot of unfinished business that whoever comes next is going to have to pick up,” Mr. Allen said.
But Francis’ supporters, detractors and Vatican analysts agree that there was also a lot that Francis did do.
“He has fundamentally changed the culture of the church. Without really touching any doctrine,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a prominent Vatican analyst who in 2005 was forced out by the future Benedict XVI as editor of a Catholic magazine because he had published articles critical of church positions.
Francis, he said, allowed an “openness for discussion and debate that freed theologians to once again talk and write about things, because he believed that this is the way theology grows, to figure out how to preach the gospel in the 21st century without just repeating 13th century formulas that nobody understands. So these are revolutionary changes.”
But there were concrete changes, too. Francis cracked the door open for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion by giving more latitude to local priests and bishops. But instead of changing change church law, he encouraged people to engage in the process of praying over the issue with their priests.
He opened up major meetings of bishops — his preferred decision-making body — to laypeople and women, and he put women in big jobs within the powerful Roman bureaucracy that governed the church.
He suppressed the Latin Mass beloved by traditionalists who wanted to restore old ways, made liturgical changes intended to make the church’s prayers more accessible to people in local languages, and allowed priests to bless same-sex couples. But he also allowed African priests who revolted against the blessings to essentially ignore the rule.
The cardinals who elected Francis in 2013 did so with a clear desire that he reform the Curia, and he introduced a new Vatican Constitution, streamlined its departments to avoid repetition and waste and introduced cultural changes.
“Everyone was forced to really look outside, to have a dialogue and language suited for the outside world, this was the change,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who used to run the Vatican’s culture department.
Some Vatican officials said significant resistance slowed Francis, and that changes he made were more incremental than revolutionary. But Cardinal Ravasi believed the changes to the Curia were permanent, and “not just cosmetic.”
Supporters of Francis in the church hierarchy and veteran Vatican analysts say Francis’ effect on the church was more complicated, and in some ways deeper, than policy changes or specific reforms. He sought to change the way the church saw itself, incessantly haranguing his hierarchy against acting like princes above their flock.
“Change of process is more important than the change of product. It’s deeper. It’s more important. It’s more long lasting,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, who was a close aide to Francis, said of the meetings. “The topics are secondary.”
But he said that the more collegial, bottom-up process would ultimately be better to take on difficult topics, and make progressive decisions with sticking power. Concerns about the process being rolled back were misplaced, he said, because a new pope could decide to do anything.
“There is nothing that we have done over 2,000 years that couldn’t be rolled back,” he said, but undoing such a deep change in process would be a radical, and difficult, reversal.
On the world stage, Francis’ changes may be equally lasting. He sought to bring the church out into the world. He appointed cardinals all around the globe, often passing over traditional centers of Catholicism for far-flung places to increase the church’s global footprint.
After Benedict had inadvertently damaged relations with the Muslim world by delivering a speech that insulted Islam early in his pontificate, Francis set about improving the relationship, often in lands where Catholics lived in danger.
He flew to Iraq during the pandemic to meet with a Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in the holy city of Najaf. He signed major agreements with Muslim spiritual leaders designed to recognize one another’s rights and protect vulnerable Catholic minorities. He undertook enormous criticism from conservatives who accused him of caving on human rights by trying to improve relations with a Communist regime that persecuted Catholics in China.
“He has pushed the boundaries,” said Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister.
But perhaps his most consequential change for the church will be seen in coming weeks.
Francis appointed a large majority of the College of Cardinals that will now pick his successor. He often chose prelates who shared his priorities of being close to the poor, welcoming the marginalized and moving issues like climate change to the forefront.
For many, the question now is whether those cardinals will pick someone who will meet or dash the expectations of Catholics who supported Francis. But those who knew Francis best say that unrealistic expectations made for a reductive metric by which to judge his legacy.
“In many ways,” Archbishop Gallagher said, Francis was “an old-fashioned conservative Jesuit. At the same time, somebody who’s very open to what certain other voices are saying in the church.”
Bringing those two things together, he said, was the story of his pontificate.
Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome
Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief for The Times, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe.
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