Francis’ Pontificate Turns 10: How The Press Covered This Papal Milestone

(ANALYSIS) Pope Francis’ pontificate turned 10 years old last week and — like with an anniversary or milestone — became a time for the news media to reflect and reassess.

What will continue to matter — at least what I will be keeping an eye on — is how this pope will be covered both by the mainstream and Catholic press going forward. And, once again, news coverage of this pope often says as much about the journalists doing the coverage as it does about Pope Francis.

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I wrote my own piece for ReligionUnplugged.com on Francis reaching the milestone.

This is how I set up that feature:

The former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was born in Argentina and is of Italian descent, was elected the 266th pope on March 13, 2013. It marked the first time a pontiff from South America has held the position.

Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, a papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor. He chose Francis as his papal name in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Over that span of time, Catholics, especially in the West, have become much more polarized around political lines, a trend that has exacerbated divisions among Catholics. The 86-year-old Pope Francis, on a great number of issues, has been seen as a polarizing force for his progressive stances on several issues.

In fact, the “polarizing force” this papacy has brought with it was the major theme throughout much of the coverage regarding Francis’ 10th anniversary as head of the Catholic Church. The question: Was the force put to good use?

The narrative over the past 10 years has been that Francis’ papacy has largely steered the church leftward in terms of doctrine and culture after more than three decades of conservative leadership under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

But ambiguity has been the main issue with what this pope says, as opposed to what he does. Then there is the issue of what the elite press chooses to highlight (or ignore) — something that has caused more confusion among both Catholics and non-Catholics.

This was the major trend in the coverage over the past week that largely looked back at what Pope Francis said and did over the past 10 years and what it has meant for the church.

The Associated Press story on the anniversary ran with the headline “Pope Francis at 10 years: A reformer’s learning curve, plans.” The piece recounted several issues that have defined his papacy, including the role of women, the Latin Mass and LGBTQ Catholics.

On the contrary, with an agenda full of problems and plans and no longer encumbered by the shadow of Pope Benedict XVI, Francis, 86, has backed off from talking about retiring and recently described the papacy as a job for life.

History’s first Latin American pope already has made his mark and could have even more impact in the years to come. Yet a decade ago, the Argentine Jesuit was so convinced he wouldn’t be elected as pope that he nearly missed the final vote as he chatted with a fellow cardinal outside the Sistine Chapel.

“The master of ceremonies came out and said ‘Are you going in or not?’” Francis recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I realized afterward that it was my unconscious resistance to going in.”

The New York Times story on the anniversary ran under the headline “10 Years On, Pope Francis Faces Challenges From the Right and the Left.” This is the main thrust of the piece:

Throughout the past decade, Francis, now 86, has visited far-flung countries and strode across the international stage as a major figure willing to use his moral capital on the major issues of the day. He has made the College of Cardinals, which will pick his successor, much more global and has opened doors to debate in the church, seeking to make a torn institution more collegial, unified and less centralized in Rome.

But deep into Francis’ longer-than-average papacy, many of the faithful are wondering whether the pope, slowed by a bad knee but perhaps less inhibited after the death of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, will make concrete and transformative change or decide once and for all that such shifts will not happen on his watch.

The same story, further down, quotes John L. Allen Jr., editor at Crux and a noted Vatican observer. This is the key section that discusses the ideological divide that has grown under Francis’ papacy:

But the church’s liberals remain frustrated by what they view as a holdup.

“Today, it seems clear that Pope Francis has a ‘Gorbachev problem' — enormous acclaim outside the Catholic Church but increasingly brazen opposition from within,” John L. Allen Jr., the editor of Crux, a news site specializing in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, wrote on Sunday, comparing Francis to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president.

“Also like Gorbachev, Francis’ foes come both from a traditionalist right unhappy with his progressive agenda and an impatient left increasingly hungry for actual revolution rather than mere reform.”

Francis has shifted from entertaining talk of resigning to speaking more about the papacy being a lifetime ministry. But after health ailments that have him leaning on a cane or using a wheelchair some wonder how much time for change is left.

The Washington Post’s account was nearly identical to that of the Times, again emphasizing the left-right divide. The news story paints Francis, and I’d say rightfully so, as a reluctant pope loaded with contradictions. This is the key section:

His famous “Who am I to judge?” comment, made months into his pontificate, marked a tonal shift in how popes speak about LGBTQ Catholics — but Francis hasn’t changed official church teaching, which calls homosexual acts “disordered.” Meanwhile, he has opened opportunities for women, but only by the smallest of degrees. His managing of the clerical abuse crisis has been uneven, and he has erred in his handling of cases involving people close to him.

In leading the church, Francis has found himself caught between two poles, transforming too much for one side, not enough for the other. He has been a reformist pope — kind of. He is also a product of an institution that is almost always slow-moving.

Of course, the press take on the famous “Who am I to judge?” raised many questions about what the pope had said — in context. This was a sign of things to come.

While the mainstream press got the left-right doctrinal struggle — and the battles of the past 10 years — mostly correct, Catholic media was, once again, a better place for readers.

Crux, for example, does great work and Allen’s knowledge and decades-old ties to Rome make him a must-read on this pope’s 10th anniversary and in general. Allen’s analysis — the one comparing Francis to the former Soviet leader — made some important points. This is the key section:

Francis, too, has promoted an ecclesiastical version of glasnost, lifting old taboos and encouraging robust debate on previously closed questions, from outreach to gays and lesbians to the role of women in the church, married clergy, and matters beyond. He too has also launched a program of decentralization, which now goes under the buzzword of “synodality.”

After taking the reins, Gorbachev signaled a strong break with the past by openly reversing some of the positions of his predecessors. He freed dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, rejected the “Brezhnev doctrine” that justified Soviet military incursions into satellite states and pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.

In a similar spirit, Francis rehabilitated figures marginalized under previous popes (such as Cardinals Walter Kasper Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga) and reversed the church’s course on matters such as communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics and the Latin Mass.

Looking back, it’s clear what Gorbachev intended to accomplish: He wanted to revive what he saw as the original promise of the Soviet system, its twin commitments to social justice and global solidarity, in the conviction that freed from its pretensions of command and control, that vision would be strong enough to sustain a new and better future for the Soviet institutional apparatus.

In the end, of course, that’s not how things played out.

Allen then makes this wonderful point to conclude:

Like Gorbachev before him, Francis faces a strong right wing inside his own system, including a large swath of the middle managers he depends upon to govern, which fears things are going too far. While they’re unlikely to attempt an actual coup, they’re certainly inclined to resistance, either active or passive, to much of the pope’s agenda.

In the meantime, he also faces a growing cohort of liberals unwilling to wait for permission to implement even more sweeping reforms, perhaps most pointedly right now in portions of Western Europe such as Germany and Belgium. The recent vote by the German bishops to authorize blessings of same-sex unions, in open defiance of Vatican directives, is eerily reminiscent of the 1990 elections for the Russian Supreme Soviet, when it became clear that Yeltsin and the other liberals would press ahead with their agenda regardless of Gorbachev’s calls for restraint.

Granted, the Catholic Church has a staying power that vastly outstrips the USSR. The Soviets endured less than 70 years; Catholicism has been around for more than 2,000. No matter how much the contradictions under Francis may be heightened, the church he leads is deeply unlikely simply to dissolve.

Nevertheless, the question remains: Can the moderate reform sketched by Francis endure, or will the centrifugal energies of a deeply polarized era prove so intense that a rupture is inevitable?

Over in The New York Times opinion section, columnist Ross Douthat, a convert to Catholicism, wrote not one but two pieces just days apart regarding this papacy.

On March 15, Douthat’s piece — under the headline “Pope Francis’ Decade of Division” — ran with this thesis:

In the secular press the narrative of Francis as a great reformer was established early on, and as contrary evidence has emerged, the response has often been a decorous silence. It’s been mostly left to his conservative critics to compile the lists of clerics accused of abuse who have been given favorable treatment by this pontiff; or to harp on the failures of financial reform and the absence of any obvious renewal in the pews; or to point out that a pontificate that once promised to make the church less self-referential, less inward-focused, has instead produced a decade of bitter internal arguments and widening theological divisions — while Catholicism’s official verbiage is received with conspicuous indifference by the wider world.

Regarding the church’s evident polarization, at least, the pope’s admirers have their own narrative: The problem is just resistance from conservative Catholics, especially American conservative Catholics, who have blocked, impeded and sabotaged this pontificate, defying both the Holy Spirit and the legitimate authority of Rome. The Catholic right has started a civil war and blamed it unjustly on the pope, and his apparent failures of governance and leadership are just a testament to the difficulty of true and deep reform.

I have some personal reasons to disagree with this narrative: I was an early doubter of Francis, fearing roughly the kind of unraveling we’re seeing, and my doubts met intense early opposition among many of my fellow conservative Catholics, who were extremely loath to imagine any daylight between themselves and Rome. So the fact that many of them have since ended up in some sort of opposition seems like a consequence of the specific ways that Francis has pursued his liberalization, rather than just a reflexive opposition to anything outside their comfort zone.

Douthat goes right to the heart of the matter we care most about here. Secular press narratives regarding this pope have had a very big influence over the general mood of how Francis is largely viewed. I made a similar point in my Religion Unplugged story I referenced above.

Two days later, on St. Patrick’s Day, Douthat ran a second column with the headline “What Liberal Catholicism Gets Right.” He opens the piece this way:

My column on Wednesday cast a cold eye on the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ pontificate. But this is the Lenten season, and as a longtime critic of the present pontiff, it wouldn’t be particularly penitential for me to focus exclusively on his struggles. So in this newsletter I’m going to find some points of agreement with a school of thought I usually argue with, and talk about what liberal Catholicism, as a broad worldview that clearly influences the Francis pontificate, has gotten right.

My starting place will be an essay by Thomas Pink, a philosopher and Catholic traditionalist, that appears in a recent issue of The Lamp, the Catholic journal edited by Matthew Walther, a contributing opinion writer to The Times. Pink sets out to address a question that was primarily associated with liberal Catholics two decades and two popes ago but that has come to matter a great deal to conservatives of late: To what extent is it acceptable for Catholics to argue with the pope? Or even to find ways to resist him?

Or to cite the specific controversies of the Francis era, if a pope tries to suppress the traditional liturgy of the church or seems through his teaching to undermine settled Catholic doctrine, must faithful Catholics simply assume that he is guided by the Holy Spirit in these cases? Or can they protest, criticize, insist that these are mistakes that a future pope should abjure or overturn, or even find ways to resist him?

The rest of the piece looks at how modern Catholics view a variety of issues following the Second Vatican Council. Those are important in framing the current divide, but one a news story could never delve into. It is the columnist, and one who is well read and informed about the church like Douthat, who can examine such an issue.

Finally, Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things, wrote a very good piece looking back at Francis’ pontificate and what he called a papacy that “has been analyzed, praised, criticized, and interviewed ad nauseam.”

He’s right about that. Hitchens also has this to say about this papacy and its contradictions:

For a while, in those heady early days, the explanation looked simple enough: He was a rough-and-ready orthodox Jesuit, a veteran of real pastoral work in the hard-as-nails barrios of Buenos Aires, who was prepared to take risks and make provocative statements in the service of the gospel. He accepted the Church’s harder doctrines unquestioningly and proclaimed them unflinchingly, but he saw that they might go unheard unless they were preached with true radicalism: the radicalism of Jesus Christ, who dined with tax collectors and prostitutes, who shocked the respectable religious people of his day with his outrageous words, who lived among the poorest of the poor and made their life his own.

Well, that would have been nice. But it does not come close to describing the last ten years. Instead, the simplicity of our Lord’s teaching has been almost buried under an avalanche of unofficial interviews, semi-official documents, half-forgotten footnotes, and cryptic asides, all in the service of a bewildering ambiguity. The story has been told so often—by the highest-ranking cardinals (here and here), the most serious theologians and philosophers (here, here, here, here, here, and here), the canniest journalistic observers (here, here, and here), that it is hardly worth repeating. Suffice to say that the definitive comment on the era was given by that marvelously succinct thinker Alice von Hildebrand when she remarked: “I beg God to take me before I have a chance to get confused.”

So is the pope, to take a second theory, a liberal Catholic with a cunning plan? Has he, by speaking so ambiguously about such doctrines as the indissolubility of marriage, the necessity of the Church for salvation, and the immorality of contraception, laid the ground for the abandonment of such teachings in favor of an uplifting humanitarian mush? Has he, by promoting such boomerish and dogmatically-challenged figures as Cardinals Hollerich and McElroy, effectively shown that he wants to remake the Church in their image?

Again, the evidence only goes so far. For Pope Francis has also, from time to time, punctured the hopes of the liberals—declining to impose married “viri probati” clerics on the Amazon, approving the CDF’s condemnation of same-sex blessings, shaking his fist at the German synod. And he does, from time to time, appeal with a deep emotion to such unliberal themes as the fearful reality of demonic activity and the central place of the Blessed Virgin in the Christian life. It is not how Pope James Martin—may God preserve us—would conduct himself in office.

These are all great points and ones that journalists have had to wrestle with for a decade. What comes next for this pope and the Catholic world remains to be seen. What Francis’ legacy will ultimately be remains yet to be written.

This post originally ran at GetReligion.

Clemente Lisi is a senior editor at Religion Unplugged and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. He is the author of “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet’s Biggest Sporting Event.” Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.