Pope Francis: Man who drummed up inclusivity & balked at by conservatives

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis changed the face of the modern papacy more than any predecessor by shunning much of its pomp and privilege, but his attempts to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and less judgmental made him an enemy to conservatives nostalgic for a traditional past.

The Vatican said on Monday in a video statement that he had died.

Francis inherited a deeply divided Church after the resignation in 2013 of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. The conservative-progressive gap became a chasm after Francis, from Argentina, was elected the first non-European pope in 1,300 years.

The polarisation was fiercest in the US, where conservative Catholicism often blended with well-financed right-wing politics and media outlets.

For nearly a decade until Benedict’s death in 2022, there were two men wearing white in the Vatican, causing much confusion among the faithful and leading to calls for written norms on the role of retired popes.

The intensity of conservative animosity to the pope was laid bare in January 2023 when it emerged that the late Australian Cardinal George Pell, a towering figure in the conservative movement and a Benedict ally, was the author of an anonymous memo in 2022 that condemned Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.

The memo amounted to a conservative manifesto of the qualities conservatives will want in the next pope.

Francis appointed nearly 80% of the cardinal electors who will choose the next pope, increasing, but not guaranteeing, the possibility that his successor will continue his progressive policies. Some Vatican experts have predicted a more moderate, less divisive successor.

Under his watch, an overhauled Vatican constitution allowed any baptised lay Catholic, including women, to head most departments in the Catholic Church’s central administration.

He put more women in senior Vatican roles than any previous pope but not as many as progressives wanted.

Conservatives were unhappy with the pope from the start because of his informal style, his aversion to pomp and his decision to allow women and Muslims to take part in a Holy Thursday ritual that previously had been restricted to Catholic men.

They balked at his calls for the Church to be more welcoming to LGBT people, his approval of conditional blessings for same-sex couples in December 2023 and his repeated clampdowns on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He said conservatives had made themselves self-referential and wanted to encase Catholicism in a “suit of armour”. Their spiritual gurus were Pell and U.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who once famously compared the Church under Francis to “a ship without a rudder”.

In 2016 and in 2023, Burke and a handful of other cardinals lodged public challenges known as “Dubia” (doubts), accusing Francis of sowing confusion on moral themes.