After a long period of declining health which saw an increasingly debilitated Francis struggling to hold onto life, it was the demonic visitation of US Vice President JD Vance, it seems, that finally did the pontiff in. His death marks the end of a 12-year project aimed at rescuing a crisis-ridden Catholic church from irrelevance and possibly terminal decline. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, a mid-ranking Jesuit at the height of that country’s ‘dirty war’, Francis was an obscure figure to many outside Latin America when he assumed the papacy in March 2013.

The church that Francis inherited was then locked in a profound crisis and was being rapidly deserted by lifelong Catholics, even in traditional strongholds. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were staunch conservatives in both their theological and political leanings. In his efforts to stamp out the ‘heresy’ of liberation theology—a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that propelled a powerful Catholic left across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s—the strident anti-communist John Paul had aligned Rome with US President Ronald Reagan’s bloody counter-insurgency and did not flinch even when US-armed militias raped and massacred grassroots Catholic clergy. Indeed, some of his bishops are said to have provided lists of potential targets to the right-wing death squads.

Serving an apprenticeship as John Paul’s doctrinal henchman, Benedict assumed the papacy after leading a purge of left-wing clergy: his own reign was marked by hysteria around creeping secularism and women’s demand for equality in the church. Benedict pushed an early version of the ‘culture wars’, encouraging an obsessive focus among conservative clergy on sexuality, abortion rights and the traditional family. This was part of a calculated effort to exorcise the social justice focus of the liberationists.

Their successful prosecution of a war on the Catholic left endeared both of Francis’s predecessors to church conservatives, but outside these narrow circles they are most popularly associated with a series of profound scandals that, by 2013, threatened the church’s very existence. The best-known of these exploded after a series of revelations about the massive scale of clerical sexual abuse, compounded by proof that—for all their pious moralizing around sexuality—both popes had played central roles in covering up these crimes and shielding perpetrators from justice. The Boston Globe concluded that John Paul had been ‘guilty of one of the biggest institutional cover-ups of criminal activity in history.’

On its own the disclosures around massive, endemic sexual abuse rocked the church internationally, but they were compounded by shocking financial scandals. The release of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed that Rome kept tens of millions in offshore tax havens. The twilight days of Benedict’s papacy saw further, sensational revelations of the deep financial corruption at the heart of the Vatican. To take just one example from the Vatileaks disclosures, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, living in a ‘princely dwelling’ in Rome with a nun serving as housekeeper, was found to have ‘redirected tens of millions of euros from a foundation meant to support the Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital in Rome and used the funds to renovate his apartment instead’. Bertone travelled around Rome by helicopter, running up a tab of nearly €24,000 in 2012. The church’s global ‘Peter’s Pence’ charity—meant to be used ‘for the relief of those most in need’—was revealed to be a financial ‘black hole’, with nearly 70% of its collection handed over to maintain the ‘Vatican bureaucracy’. There were dozens of similar exposures.

The Politics of Church ‘Renewal’

All of this passed under Francis’s predecessors without a murmur of complaint, and it meant that he inherited an institution in freefall. There were other pressing challenges: at a time when membership was declining in the US and elsewhere in increasingly secular former Catholic countries in the West (like Ireland and Spain), across Latin America—where Catholicism had long exercised a monopoly—and in Africa, Rome faced increasing competition from evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and other sects. Benedict’s rout of liberation theology and the hierarchy’s reassertion of command only created new problems: in Brazil and elsewhere believers deserted the stale ritual of elite-led Catholicism en masse.

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