I didn't kill Pope Francis

But I do have a lot of feelings about him

The week Pope Francis was elected, in 2013, I had a conversation with a woman who had recently vacated a very senior post in Vatican City. Through her work, she’d had personal dealings with many members of the College of Cardinals, including Jorge Bergoglio, the Argentinian who had just unexpectedly been elected pope.

I don’t remember our exact conversation but her key message to me – a 23-year-old former Catholic with a residual burning interest in the life of the Church – was that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. This guy will talk a good game, she said, he’ll perform progressive values, but when push comes to shove, he’ll protect the institution he leads. He will be, in that most fundamental sense, a conservative.

For a long time, I stuck to that reading of Pope Francis. No matter what he did, I viewed it with suspicion and distrust. Later that year, when he famously asked “who am I to judge?” in response to a question about the gay lobby in the Vatican, many celebrated it as a step forward, a break with the highly conservative pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. But, more than a decade before his famous denunciation of ‘frociaggine’ in closets of the Holy See, I was having none of it. When it came up in conversation, I pointed to his open attacks on trans people, his overt opposition to gay marriage, his strong implication in the same interview that while being gay isn’t a sin, there was indeed a problem with gay lobbying.

He was a spectacular performer though, you have to give him that. The soundbite couldn’t have been more perfectly calibrated for maximum publicity with minimum actual impact. Five words spoken on a plane, during an informal press huddle, as far as you could get from his throne of infallibility. Who am I to judge? It’s just me, your boy Jorge, I’d never judge anyone. That guy Francis, however…

Around the same time, the newly-elected pope also broke with tradition by washing and kissing women’s feet, as part of an annual ceremony commemorating Jesus’s last act of service to his disciples, which previous popes had limited to men. There was a brief flurry of panic from traditionalists, concerned that, by inviting women to occupy the symbolic place of the disciples, the new pope was signalling some intention regarding the ordination of women as priests.

I wrote a piece about it at the time, which I’ve just dug up in my Google Drive. “I think the traditionalists are blowing this out of proportion,” I wrote. “Francis, as bishop and cardinal, has explicitly stated his opposition to female ordination and he remains extremely conservative, despite his unusual eschewing of luxury and conspicuous status indicators.”

My young self is both adorably trenchant and correct here. The washing of women’s feet (and they were Muslim women which made it even more significant) was another beautiful piece of performance. But while the visual and the message was powerful, it did nothing to alter the institutional misogyny of the Catholic Church, its hostility to women’s leadership, or its violent suppression of women’s bodily freedoms. Putting a smilier, more grandfatherly face on misogyny and hatred doesn’t actually reduce it’s harm. In fact, it can do the opposite. If the progressive PR is willingly lapped up by the international media, that gives cover to the continuation of the real conservative work.

Today, reflecting on the work of Pope Francis, I still believe that like any other pope, his legacy is inextricably entwined with the ongoing legacy of the church, and with the continuing harm it does around the world with its wrongheaded, inhumane and entirely capricious suppression of human freedom, particularly as it relates to our bodies and sexuality.

What’s more, Francis has personally advanced that agenda. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler writes about his role in the international transphobic movement, citing his conflation of “gender ideology” with nuclear war. In her book on the Mother and Baby Homes, who, Caelainn Hogan writes about how, in his visit to Ireland in 2018, Francis visited the tomb of Matt Talbot, an Irish candidate for sainthood, on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin. The church where Talbot is buried is literally across the road from a Magdalene Laundry, the last one to stop operating, not finally closing its doors until 1996. I visited last year and was shocked. You can see one building from the other, and yet Francis got back into his car and drove on by.

Even as I write this, my anger surges again. Why does it have to be like this? Why does the supposed church of the poor, the church of Saint Francis, the church of Jesus Christ, have to be like this? Surely there’s another way, if more of these men had the will or the courage to find it.

But then I remember that yesterday, on the last day of his pontificate and of his life, Pope Francis called for a ceasefire in Palestine. That for the last year and a half, every night, even from his hospital bed, he’s called the Holy Family Church in Gaza. I remember hearing (from people I knew in the climate movement) that he was arguably the most significant player in getting the Paris Agreement over the line, personally intervening with the leaders of Catholic states to encourage their support. I remember his relentless advocacy for refugees and migrants, through twelve years when the world has failed them so catastrophically. I remember him calling unbridled capitalism the dung of the devil, and canonising Archbishop Oscar Romero, and encouraging interfaith dialogue, and speaking with and for the poor.

This did cost him. He was absolutely hated for all of it, by the true forces of evil in the Catholic Church. Without doubt, there are champagne corks popping in the Vatican tonight, and in episcopal palaces all over the western world. They’ve wanted him dead for years and now that he is, they have a better shot at rebuilding the repressive, reactionary, culture-war-waging, self-enriching church that they want. That’s bad news for Catholics and it’s bad news for all of us in an era of fascist resurgence when, despite his many failings, Francis was a powerful countervailing voice among world leaders.

For me personally, all of this is bizarrely happening against the backdrop of the publication of my debut novel, Ordinary Saints. Multiple friends texted me as soon as they heard the news to ask if I had killed him for publicity purposes. For the record, I did not. The timing is extremely strange and I feel weird even writing this, since it feels a bit like using an old guy’s death to plug my book.

However, the story of Ordinary Saints – about Jay, a queer Irish woman who finds out that her dead brother may be made a saint and is forced to revisit her Catholic upbringing – has brought me on a surprising journey. From a place, back in 2013, of unreconstructed anger and resentment to a place of…something else. Ambivalence, I suppose, is the closest word. And in that sense, it’s very much a book of its time, of Francis’s ambivalent pontificate, a fact I don’t think I’d appreciated until that pontificate ended this morning.

Through the writing of this book, I’ve re-encountered the good in the Catholic faithful, if not the Catholic Church. As I write in my acknowledgments, Catholicism isn’t a monolith, though it may often seem so. For me it was very moving – even healing - to engage with progressive Catholic voices, people who are fighting harder than anyone to build that church of the poor, of the immigrant, of the marginalised, of the queer.

Their path was clearer and easier to navigate under the leadership of Pope Francis. Not as clear as it should have been, or as easy as we would want it to be – the woman I spoke to back in 2013 wasn’t wrong, and the church hasn’t fundamentally changed. I doubt my own ambivalence, question the softening of my perspective. And I resent that we’re expected to be grateful that Francis was better than most other men in his position would have been. We should be allowed to expected more than that.

And yet, he did do more good than he had to, he was often brave when he could have gotten away with being weak, and I suspect we’ll miss him now that he’s gone.

Now that I’ve posted here once, I might actually start using it more regularly. Subscribe if that sounds like something you would enjoy. In the meantime, you can buy my novel Ordinary Saints here, or at any good bookshop.