Pope Francis has died

Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word.

As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.

His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.

He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.

- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Being both inspiring and unsettling to me says he did the job well. I will remember him as the smiling Pope.

A teacher of mine often reminds me that in many cultures—like Japanese and Native American traditions—the role of having an enemy is viewed with a certain respect. Enemies help define us. They challenge us, sharpen us, and push us to grow. Western culture tends to abhor the idea of having enemies, but sometimes, having them simply means you’ve stood for something meaningful—something worth noticing.

It seems Pope Francis had his share of critics—those who opposed his beliefs or feared his vision. And yet, he stood firm and made people think. In that sense, perhaps even his enemies affirmed the impact he was making.

Looking back on his papacy, I agree that we was very divisive in some aspects but also, being the pope has to be one of the hardest jobs on the planet, he's basically a world leader.

At the "world leader" level it's impossible to do a job in a way where everyone will think it's a good job, you're always going to piss off one group or another with practically any action in any direction.

IMO he took on one of the hardest tasks at the church which is "modernization". The way I look at it is the church is so old that it constantly needs modernization. But that comes at a steep cost as while you are attracting new parishioners, many of your older ones will scoff at the changes. And because of the church's age, this is something that must be done over and over and over again.

Please stop talking in such general terms. No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did. I have been educated in a Catholic school, which also served as a Catholic seminary, and I never heard Pope Francis say anything that was not in line with the catechism that we were taught back then.

Interesting, it depends on your temper and philosophy. A respected enemy is worth having, but when it devolves into primitive antagonism, less so.

Many Catholics I know were absolutely shaken by this Pope, and were absolutely not supporters of the man. They thought he was too liberal and too modern.

Feel like I just read a eulogy.

That sucks, because if you’re catholic and you _dont_ support the pope…you’re not really a catholic

I guess you can consider yourself lucky that the Catholics you know get the big picture. There's a whole world of Catholics out there, and unfortunately, not all do.

It does make the news. This is something we should be aware of. Here's just one such story: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-francis-samesex-bles..., not to mention the recent spats from VPOTUS.

According to the rules in the first post, I cannot talk about politics in this thread, but the summary is, the political inclinations that he displayed were "uncomfortable".

"Enemy" may be the wrong word for this. To me, that implies wishing sth bad on the other party and aiming to hurt/damage/destroy it.

"Opponent"? "Antagonist"?

The word enemy, by definition and function, is spot on, because its presence triggers the primal instinct: Staying alive, no matter what.

Being in that mode opens a window to yourself no other state can open. You'll find what makes you tick, and what you are prepared to go through to make out alive in this situation.

You'll be tested in your might, intelligence and more importantly, ethical and moral limits.

The saying "You don't know how much violence it took for me to be this gentle." has roots in this perspective, so as my favorite quote from Murakami:

> And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

that’s HN for ya

>Isn't the pope infallible, by definition?

No, the Pope isn't infallible by definition. Catholics believe he is capable of making infallible statements, but it isn't a 24/7 eats breakfast infallibly superpower and not every statement is infallible.

The pope, as all humans, is fallible. It's only when speaks ex cathedra that his teachings are considered infallible. These are very rare (Francis never did it).

Now, I agree with you. As a Catholic, I'll support any pope, i.e., I want them to do good. That doesn't mean I have to be fond of him. I really liked Francis, though. I'm afraid I'll deeply miss his wisdom.

There is more to catholicism than just liking the pope.

You're correct. For many modern Catholics, it's about inertia. They've always been Catholic, but they want to do it their way. That's the entire purpose of the Catholic Church - to tell you exactly how to do church.

Is also why there are so many converts from Catholicism to New age sorts of Christian churches.

I agree that a foil can help foster introspection versus living in a bubble.

Western culture abhors the idea of enemies? What??? Western culture, more than any other embraces its enemies since the days of The Dying Gaul. Read a book.

"Opponent" is the word that a lot of anime/manga uses (translates to) when someone is referring to someone. There is a lot respect, and sometimes gratitude, shown for someone that is a worthy opponent. The idea being, as is noted above, that the opponent is someone that helps one become better.

The pope isn't always infallible by Catholic doctrine, only when speaking ex cathedra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility

> No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did.

I'm not convinced that every Catholic you know constitutes a representative sample of Catholics worldwide.

It is possible to be a Catholic and not support the direction that the Pope is taking the church; in the same way it is possible to disagree with the direction that the local priest is taking the parish. It is possible to look at someone as the leader of an organization you are part of, and treat them with respect, while not agreeing with every choice they make.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "support the Pope", but your simple binary division between "Roman Catholic or Protestant" ignores a lot of the historical tensions between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. There's also the whole issue with the Oriental Orthodox Church, which went into schism after the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was LONG before the Great Schism in 1054. How do they fit into your categorization?

You might find it interesting to study more details about the history of Christianity. It's not so simple as "Love Pope or Reject Pope."

Not exactly the same, but this sounds very similar to saying "if you don't support the president, you're not an American".

My favorite quote was when he talked about families in one of his many speeches.

"In families, there are difficulties. In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly...In families, there are difficulties, but these difficulties are overcome with love. Hate doesn’t overcome any difficulty."

You can, but is only encouraged if it helps make the topic more deep and interesting.

Not to sound like the oldest person in the room/thread, but the use of "opponent" as 'opps' has gained a lot of traction in the vernacular of Gen-z/alpha. Not so much as an outright enemy, and not so much as a 'hater'.

That's the problem with calling yourself X, without a clear non-subjective definition of X.

Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the Bible was when there were people trying to make a profit in the Temple. Contrast that to people who will attend a megachurch but hate gay folks. Francis did not condone gay marriage. He simply said that if a gay couple comes to you for pastoral advice, that you love them and attempt to give them the help they need. But you'd think the dude was prancing around in rainbow underwear on camera with the way people reacted to his love and grace.

Said political inclinations were written in the Catechism before any of us knew who Pope Francis was.

If you look at my other posts, I acknowledge this and I am only replying to posts who pretend to speak for the whole worldwide Church.

No the Pope is not infallible and you can disagree with the Pope. Sure. But you cannot use that as a cop out to turn Catholicism into an arbitrary Protestant sect where you make up moral values as you go based on your political inclinations. The whole point of Catholicism is that you have a whole institution whose job it is to guide the Church. If you believe you know better than the clergy on every single topic, you are by definition a Protestant. Lots of these Protesting Catholics have worldviews that are entirely incompatible with the fundamentals of Catholicism, but they do not want to drop the Catholic aesthetic, because it gives them an air of superiority over their fellow Protestants which they look down upon.

Does the enemy have to be a person?

I think the problem with enemies is 1) vindictiveness and 2) ineffectiveness.

Everyone dislikes some actions and ideas, and thus dislikes people who express those actions and ideas. Every group has enemy groups, who they oppose and who oppose them, even if they're not explicitly named.

A problem is when people start opposing others who don't express the actions and ideas they oppose, because they resemble the people who do. Anger generalizes, sometimes to ethnic groups, sometimes to the entire world.

Another problem is when people attack others in ways that don't stop their actions or ideas. Violence doesn't seem to promote its ideas in the long term, and it can backfire. Jesus might be the greatest example of this.

The way to kill actions is through counter-actions, and the way to kill ideas is through counter-ideas. These counter-actions and counter-ideas can be ugly or violent, or they can be pretty or pacifist. But every action or idea opposes another action or idea, which could be considered an "enemy".

Rival.

Source: Anime and Pokemon games :)

Terry Pratchett's classic book "Small Gods" has a section that is perhaps inspired quite directly by the Church, comparing it to a type of shellfish: "Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed."

I think Pope Francis was committed to trying to dig through some of the shell to get to the godly bits of the religion, and this is deeply laudable. It was frankly weird to see the opposition to some of his seemingly obviously Christian stances. He'd say something like "I guess I don't really approve of gay people marrying, but I think we should be focusing on all of these suffering and dying poor people?" and then a bunch of people would bitch about it.

I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character. This was exacerbated in turn by the media's selective quotation of statements that were, if quite reasonable in their entirety, not exactly robust to misinterpretation.

Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.

Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi: "It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."

Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.

People who aren't familiar with mainstream Catholicism might not understand that TLM is a pretty powerful cultural signifier; it's something close to a separatist movement within the church (in fact, it's the launch pad for an actual separatist movement, SSPX) and it's quite conservative. When you hear the pejorative "tradcath", these are the people they're talking about.

Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.

I share some of your frustrations, and yet there is also a spiritual peril in failing to extend charity in the interpretation of these remarks, let alone in claiming to know that anyone who interpreted them differently is being willfully obtuse.

The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.

Not to turn this political, but what are your views on trump?

> It's only when speaks ex cathedra that his teachings are considered infallible.

That's the infallibility of the extraordinary magisterium. The Catholic Church also teaches that the Pope possesses the infallibility of the "ordinary and universal magisterium", which makes less than ex cathedra statements infallible, when he teaches something and (almost) all Catholic bishops agree with the teaching.

But, I think many Catholic theologians would say, that whatever infallible teaching Francis gave by the ordinary magisterium, was largely just a repetition of what his recent predecessors had taught, without any significant doctrinal developments. (Probably the biggest point of contention is the status of his catechism change on the death penalty, but I think even the majority of theologians who support the change wouldn't argue it was infallible.)

An example of a teaching which many Catholic theologians say is infallible ordinary magisterium is John Paul II's 1994 declaration that women can't be ordained as priests (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) [0] – which wasn't teaching anything new per se, but arguably the first time it had been stated with such explicitness and solemnity

An interesting meta issue, is that theologians debate which papal statements are infallible, but the judgement of a statement as infallible isn't itself infallible. So, while Cardinal Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI) issued an official declaration in 1995 stating it was infallible ordinary and universal magisterium, [1] that declaration itself isn't infallible – and some (progressive-leaning) Catholic theologians have argued the declaration is mistaken. [2] Conversely, a minority of (conservative-leaning) Catholic theologians go beyond Ratzinger and argue Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is infallible extraordinary magisterium (ex cathedra). [3] Some even argue the Pope can teach infallibly and then erroneously claim he wasn't doing so. [4]

[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters...

[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

[2] https://womenpriests.org/teaching-authority/mag-con2-theolog...

[3] https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?rec...

[4] https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/i-agree-with-d...

That question very much does turn this political, and is not in the spirit of the thread. What is it that you'd really like to know?

> while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character

He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.

> People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions.

I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.

Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.

But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.

SSPX is in no way separatist, that is severely misinformed. If anything it is reformist, as they recognize the pope as their legitimate ruler and the local bishops as the legitimate local authorities. The claim is not that Rome has failed, it is that papal authority does not extend to the banishment of the Latin Mass, a position many regular clergy agree with.

Catholics are not obliged to follow the pope in matters not related to faith and morals, and even then not when he speaks as a private person instead of in the voice of the Church (the same sex marriage interview as a prime example where he directly states it is his own private opinion). Though every catholic IS obliged to pray for the pope and defend his legitimacy and claim to power, which I suppose could constitute a degree of obligatory support

Younger Catholics apparently prefer the Latin Mass but no..

Honestly, if you're going to be a member of a church and you fully believe that the dude is holding the seat of the founder of the faith, the least you could do is actually have enough of an attention span to fully hear him out. It isn't his fault that people decided to do what people do. He explained himself and people chose not to listen.