When elected in the papal conclave of 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio was the first member of the Society of Jesus to become pope—but we should not be looking for some sinister Jesuit plot, and he should not be seen as having been the Jesuit candidate. There has never previously been a Jesuit pope for the good reason that Saint Ignatius Loyola in setting up the Society strongly discouraged members from taking high office in the Church, and Ignatius’s wishes have been particularly effective as far as the highest office of all is concerned. In reality, Bergoglio was not especially popular among his Jesuit confrères in 2013; he had sustained a complex and perhaps over-cozy relationship with the right-wing dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, and after that Pope John Paul II had seemed to support him against the Society’s leadership, creating him cardinal in 2001.
In view of this, Francis’s papacy took an unexpected direction. He determinedly identified with the Jesuit vision that the Society re-fashioned around the Second Vatican Council: social justice, a concern for the environment, and an openness to development and transformation within the Church. That vision was a return to Jesuit roots after more than a century. When Pope Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus in 1814 after its eighteenth-century suppression, gratitude to the renewed papacy made the Jesuits a bastion of conservative Vatican Catholicism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sense of creative theological exploration, intellectual flexibility, and discreetly independent initiative that had characterized the Jesuit mission before the papal suppression faded away, and it only returned amid the wider changes of Catholicism after the Second World War. Jesuit pastoral work in the wake of worldwide devastation after 1945 led many Jesuits to conclude that social reform was not a left-wing or socialist cause but a Christian imperative, and that a call to renewal should be heard as much within the Church as without. By the time that Vatican II began in 1962, the Society was becoming identified with the forces in the Catholic Church impatient for change—forces that unexpectedly became dominant at the council.
In the subsequent internal Catholic culture wars over what the council signified—no change or great change?—the Jesuits have mostly stayed on the side of reform and further reform. That made their relations with John Paul II particularly difficult, as he tried to do what popes hostile to the Society had tried before and deprive the Jesuits of their freedom of action. Abruptly Francis’s papacy turned away from the minimalist (if not revisionist) view of Vatican II espoused by both John Paul and his successor Benedict XVI, just as the Society as a whole has done. The new pope gave the clue as soon as he took the papal name Francis—apparently not inspired by the perfectly respectable Counter-Reformation Jesuit saint and aristocrat Francis Borgia, but reaching back to the programmatically maverick friar Francis of Assisi.
It is the change of style in the Bergoglio papacy that is important rather than concrete achievements, which were often ambiguous and less revolutionary than some rhetoric might suggest. His two predecessors were leading an uneasy and turbulent Church back into an ecclesiological cul-de-sac constructed in the nineteenth century. Despite its emphasis on tradition and clerical authority, this version of Catholicism was effectively a new creation after the trials of the French Revolution and Napoleonic eras, rebuilt out of trauma and lack of leadership in 1800 and dependent on a new charismatic role for the papacy that was very different from the multiple sources of Church authority that existed before 1789.
One fatal weakness of John Paul’s and Benedict’s renewed project to ignore the dynamic of Vatican II was the sudden intrusion of events: a new focus both inside and beyond the Church on the long-standing problem of sexual and emotional abuse. When victims lost their fear of speaking out and others felt empowered to listen to them, it was a devastating blow to the authority of Catholic celibate clergy. John Paul II did little to address the problem; Benedict did his best but resigned, overwhelmed by the task. Francis did not always tackle examples of continuing abuse or their wider implications with enough vigor, but his open impatience with clericalism and his studied rejection of ecclesiastical pomp (very Jesuit) were distinctive notes in his papacy. It is difficult to imagine that any successor to the Throne of Peter could row back from that. And fortunate will be any future pope whose death dismays and saddens so many across the world, far beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.