The pontificate of the first pope of the Catholic Church from the Americas has been consequential, and in ways that defy the conventional and trite understanding of a pontiff who gave rise to conflicting and polarizing reactions. My American journey as an immigrant from Europe has been, for twelve of its seventeen years (so far), accompanied spiritually and intellectually by Francis. It’s been an experience much richer than the usual narrative of tensions between the Jesuit pope from Latin America and the Catholic clerical establishment—both in the United States and elsewhere.
As an Italian academic who came to the United States to teach Church history and theology in his mid-thirties, I was initially surprised by Pope Francis: for his “firsts,” for his similarities with Saint John XXIII, for his openings to the global dimension of the Church from an Italian-inflected Latin American background. At first what struck me about Francis was how his treatment of doctrinal and pastoral issues differed from that of his predecessors. I perceived that historical moment in the history of the papacy, the proverbial “swinging pendulum.” I remember the excitement of the first months and years, and the temptation to label myself a “Pope Francis Catholic.”
Then, in the middle of his pontificate—which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—I began to feel that I understood something more not only about the “Francis effect” but also about the enigmatic and less explored aspects of his life and papal ministry.
For me Francis’s pontificate also co-incided with new opportunities to communicate and collaborate with the global Catholic world—colleagues in other universities but also other Catholics. These connections originated in the United States, which also made them possible. Francis helped me see more of the richness and complexity of the Catholic world—especially as it is understood in relation to (and sometimes in contrast with) the country in which I found myself living and working. It became more clear to me that Francis was what the Germans used to call a Querdenker: a “lateral thinker” who defies clear ideological identifications with one school of thought or one discipline, who provides unexpected and surprising insights. (Since the pandemic, the word Querdenker has taken a different and more controversial meaning in Germany).
In ways that have been purposely ignored by the mainstream media complex, Francis challenged the ideological bipartitions with which we associate Catholicism, especially in the United States, as a result of the “culture wars.” His critique of traditionalism was celebrated more than his strong sense of the tradition, and it was kept separated from his unembarrassed devotion to the Virgin Mary and the central role that devotional practices had in his Christian life. His radical and undiplomatic words about capitalism, “gender ideology,” the family, and abortion (for which he used a language harsher than that employed by his predecessors) cast a particular light on our social, political, and economic order at a key time for me, when I started raising a family in the United States.
Francis communicated to a new generation of Catholics—including Catholic scholars and intellectuals—a missionary urgency that supersedes or at least relativizes many previously existing oppositions and mutual excommunications. To me personally, the opportunity to follow Francis’s pontificate, and my immersion in a public debate on his attempt to push the Church “to go forth” deepened my relationship with American Catholicism in various ways that were not merely professional and academic but also ecclesial—beyond the gates of the college campus and beyond my natural interlocutors.
His invitation to recover the mystical, devotional, and emotional dimensions in the life of the faithful still have to register in academic theology, which has not found a way to incorporate his insights in ways that go beyond including some recent papal documents in classroom syllabuses. The fact that Dilexit nos was published during the Synod on Synodality was seen as an odd choice of timing at first. But that encyclical on the Sacred Heart is integral to a magisterium that took bold positions on social issues founded upon a renewed faith in the people of God. It also encourages academic thinking to leave its safe havens and to include the spiritual and mystical dimensions of life.
Francis’s recasting of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—from its nineteenth-century anti–French Revolution legitimism to the symbol of a new form of politics in our century—was expressed in one of the most powerful apophthegmata of his pontificate: “All our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart.” Francis’s opening of processes, as opposed to occupying spaces, meant also a reconsideration of much of what is now perceived as dividing Catholics. The key question is whether even the most important act by Francis—seeing in the flesh and face of the poor and the last of the earth the face of Jesus Christ—has become divisive, and why.
Francis’s definition of the Church as a “polyhedron” in Evangelii Gaudium applies to its author as well: polyhedric but also enigmatic. These qualities should suggest caution to anyone who wants to draw definitive conclusions about his pontificate so soon after its end. But my experience is that his “lateral thinking” is particularly important to understanding Catholicism at last exiting the twentieth century, especially in the United States at a crucial time in its history.
Even after the election of Leo XIV, it is not clear what kind of sensus Ecclesiae the processes opened by Francis have created or how the cardinals in the conclave interpreted them. His successors—not just the new pope, but all of us—have the task of interpreting this Querdenker, resisting the temptation to make of him a tame icon, the patron saint of one particular cause, or even worse, of one ecclesial party.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
