It is undeniable that the pontificate of the late Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to the world known as Pope Francis, has been impactful, both within the Catholic Church and outside it.
In general terms, it can be said that it has been a totally disruptive papacy like no other in the history of the church.
Francis promoted radical changes that were not simply evolutionary but one offering an abrupt break with the very life, doctrine and practice of the faith founded by Jesus Christ.
Catholics believe in the Petrine papacy — that the Seat of Peter was ordained by Christ and would provide an uninterrupted continuity as the cornerstone of the church.
Because of these radical changes, the Bergoglian papacy has had, from the beginning of his pontificate, support from sectors historically antagonistic to the church.
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While the papacies of the last centuries were considered "traditionalist," the South American pope's oversight of the church has been deemed as "revolutionary."
Pope Francis' radical changes included:
1. Focus on social work of the church.
Francis has moved the gradual predominance that pastoral care of mercy, the church's social work, above the faith itself — the primacy of doctrinal truths.
The pope made major changes here with the synod on the family, carried out in two stages in 2014 and 2015.
In this synodal assembly, the indissolubility of the marriage bond and the prohibition of access to Communion for the divorced and remarried began to be discussed in direct contradiction to doctrine.
2. Acceptance of homosexuality as normal for church faithful.
Starting with his famous statement pronounced at the beginning of his pontificate: "Who am I to judge?" Francis' successive defenses of the condition were a radical departure from teachings that emanate directly from sacred scriptures and the ecclesial magisterium.
Francis' decision to embrace Fiducia Supplicans (2023), authorizing the blessing for homosexual couples, put the faithful into confusion while causing the unanimous rejection of almost the entire episcopate of the African continent.
Pope Francis accepted this collective refusal "because of the cultural idiosyncrasy" of the African population and clergy.
3. The church's embrace of globalist agendas.
History may record that Francis was the first woke pope, easily and without complaint accepting the agendas of the United Nations (Agenda 2030), the World Economic Forum (The Great Reset), the Paris Summit (climate change), and Big Pharma's take on COVID-19 — including many clearly anti-Christian concepts that remain totally alien to the ecclesial magisterium.
4. Bergoglio offered unequivocal adherence and alliances to groups and personalities aligned with progressivism.
He did not find it problematic they advocated an anti-Christian and anti-humanist agenda. At its root, the progressive conception of a human being is conditioned and dominated by one's subordination and submission to the state and the state's derivatives, including cybernetics, that is, a human being symbiotized with the technologies inserted in the human organism.
5. The pope radically diminished the church's fight for life and opposition to abortion.
Except for brief and sporadic expressions, Francis' papacy stands out strikingly with the absence of serious condemnation genocide of abortion, which annually eliminates around 70 million unborn children, according to data from the United Nations.
Moreover, during his pontificate, Francis has appointed to various positions in the Vatican dicasteries people who fervently support abortion as either a judicious choice for women or as a legal right. These pro-abortion appointees included the Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato and the Argentine jurist Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni.
The pope also maintained a friendly relationship with aggressive and Catholic promoters of global abortion such as former President Joe Biden, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., former Chilean socialist president Michelle Bachelet, Bolivian political leader Evo Morales, and Brazilian president "Lula" Luiz Ignacio da Silva, among many others.
6. The most revolutionary institutional change has the transformation of the Catholic faith as a "synodal church."
This has meant the church is steered by an ecclesiastic and lay leadership handpicked by the pope himself while diluting the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic (as defined by the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in 381 A.D. and the catechism of the Catholic Church.)
The synod church offers a horizontal structure whose members walk together — that is, they define criteria and courses of action by consensus, in what appears to be a democratic manner — at all levels.
But like communist organizations, these assemblies are not truly representative but are stacked by a higher committee or individual.
A deliberative assembly has been created in which the church hierarchy moves to a second level, in which everything is decided by "discernment in the Spirit."
7. The end of the church as the exclusive agent of salvation.
This is perhaps the most radical departure from traditional teachings that reach back to Holy Scripture.
Neither Christ nor the church is the critical element of salvation. Francis moved to reduce the faith to the same level as all other beliefs, since "all religions lead to God."
Francis has also effectively condemned evangelization that leads to conversion — a mission that Jesus Christ gave as his prime directive to his adherents, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19).
Francis saw such evangelization as simple proselytizing to incorporate new members into the institution.
It is important to emphasize that these seven radical changes have not been based on a new doctrinal conception of faith and dogmas but on a different institutional framework.
Indeed, Francis set aside the sources of Revelation — Sacred Scripture, living tradition and the ecclesial magisterium.
Francis did so to give primacy to the personal criteria of the pope himself.
In this light, when one reads the apostolic documents and encyclicals issued by the pontiff, one can see that more than 50% of the citations that support his new positions use the writings of the pope himself instead of relying on the 2,000-year-old doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church.
This Bergoglian praxis has led to an extraordinary development in the church: the absence of the presence of Jesus Christ in the "synodal" church and of its centrality in institutional life.
Will the Church of Christ once again be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, or will it remain a synodal church governed by an untethered pope working through synodal front?
Francis' radical changes offer Catholics around the world — and the next pontiff a challenge — can they rediscover the centrality of a risen Christ in their faith and works? This question will be answered soon.
Professor José Arturo Quarracino is an Argentine philosopher, former university professor and translator of Vatican documents.
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