At a time when global superpowers are jockeying for position, a major piece on the chessboard of statecraft, Pope Francis, just left his square.
Now 1.4 billion Catholics in virtually every nation in the world are strenuously peering over the Vatican wall to see on which square the new pope will land. Given that 108 of the 135 Cardinals tasked with replacing him were appointed by Pope Francis himself, the late pope’s political philosophy and behaviors provide solid clues into the Church’s future and whether Pope Francis believed the next pope might be the last.
As an official nation whose capital city is the Vatican, the Catholic Church believes the Pope’s role is to represent St. Peter’s unbroken line as Christ’s representative on Earth, a priest, or connector, between God and man. Perhaps that is why the Pope is also referred to as pontiff, or bridgebuilder.
Pope Francis even extended that role to other politicians when performing mass at the U.S./Mexican border in 2016, saying that “anyone who builds a wall rather than a bridge is ‘not a Christian.’”
While this was a policy slight against President Trump, he failed to account for the obvious irony of the wall around Vatican City. Rookie mistake. But then, a pope is not a politician. Or is he?
Shortly before his little border faux pas, in 2015 Pope Francis showed his political cards with the encyclical, Laudato Si’ wherein he explains his view of society as an irreducible whole, decries capitalism, and tacitly presumes global warming not only exists but is a man-made emergency requiring immediate and unified global attention to avoid disaster.
These are very progressive political notions held by left-leaning politicos. These views typically lead to heavy-handed socialist governmental solutions like China’s one-child policy, resulting in mandatory, at-work pregnancy testing and forced abortions.
But just how convinced was Pope Francis about the theory of imminent global biological collapse? To what extent was he willing to partner with secular regimes to force changes in population dynamics to avert presumed disaster?
And more to the point, what will his successor do about it?
In 2017, Pope Francis provided the canvas for Population Bomb progressive Paul Ehrlich to paint a dystopian future of biological extinction due to human reproduction and resource consumption.
The upshot is that the Pope gave Ehrlich the Vatican bullhorn to blame the imminent demise of the globe on well-meaning but irresponsible parents who want to have children and ensure a good standard of living for them.
The Church playing host to these theories is unnerving to many. Why? Because it telegraphed a shift in Church doctrine away from the nuclear family which it championed for over a millennium.
Pope Francis was careful never to officially alter Church doctrine on social teaching, although, pastorally, he did push the boundaries. Recall the Pope’s comments as he suggested the use of contraception during the Zika virus scare as a lesser-of-two-evils option?
When it came to the Church’s moral teaching, Pope Francis’ socio-political views revealed a man in tension.
Case in point, when asked what advice he might give to U.S. voters in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election who have to decide between a candidate “who is in favor of abortion and another who wants to deport millions of migrants.”
His response was an equivocation, oddly refusing to deploy his “lesser-of-two-evils” solution saying, “Both are anti-life,” going on to say, “both the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills babies.”
The Church’s belief in the sacrosanct nature of the human person was indeed at odds in his mind with his belief that human reproduction was killing the earth, which he believed to be the ultimate cause of a geo-political crisis causing mass U.S. immigration.
Perhaps Pope Francis’ encyclical and off-handed comments were his way of tilling the doctrinal soil, increasing the odds of the cardinals electing a liberal-leaning successor who would be able to take the next steps of changing official Church moral teaching to subdue the growth of the nuclear family, thinking that his successor would be perhaps the last pope to preside over a house on fire.
The Church has altered its moral positions in the past. At one time, the Church approved capital punishment. After the Church’s last internal revolution, Vatican II, that changed.
With Pope Francis’ political philosophy at odds with moral doctrine, one might imagine a future where the Church will support contraception or other population control policies similar to China’s, undermining the nuclear family under the guise of a special dispensation to save the “irreducible” human family.
Pope Francis clearly accepted progressive theories of an impending, man-made environmental disaster. By extension, did that mean he also accepted socio-communist centralized government philosophy as a solution for the salvation of the world?
The Chinese communist cultural revolution under Mao Zedong, modified family and reproductive norms using the coercive power of the state. Could China’s effectiveness be why, in 2018, Pope Francis entered into a secret agreement with them called the Sino-Vatican deal?
The agreement is a strange act of statecraft, giving an atheistic communist regime power over Church polity. The deal provides the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with authority to name Catholic Bishops in the Church in China. It was renewed in 2024. And the CCP just named two new Chinese Catholic bishops.
Arguing that the world is facing imminent collapse and attributing this to the issues of overpopulation, even though global population growth has already peaked, allows the Vatican to reinterpret the Church’s official moral teachings on the family, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. This shift can be framed as a call for responsible self-restraint aimed at preserving the Earth's increasingly scarce natural resources, which are essential for the survival of smaller future generations.
Pope Francis assuredly understood the Church is a ship that turns slowly.
And now 135 cardinals, 108 of them (80%) appointed by Pope Francis himself, must choose his successor. The extent that those new cardinals reflect the views of their former leader will determine the trajectory of the Church’s moral teaching and influence on how governments treat humanity.
Whatever happens, Pope Francis was right about one thing: There will be a global collapse. Jesus Himself foretold it.
But global collapse will not be a result of human reproduction but of godless moral degradation (Matthew 24).
The Rev. Jim Harden is CEO of CompassCare, an anti-abortion medical network based in Buffalo, New York. He is married with 10 children. Recently his medical center was firebombed by anti-abortion activists. Read more of his reports — Here.
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