In July 2022, speaking at the historic Indigenous pilgrimage site of Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, Pope Francis described his vision for the Catholic Church. He urged the pilgrims gathered there to build up “a Mother Church pleasing to [God]: capable of embracing each of her sons and daughters; a Church that is open to all and speaks to everyone; a Church that is against no one, and encounters everyone.”
It didn’t draw much attention at the time, but I think that description provides an interpretive key to Francis’ entire papal ministry. This was a man with a vision of a Church that was truly catholic—“universal” in Greek—going to Canada, one of the most secular, post-Christian countries in the world, a land convulsed with conflict over the history of the church, and speaking humbly yet confidently, refusing to be defensive, projecting hope in the face of anger and pain.
Later in his homily, Francis preached, “All of us need the healing that comes from Jesus, the physician of souls and bodies.” Not some of us, not a small minority church, but all of us. On his visit to Canada, Francis came not to say farewell, but to invite people to come home.
That confident attitude towards a seemingly hostile country reflects his origins as the first Latin American pope, one who came from a society in which nearly everyone was Catholic—the good, the bad, and those stuck somewhere in between.
His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI came of age in the shadow of communism and Nazism, godless ideologies that broke sharply from the Christian inheritance. Francis, in contrast, lived most of his life in the more mixed social and political climate of Argentina, where populists, military juntas, and liberation theology socialists contended, each claiming their projects represented God’s will.
John Paul and Benedict spent much of their papacies drawing clear lines and making fine distinctions. They wanted to make clear what it meant to be Catholic, even if that was unpopular. Benedict even speculated that the future of the Church in the Western world might be as a “creative minority,” holding on to unpopular truths in the face of a hostile society. Francis didn’t shy away from unpopular truths—he was condemned by the Belgian Parliament last year for speaking against abortion on his trip there—but he wasn’t so quick to accept that the church should be a minority.
There’s a perception out there that Francis was a liberal pope, one who doubted and sought to overturn the dogmas of the Church. That perception is too simple. It’s a caricature of the man, and it’s in tension with homilies like the one he gave at Lac Ste. Anne, or his numerous, daily affirmations of Catholic dogma. He was not a relativist. He was a man in love with God and the church—but a man who wanted everyone else to share in that love too.
Francis was never comfortable with the idea of a shrinking Catholic Church. He wanted the Church to make another great play to retake her place as the central guiding institution of human spirituality. He wanted to fight for every soul, especially those most on the margins, including those seen by some as hostile to the Church.
To do so, Francis was willing to shake certain certainties that perhaps shouldn’t have been so certain. His famous line in reference to gay people seeking God, “Who am I judge?” shook the certainties of a certain kind of conservative Catholic. But it was purely orthodox, a reflection of Christ’s admonition to “judge not, lest ye be judged” (Mt. 7:1).
His advocacy for migrants, Gazans, and action against climate change meant he could not be pigeonholed as a pope for the Right, but his forceful opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and transhumanism meant he couldn’t be a pope for the Left either. Hardly a surprise given the Church precedes these modern categories by more than 1700 years, but worth noting in a world where almost everything seems to come down to a Left-Right divide.
Less dramatically but more importantly, Francis began a global synodal process: a giant, church-wide effort to listen to the laity and hear their hopes and aspirations, bringing them to the heart of church decision-making in Rome. This was messy and divisive, as the synod seemed to open up questions some had prematurely declared closed, but it reflected Francis’ conviction that the Church at her best would find ways to make room for all people, even as she struggled with secularizing trends sweeping the Western world.
Here, we can point to an under-recognized Canadian connection to the Francis papacy: McGill University philosopher Charles Taylor, to whom Francis awarded the 2019 Ratzinger Prize for contributions to theology. Taylor spent his entire career arguing that Christians shouldn’t see secular liberal modernity as a story of loss, but of opportunity.
For Taylor, liberal modernity is the playing out in history of the core Christian concept of the Imago Dei, the idea that all human beings are made in God’s image and likeness. We are free, and our freedom reflects our dignity. So we shouldn’t hide from liberal modernity, or be implacably opposed to it, but seek to redeem it—to draw out its latent good and to purify it of errors that have crept in—recognizing that in a historically Christian culture, even the secular soul can tell us something important about God.
To put a finer point on it: Taylor’s view, embodied in Francis’ pontificate, suggests that the ancient Catholic Church might have something to learn from the Indigenous woman struggling with intergenerational trauma or the gay couple trying to work out God’s will for their lives. It was a project based in the hope that the future church could once again be a vital centre of the culture, including even those we might now perceive as hostile to her.
Francis’ project has many critics. For some, the apparent unchanging nature of the Church is precisely what persuades them that it truly is somehow divine. Any seeming instability risks damaging their faith. Many others look at what secular liberal modernity has wrought and wonder if there is any dialogue to be had there.
I confess I was more optimistic about Francis’ project in 2019 than I am today. The progressive overreach of the last few years makes me wonder if Taylor’s vision of goodness within liberal modernity might be overstated. Are the church burnings of the last few years more representative of the modern liberal heart than the claimed desire for truth and reconciliation? Especially in Canada, where political leaders often polarize against Christians for political gain, is there a genuine desire for dialogue?
I hope there is such a desire—and hope is a theological virtue, one that Francis bet his entire pontificate on. But my optimism has been shaken. In the next few weeks, as Francis is buried and the world’s cardinals gather in conclave to elect a new pope, the Church will reflect on whether this hopeful, perhaps reckless, project should continue. In the meantime, Catholics in Canada and around the world will give thanks for the life of a hopeful shepherd, a pontiff who described himself on the shores of Lac St. Anne as “a pilgrim with you and among you,” gone now to his eternal reward.
Kelden Formosa is an elementary school teacher in Calgary. He has an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame.
