Pope Francis and Me: After Five Years, the Pope Mystifies and Disappoints

In late 2012, I had reached a fork in the road as a Catholic feminist. I faced a misogynist church led by a stern pope whose Vatican scolded nuns for their “radical feminist” ideas, meaning that, unlike America’s bishops, they cared more about serving the poor than obsessing over abortion and gay marriage.

I did not know whether I could continue to be both a Catholic and a feminist. Writing a book was my way of addressing these conflicts. I’m a journalist, so my approach was to seek out women with progressive views who identified as Catholic and who would be willing to share their stories with me.

But a few months into my quest, something radical happened in the church. The dour Benedict XVI shattered a 598-year precedent and quit the papacy. On March 13, 2013, he was replaced by Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Jesuit to become pope, the first from Latin America, and the first to take the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi.

I wondered whether my book would even be relevant under the new pope.

First impressions showed Francis to be very different from his predecessor. He was sunny and smiling. He eschewed the papal pomp that Benedict seemed to relish. He even declined the posh papal apartments, choosing to live in a Vatican guesthouse instead.

He seemed far more interested in income inequality than abortion. And he appeared to have no qualms about communicating with the outside world. His new style won over many American Catholics. According to a recent survey, Francis’s approval ratings among U.S. Catholics hover at 85%.

Nevertheless, I had no cause to worry about the prospects for my book. Yes, Francis is different from Benedict, and has taken some steps Catholic feminists applaud. We all were encouraged, for example, when he made peace with American nuns, lifting the clerical scrutiny and oversight that Benedict had imposed.

But if recent news from the Vatican is any indication, it appears that instead of Francis fully taking the reins of the institutional church, the institution appears to have captured him.

Consider this: The Pope once advised members of the clergy to tone down their sense of superiority, warning them of the “evil” of clericalism, and advising that the wrong training could create priests who are “little monsters.”

Yet his visit to Chile in January revealed a vastly different side of the pontiff. This pope went so far as to accuse Catholic victims of an abusive priest of slander because they claimed that their bishop had known about the pedophilia, and done nothing. “It’s all calumny,” the Pope said.

Of course, the Pope’s behavior in Chile looked even worse after reports that he had received a letter from a victim in 2015. The victim charged that the bishop was present when he and others were subject to the priest’s unwanted kisses and touches. It was only after widespread negative media attention that the Vatican actually dispatched an investigator to look into their accusations.

It appears there are two versions of Pope Francis. There is the Pope who smiles and shrugs when asked about gay priests, and replies, “If someone is gay and he searched for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

And there is the Francis who warns of the “terrible” state of affairs that children are being taught that “they can choose their own sex,” and who wrote that same-sex unions were not even “remotely analogous” to Catholic marriage.

There is the Francis who confesses to being “a bit feminist” and who created a commission to study the possibility of ordaining women to the deaconate, while insisting that women will never be ordained to the priesthood.

There is the Francis who says he wants women to have more say in the church, and leads a Vatican that seems unable to abide any dissent by Catholic women, even those planning to express that desire for more inclusion during a ladylike discussion at the Vatican. The Vatican presumably didn’t like some of the speakers for the event because they supported more compassionate outreach to gay Catholics, forcing the women to find another venue in Rome.

I used to think of Francis as the “Pope of hints,” prying open the tightly wound church hierarchy by suggesting, rather than dictating. After all, this was the pope who recommended that perhaps, in some situations, divorced and remarried Catholics could receive the Eucharist, a privilege long denied them by the institutional church.

I believed that deep down, Francis loved people and wanted to lead a kinder, gentler church into the 21st century.

Five years into his papacy, however, I don’t know what to think. Except that I don’t think that in my bewilderment, I am alone.

Wexler is the author of Catholic Women Confront Their Church: Stories of Hurt and Hope (Rowman & Littlefield).