Some Brief Reflections on the Death of a Pope

Here we go again. Another round of swooning, gushing, and utterly emetic media coverage for a deceased pontiff. Only the death of a monarch inspires more turgidly worshipful garbage from BBC News. I took some screenshots just moments ago for illustration. One has to scroll down through many an irritatingly earnest headline and a tiresome number of photos of people crying to get to some real news (rather sheepishly listed under ‘more top stories’)—like the resumption of Russian drone attacks on Ukraine, or the existence of a second group in a chat app where sensitive US military information has been shared, or the Palestinian Red Crescent’s accusation that Israel lied about the killing of paramedics last month. All much more important developments than the death of an old man, one would think.

The carpet-bombing levels of saturation aside, I have already mentioned the adulatory tone of the coverage of Pope Francis’s death. As with monarchs, so with popes: the media is full of tears and worship, and nary a critical or sceptical word is uttered. It is as predictable as it is pathetic. I wrote similarly about the death of Francis’s predecessor a couple of years ago, which prompts one to ask: was Francis more or less vile than Joseph Ratzinger, who was very, very vile indeed?

In some ways, this is a non-question: the very idea of the pope is a rotten one to begin with, and there can be no good popes, only popes who are good in spite of being pope. A divinely appointed theocrat of great wealth and power using the dubious status of Vatican statehood to push his church’s theology on the rest of us and cover up its own corruption and abuse? No, thank you. Popes might not be able to launch crusades any more, but they are still incredibly powerful, to the detriment of everyone else.

About the nicest thing I can muster regarding Francis is that he was indeed less vile than his predecessor. A low bar, indeed, but credit where it’s due. It was also good to see him rebuking the Trump administration recently. Still, for all the fluffy words that occasionally came out of his mouth, Francis upheld an explicitly authoritarian, homophobic, and misogynistic institution. Nothing he did or said changed the bigoted core of the Church as enshrined in Canon Law. Fags are still guilty of the ‘foulest crime’ and bound for hell, but at least Pope Francis said some sweet things about us meanwhile.

Worst of all, Francis merely tinkered around the edges of the Church’s child sex abuse problem, doing nothing to fundamentally change a system which encourages abuse and its cover-up to this very day. As I wrote in 2023, citing Daniel Gawthrop’s excellent and devastating 2013 book The Trial of Pope Benedict:

And what of Ratzinger’s successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis? Gawthrop offers a wish list at the end of his book, published in 2013, for what he hopes the new Pope might do. Most of his wish list has not been achieved. Indeed, very little real change has happened under Bergoglio. He is slightly more progressive, at least on the surface. But underneath his kindlier, people-oriented façade, Bergoglio is more or less the same as Ratzinger.

I emailed Gawthrop, interested in his views on how Bergoglio has done as Pope. He is not impressed. Bergoglio’s early, seemingly liberal statements have proven hollow, revealing the crusty conservative underneath: homosexuality is still an abomination, the ordination of women is still a heinous offense, and abortion is still a great evil.

On child sex abuse, Bergoglio has recently announced plans for the reform of church bureaucracy. In 2019, he lifted the pontifical secrecy requirement imposed on child sex abuse cases. But this is all far too little, far too late. The fundamental problems remain: Canon Law supremacy is still insisted upon, confidentiality (just not absolute secrecy) is encouraged, there is still no rigorous investigatory process or serious punishment under Canon Law, and there is still no mandatory reporting of child sex abuse cases to the civil authorities. Under Bergoglio, then, the Church is still operating a parallel and secretive legal system to deal with what are considered serious crimes under most national law codes. And, of course, the CDF [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] archives have not been opened, meaning that the full story of the Church’s, and Joseph Ratzinger’s, response to child sex abuse among its priests is still unknown. Why, if there is nothing to hide, is the Church still so defensive?

Bergoglio’s reforms, in short, mean nothing: they are mere tinkering.

In that article for OnlySky, I quoted from Gawthrop’s email:

What it comes down to is this: Pope Francis is a company man. He will always project an appealing image to the public and his flock, but he will not take action to alter the Church and its workings to a degree that would weaken the institution in the eyes of the curia [the central government of the Church]. And this, in many ways, makes him no different than Pope Benedict.

Nothing that has happened in the past two years substantially alters the judgements above. (I highly recommend Gawthrop’s book as well as Geoffrey Robertson’s 2010 The Case of the Pope for a fuller view of the problems with the papacy in general and the two last incumbents of the office in particular. I did my best in my two articles, already cited, to put across those arguments, but the best case is to be found in those books.)

As we wait for God to choose his next representative on Earth—and the absurd accompanying process will no doubt come with its own breathless media coverage—I am reminded of the words of Christopher Hitchens from a 2009 debate on the Catholic Church:

I don’t at all look forward to the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I don’t. Or any other Pope, not really, except for one tiny reason, which I ought to confess and share with you. When he dies, there’s quite a long interval till the conclave can meet…to pick another Pope. Sometimes it goes on for months till they get the white smoke, and for that whole time, that whole interval—it’s a delicious, lucid interlude—there isn’t anyone on Earth who claims to be infallible. Isn’t that nice?

All I think all I want to propose in closing is this: that if the human species is to rise to the full height that’s demanded by its dignity and by its intelligence, we must all of us move to a state of affairs where that condition is permanent, and I think we should get on with it

It seems we are still some time off from making a pope-less condition permanent, but who knows? Maybe a miracle will be worked and the cardinals will realise the utter wrongness and futility of what they are doing. Imagine it: at conclave, they decide to pack up, douse the candles, waft away the incense and the smoke, give the Church’s wealth to the poor, admit the Church’s wrongdoing and open up the archives, shuffle out of the Sistine Chapel, slip out of their jewels and robes, and just go home to await the judgement of their peers.

Pope Francis the Last. Francis the Final. How nice that would be.