Francis: the pope who changed the room

The pope died in the fourth week of April at the age of eighty-eight, and the church that he had led for twelve years began, immediately and with the formality that his office requires, the rituals that the death of a pope sets in motion. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first to take the name of the saint of the poor, and the leader who changed the church’s tone more than its doctrine; the crowds that filled the square in the days of his final illness, the pilgrims who slept on the cobbles to keep the vigil, were the measure of the affection that he had earned, and the affection was the most unusual thing about his pontificate.

The biography that the obituaries have been assembling is the part of the story that explains the affection. The Argentine cardinal who arrived in the conclave of 2013 as the compromise candidate had become, within the first months, the pope who chose the simple name, who kept the simple habits, who rode the economy car and visited the prisons and washed the feet of the migrants; the gestures were not the innovations that the theologians had expected, and the gestures were the point: he changed the church’s register, the way it spoke and the way it appeared, and the change was felt most strongly by the people whom the church’s grander registers had left cold. The theological continuity, maintained through the pontificate, was the counterpart of the personal discontinuity, and the combination was his particular gift.

The internal battles of his pontificate are the part that the history will weigh, and the weighing will take the decades that such reckonings require. The reforms that he initiated, in the governance of the church’s finances, in the treatment of the divorced and the remarried, in the language about the church’s own failings, were pursued against the resistance of the institutional conservatives and the expectations of the institutional reformers, and the outcomes, delivered in the documents and the synods, were the compromises that the resistance and the expectations produced; the church that he leaves is not the church that the two camps had hoped for, and the in-between is the record that the historians will argue about. The judgement will be conducted against the backdrop of the crises that the church faces, the declining practice in the West, the growing church in the South, the scandals that his predecessors had left unresolved, and the judgement will be shaped by the crises’ outcomes.

The world beyond the church noticed his pontificate in ways that the previous ones had not. The encyclicals on the environment and the brotherhood became the texts that the secular conversations borrowed from, the phrases about the common home entering the climate debate’s vocabulary, and the pope’s interventions in the world’s conflicts, the appeals, the visits, the gestures, were covered with the attention that the office’s moral weight still commands; the attention was the recognition that the church’s voice, whatever its internal condition, remains one of the few that the world still gathers to hear, and his voice, in particular, had learned the register that the world would hear.

The conclave that will follow his death will choose the successor, and the choice will be conducted in the shadow of his pontificate: the cardinals whom he appointed will hold the votes, and the cardinals’ choices will be read as the verdict on the path that he set. The church that the successor inherits is the church that the years of his leadership reshaped, the tone changed, the balance shifted, the questions opened; the successor will have to govern the changes, continue or revise them, and the governance will be the next chapter of the story that his twelve years wrote. He was the pope who changed the room, the square, the church’s address to the world; the crowds that mourned him in the week of his death were the evidence that the change had been received, and the receiving is the legacy that the conclave will now have to interpret.