Pope Francis Was a Shepherd, Not a Reformer

Had Sam not tragically passed away, he would have made a great Pontiff?

Pope Francis Was a Shepherd, Not a Reformer

He found himself outmatched by the curia, as the Vatican bureaucracy is known.

By Matthew Hennessey

April 21, 2025 4:40 pm ET

The media will lionize Pope Francis as a reformer, but that isn’t right. To make lasting change in an institution, you need institutional skills. Francis’ disposition was pastoral, not administrative.

In the Catholic Church, political power is concentrated in the Roman curia—the practically invisible coterie of busybodies, many of them high-ranking clergy, who administer the vast Vatican bureaucracy. The curia is staffed largely by Italians. Francis was an outsider from faraway Argentina, which put him at a disadvantage in his own house. He had no interest in the material trappings of power, forswearing the famous bling of the papacy. He preferred to live not in the luxurious papal apartments but in a simple room in the hotel on the Vatican grounds.

Francis was a shepherd. He had the smell of his sheep about him. The manipulators and inside players of the Roman curia ate him for lunch. He didn’t reform them; they reformed him.

Vatican intrigues and curial infighting happen mostly in the dark. The church is by nature insular and secretive. Bishops are loyal to the pope, even when they don’t agree with him. Priests are loyal to their bishops in the same way. Journalism, the standard check on bureaucratic abuses in an open society, has difficulty penetrating the Vatican’s thick walls. Catholic journalists have their own loyalties. They tend to pull their punches for fear of hurting the church they love.

For Catholics of a conservative disposition, Francis’ papacy was a bumpy ride. It began with the shocking resignation of his orthodox and stalwart predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. It ended with a manufactured mini-controversy about his supposed snubbing of Vice President JD Vance. In between there was frequent confusion, many casual slights and a handful of indefensible betrayals.

Pope Francis blessed a series of disgraceful accommodations with communist China, which brutalizes its Christian population. Faithful Catholics who had sustained underground churches at serious risk to their lives felt abandoned by the Vatican’s willingness to make nice with their persecutors. Untold numbers of Chinese Catholics are wasting away in Chinese prisons. Jimmy Lai is only the most well-known.

Francis’ China policy was essentially the reverse of the approach taken by Pope John Paul II to the Soviet Union. It’s hard to believe that he crafted it himself. While Francis was a frequent critic of free-market capitalism, he acquired as the bishop of Buenos Aires a reputation as a staunch anticommunist. The likeliest scenario is that powerful Vatican officials convinced him that a diplomatic opening to China was in the church’s long-term interest. It was a mistake that will stain his legacy.

Among the most shameful episodes of the Francis papacy was the railroading of Australian Cardinal George Pell. Francis asked Pell in 2014 to come to Rome to reform the Vatican’s tangled, scandal-plagued finances, putting him on a collision course with curial power. In 2017 Pell was accused of committing a barely believable series of sexual crimes in the 1990s and returned to Australia to defend himself. Pell was convicted and spent 404 days in solitary confinement—deprived even of the materials necessary to say daily Mass. Australia’s High Court overturned Pell’s conviction in 2019 and he was freed. Pell, who died in 2023, speculated publicly that his curial enemies had set him up.

Francis failed Pell. A plugged-in pope with control over the Vatican bureaucracy would never have allowed such a naked injustice to occur on his watch. Corruption among the curia was at least part of the reason Benedict resigned in the first place. Francis was unable to excise the rot. He was no reformer.

It took some time for Francis to adjust to being pope. In unguarded moments early in his papacy, he was blunt and unforgiving about the rigidity he perceived among tradition-minded Catholics. He chastised Catholic couples for thinking they needed to “breed like rabbits.” He punished conservative bishops for their “backward” and “narrow” views.

When asked whether homosexuals could be Catholic priests, he made an off-the-cuff remark that will be his legacy, for good or ill: “Who am I to judge?” He was the pope, the Roman pontiff. For believing Catholics he was the vicar of Christ on earth.

But he was no reformer. May perpetual light shine upon him.

Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.