How we know a Francis effect on Catholicism is real

Friday, April 8th, 2016

No one doubts Pope Francis’ pulling power, whether in St Peter’s Square or on Instagram. But the fact that people want to see and hear Francis doesn’t tell you much about the impact he is having on them, or on the wider Church.

To assess the success of a pope, you have to first identify the major reform he seeks, and then ask how far he has achieved it.

For St. John Paul II, it was “Evangelical Catholicism”. After a decade of turbulence and disagreement, he wanted the Church to be more faithful to its traditions and to be braver and more energetic in its proclamation.

Pope Benedict XVI’s big idea was the New Evangelization. Faced with the dictatorship of relativism, he sought a Church that could better express the clarity, coherence and power of its teaching in ways credible to the modern mind.

For Francis – and the Latin-American Church as a whole – the plan is ‘Pastoral Conversion’. He wants the Church to be closer to people in the reality of their daily lives, to be simpler, poorer and more accessible, and better able to communicate God’s merciful love.

It is the plan laid out in his November 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, and in barnstorming speeches in Florence, at the close of last year’s synod, and recently in Mexico City.

Along with his teaching documents, each pope also has a privileged mechanism for bringing about that conversion.

For John Paul II, it was traveling and visibility on a global scale. For Benedict XVI, it was the synod for the New Evangelization and the Vatican office he created to implement it.

For Francis, it is the synod on the family (leading to its fruit, the forthcoming exhortation “Amoris Laetitia” ) and the Jubilee of Mercy.

Now that we are close to what is probably the halfway point of the Francis’ papacy, it is time to ask: How far has the Church been “pastorally converted”?

On one level, of course, it’s way too early to say. But there are three indications the strategy is making its mark. Continue reading

Austen Ivereigh is a writer, journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (now out in Picador paperback, with a new, updated epilogue).