A good man but no radical reformer

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Patsy McGarry
• Published date: 19 December 2020

Almost eight years into his papacy - he was elected in March 2013 - it is very clear that he is no radical pope. It is also clear that were he one, or even minded towards significant reform, he could achieve neither without splitting the church.

This is vividly illustrated by the virulent reaction to some mild "adjustments" he has made. These have inspired a shrill hysteria among some more traditional Catholics who long for the smells and bells of the good old days of a muscular, militant Counter Reformation church where the pope ruled, God was in his heaven and the devil, Protestants, all other (false) religions and heathens knew their place in the overheated below.

It is clear this is a pope who has no intention of changing Catholic Church practice even in areas such as mandatory celibacy or female priests, as more liberal Catholics had hoped.

Even his vaunted compassion towards gay people has not meant any change in church teaching that homosexuality is objectively disordered with a tendency towards evil. And where clerical child abuse is concerned, he too has also proved something of a slow learner, a crowded space these days.

What Francis has done, however, is adjust the mood music in the church from a harsh, dusty, dry, theological, legalistic tone towards something more humane and compassionate. It is becoming a church that allows for and is comfortable with the untidiness of ordinary living.

Within the church itself synods - real synods where there is open discussion as opposed to the pre-planned choreography of the past - has been his most significant innovation. It was at the Synod on the Family (2014-15) that his different approach first emerged.

The breakthrough The issue was whether divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed receive Communion, and agreement was proving impossible. Just over halfway through this book, Francis recalls how "the Spirit saved us in the end, in a breakthrough at the close of the second (October 2015) meeting of the Synod on the Family."

This, he said was down to "those with a deep knowledge of St Thomas Aquinas, among them the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn".

These had established that "because of the immense variety of situations and circumstances people found themselves in, Aquinas's teaching that no general rule could apply in every situation allowed the synod to agree on the need for a case-by-case discernment". What this meant, Francis says, is that "there is no need to change the...