According to his publishers, Pope Francis originally intended that his autobiography should not see the light of day until after his death. He is said to have changed his mind after reflecting upon “the needs of our times” and having decided that 2025 should be a Jubilee Year for the Catholic Church, a celebration whose theme will be “Pilgrims of Hope.” The book will therefore appear January 14 (following a leak that rocked the publishing world), scarcely a month after Francis’s 88th birthday, under the appropriate if slightly unimaginative title Hope.
There were almost certainly other factors behind the Pope’s decision. The struggle between progressives and conservatives that has beset the worldwide Catholic Church since the death of Pope John Paul II, in 2005, or even, some would say, since the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965—and highlighted in the new Edward Berger film, Conclave, which has piqued interest in the Vatican’s political fissions and factions—is a contest over which Francis wants to exert as much influence as possible before his reign ends. In principle, the public pronouncements contained in his autobiography will serve that end.
Yet on two counts Francis faces a formidable task. The first is that, regarding the disputes that have recurred throughout his papacy, such as women’s ordination, the treatment of divorceés and same-sex couples, and the use of the Latin Mass, both the Church’s leaders and the worldwide faithful are painfully divided. Gone are the days when a Pontiff could simply assert the doctrine of papal infallibility, proclaimed in 1870, and expect every Catholic in and outside of the Vatican to obey his will.
The second challenge is that, in trying to heal these divisions, Francis often ends up satisfying neither the liberals pressing for change nor the conservatives determined to suppress it. Without doubt he is more reformist than John Paul II or Benedict XVI, his two immediate predecessors. However, he is not as reformist as progressives would like.
That much was clear from a series of impromptu remarks he made in recent months, which taken alone might appear to signify a sort of 180, a departure from his tenure as a more liberal Pope.
Gone are the days when a Pontiff could simply assert the doctrine of papal infallibility, proclaimed in 1870, and expect every Catholic in and outside of the Vatican to obey his will.
In September, during the U.S. presidential-election campaign, without mentioning Donald Trump or Kamala Harris by name, he said: “Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies.” That same month, in Belgium, he called doctors who perform abortions “hitmen.” This from a Pope who, in 2015, moved to relax rules around abortion by allowing priests to forgive it.
On a charitable view, the Pope’s 2024 comments were just re-stating the Church’s well-known hostility to abortion. Still, such blunt language has become something of a hallmark of Francis’s reign the longer it has gone on. Last year he was also reported to have said there was too much frociaggine (a vulgar Italian word roughly translatable as “faggotry”) at some Catholic seminaries. One Italian bishop said the Pope may not have known it was a slur.
Yet Francis’s unfortunate choice of words is more likely to be just that—a man getting older by the day, in one of the most taxing jobs on earth, reverting to offensive slang—and should not obscure the larger point that he is trying to perform a balancing act of exceptional sensitivity between global Catholic factions that span the spectrum, from radical and moderate reformism to mild conservatism and outright reaction. (He also seemingly addresses his recent gaffes in his memoir, writing: “Sometimes we unfortunately come across as bitter, sad priests who are more authoritarian than authoritative, more like old bachelors than wedded to the church.”)
To appreciate Francis’s dilemma, consider the contrasting conditions of the Church in Africa and Western Europe. On important topics such as poverty, social justice, and the legacies of imperialism, the Argentine-born Pope and the African Catholic hierarchy see eye to eye. But on matters of sexuality and gender, African prelates rank among the most conservative on the planet. It was Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, archbishop of Kinshasa, who led Africa’s resistance to “Fiducia Supplicans,” a Vatican document that made it permissible to bless people in same-sex relationships.
In Western Europe, the picture is different. Revelations of sex-abuse scandals going back decades have had a profound impact on the outlook and procedures of national Churches. For instance, the German Church embarked in 2019 on a reform process known as the Synodal Way. Among its decisions is a ruling that Church employees cannot be dismissed for re-marrying after a divorce or for entering a same-sex relationship. Three years ago, Francis made clear his disapproval of such departures from Vatican guidelines, saying, “I say to German Catholics: Germany has a great Protestant Church, but I don’t want another one, because it won’t be as good.”
More recently, Francis has returned to the themes of reconciliation and inclusiveness within and outside of the Church. In an October 31 speech at the Dicastery for Communication, a Vatican agency whose responsibilities include managing the Holy See’s Web site and the Pope’s X account (@pontifex), Francis hinted at his priorities. Apart from spreading the Catholic message, he said the dicastery’s staff should apply themselves to “building bridges, when so many are raising walls, the walls of ideologies … connecting peoples and cultures … a communication that fosters inclusion, dialogue, the quest for peace.”
No one knows better than Francis that the contest between liberals and conservatives is being fought far beyond the confines of the Holy See. It is a contest for international public opinion, couched in traditional theological language but waged on modern-media battlefields. Cardinals, bishops, priests, and lay pressure groups seek to advance their arguments and discredit those of their opponents, much as Catholic theorists did in the early centuries of Church history, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and in the 19th-century doctrinal debates about religion and scientific inquiry.
The difference is that the views of the worldwide Catholic faithful—estimated at almost 1.4 billion people—count for more than before. Particularly in Western democracies, liberal and conservative activists aim to change official Church thought and practice by mobilizing their forces in campaigns that bear a striking resemblance to election contests or referendums in the secular political arena.
This process gained momentum after 2021, when Francis launched a global consultation of Catholics to chart a path for the Church’s future. Reports flooded in from dioceses, especially in North America and Europe, calling for the full and equal participation of women in Catholic ceremonies. Earlier this week, Francis named the first woman to head a major Vatican office, appointing an Italian nun to run the religious-orders department.
One day, the Church’s cardinals will meet behind closed doors at the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Francis, Conclave-style. But whether the next Pope is a committed liberal, a conservative hard-liner, or, more plausibly, somewhere in the middle, there is every reason to expect the turmoil in the worldwide Church to rage on unabated.
Tony Barber is a London-based journalist
