David Deavel
“On the Role of Literature in Formation” is perhaps Pope Francis’s best document of his pontificate. Short, sweet, and full of good lines quoted and written. And yet he remains a “second friend” to many of his flock because they see their own world in some fundamentally different ways than he does.
Pope Francis’s pontificate has been, to put it mildly, controversial. His judgments—theological, administrative, and otherwise—have generally cheered those who seem to want the Catholic Church to resemble the liberal Protestant groups that are evaporating before our eyes. The ambiguity with which Francis has expressed many of these judgments has unleashed before us a small army of “popesplainers,” those who feel a bounden duty to tell anyone worried about statements, appointments, or any other papal action that such a worrier is a bad, faithless person who ought to trust and get with the non-judgmental vibe of Francis’s papacy.
It’s all very tiresome.
Yet no ridiculous overreaction goes unpunished by a complete overreaction in the other direction. If the popesplainer militia torments us with ridiculous accusations from one side, we get from another side the insistence that Francis is a kind of omnimalevolent actor whose every action must be maximally evil and whose every statement must be absolutely twisted. I don’t think even Dante, who put five popes in hell in his own great tale, was quite as dire as some Catholics are.
As I, with St. Paul, have no interest in making final judgments about my own soul, I really have no interest in judgments about Francis’s. It seems obvious that this papacy will not be judged kindly by future Catholic or secular historians. But that does not mean all of the pontiff’s works have been bad or even that all his ideas are.
One of the most profound difficulties about Francis for this writer has been the fact that Francis’s own tastes in reading have significant overlap with his own. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/04/reading-second-friend-pope-francis-literature-david-deavel.html