Pope Francis is starting to look a lot like Sarah Palin or Kevin Rudd

I’m starting to have a crisis of faith. Not in God, but rather, in Pope Francis.
It seems a betrayal to even write these words. I’m a progressive Catholic who longs for a church that is more welcoming of women, homosexuals and divorced people. I want a church where the hierarchy spends more time talking about liberating the poor and oppressed and less time lecturing about birth control. I pray for a church that comprehensively faces the causes of child sexual abuse so we can have confidence such systematic evil will never occur again.
Francis – global superstar, media darling, a truly modern pope – is the best hope people like me have had for many years, right? He’s the second coming of John XXIII, isn’t he?
I confess that I am starting to doubt it.
Francis swept into the Chair of St Peter with such animation and apparent determination to up-end the traditional notions of how popes ought to behave.
Washing the feet of prisoners, including women and Muslims. Refusing to live in the Apostolic Palace. Apparently calling a woman who married a divorced man in a civil ceremony to assure her it’s OK to go to communion. Refusing to judge homosexuals.
“I love this guy,” proclaimed the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Catholics everywhere – especially progressive Catholics, but also those who were lapsed or just bored – enthusiastically agreed.
Last month Francis made a curious comment in an interview marking the second anniversary of his election as pope:
I have the feeling that my Pontificate will be brief: four or five years; I do not know, even two or three. Two have already passed. It is a somewhat vague sensation. Maybe it’s like the psychology of the gambler who convinces himself he will lose so he won’t be disappointed and if he wins, is happy. I do not know. But I feel that the Lord has placed me here for a short-time, and nothing more …
He’s only going to be pope for four or five years? Well, Francis, two of those years have already passed. It’s time to get moving.
The supposedly caretaker pope, John XXIII, managed in a four year and 218 day reign to utterly transform and modernise the church through the Second Vatican Council. In trying to explain how this happened, my university theology professor said: “Well, the Holy Spirit moves where it will.” And one of my classmates whispered, “It seems the Holy Spirit is a bit constipated these days. Nothing much is moving anymore.”
Undergraduate humour but a pretty accurate description from the viewpoint of our generation: post-Vatican II babies who had grown up in a split-personality church, a modern institution led by the traditionalist and conservative John Paul II and his theological enforcer Cardinal Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI. Nothing much was moving, unless you count backwards.
When Francis stormed into office, full of symbolic gestures, I remembered that joke and started to believe that maybe the Holy Spirit was on the go again. As a Catholic, I know that symbols are important. What else are the sacraments but outward symbols of an inward grace? Francis’ outward gestures must be pointing us to his inward grace, to his purpose, direction and vision. Surely, the Holy Spirit’s liberating impulses were working through Francis, breaking the church free from an institutional and hierarchal stranglehold. Surely, Francis’ actions were not just those of a populist wanting to be loved.
This week a Pope Francis Facebook fan page posted one of those annoying quizzes and it popped up in my timeline. It was a Catholic trivia quiz titled “Did Pope Francis Really Say That?” and promised “Free virtual high fives for those who can get more than 10 right ;)”
For the record, I got 13 correct and received my papal hand-slap emoji, but all I could think was “how depressing.”
The pope has transmogrified into the most modern of all creatures: a 21st century celebrity. Having spent the past two years taking selfies, delighting crowds with his antics and entertaining the media with his well-placed “off the cuff” quips, Francis is starting to look familiar. Think Sarah Palin, or Kevin Rudd: people who confuse popularity with leadership, or celebrity with substance.
I know that Jesus says judge not lest ye be judged. And I also know I am being a bit harsh. Francis has taken a meat cleaver to the Vatican Bank, delivered a scathing assessment of the Curia, shut down a witch-hunt inquiry into the US Catholic nuns’ leadership group, and got the world to pay attention to issues like boat people and financial inequality. Later this year he will publish an encyclical on climate change. Because of these actions, the American conservative Catholics are not happy with him.
But has Francis really changed the church? If the pope moves on in two or three years, what will he have left behind? A church more welcoming of the talents of all its members, more accepting of all those who love God and live faithful lives, and a safer place for children, or a just a string of Instagram pictures, warm memories and the latent fizz of lost celebrity? I pray it is the former. I pray the Holy Spirit is moving.