1- Empathy. The success of Pope Francis connects with the disparities of the present moment. The first American pontiff, he came from afar and sought to distance himself from the Roman Curia, those who believe themselves to be the owners of the business and resort to the most worn-out models of power to continue competing for hegemony in representing God among Christians. Despite his background coming from the most conservative sectors of the Argentine Church, Bergoglio grasped the need to reach out to the people, to look to the parishioners and not just to the Curia, the guardian of increasingly worn-out ways and means, distant from the street. His contribution expresses his character: he has been a figure who inspired more complicity, more accompaniment than intransigence, and who sought to encounter people through their concerns rather than through the transcendence of the higher values of the believer. This is the key to his success—which means that today he is being dismissed with a focus on his forms of proximity, much more than on indoctrination and promises.
An affable Pope. In this way, he has plugged the bleeding of the Church after the ineffable mandates of Pope Wojtyla and Pope Ratzinger. Benedict XVI, an intellectual in an inappropriate place, with his distancing himself from the world, from the supreme gallery of principles, was so disoriented that he folded without allowing death—the exit from that world—to be the natural end of his mandate. Pope Francis learned his lesson, looking people in the face, distancing himself from the Roman Curia, the self-proclaimed ministers of God, that core of ideologues without precise attributes who cling to orthodoxy, secrecy, and a bureaucratic idea of faith and its administration. And he has made understanding toward sinners, concern for people, his way of being in the world. And it has worked: it has brought him recognition.
2- Parentheses. Will he have managed to change the Church? Not necessarily; he is no longer with us, the episode is over, and most likely—we will see this in the conclave that will elect his successor—we will return to the same old story: distance, mystery, promise, and the choreography of revelation, to continue spreading the fear of God. Pope Francis will have been a parenthesis: a figure who sought to win people over, humanizing the Church, playing on sympathy and proximity, but who will have hardly changed anything fundamentally in such a rigid institution controlled by a minority—the cardinals—that reproduces itself, with deep conservative inertia. A conclave in the midst of Trumpism, God help the confessing Christians.
Empathy has made Bergoglio a figure. Coming from outside the Roman ruling core, he found the right way to communicate, to open avenues for people, from a rather closed world. With a respectful style, he even approached those stigmatized as sinners: "If a gay person seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge him?" While pointing out the differences, he showed signs of recognition. Although sometimes he was too wordy in his examples: "Women are like strawberries on the cake, we need more," without the rudeness being accompanied by any proposal for incorporation into the backbone of the institution, the priesthood, built solely with males. In these times, one cannot help but remember that at Trump's inauguration, the only dissenting voice that unsettled the president was Mariann Edgar Budde, a Protestant bishop, asking for consideration for immigrants and LGBT+ people.
Conclusion: Bergoglio, an affable communicator with a lively and non-aggressive outlook, leaves behind an image of empathy and respect, insufficient to change the structural miseries of an institution that denies women the power and recognition granted to men. It's immoral. And despite Pope Francis's amiable manner, neither has the Church changed, nor is there any sign that it might.
