Pedro Paulo Wizenmann. Originally published in Spring 2018.

Pope Francis completes his fifth year as the head of the Catholic Church on March 13, 2018. From the moment the Latin American Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became pope in 2013, audiences around the world watched his gestures of humility and firm desire to reach out to everyone, especially the marginalized. The new pontiff refused to move to the official papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and instead lived in a Vatican guesthouse, drove a Fiat, and washed the feet of Muslim refugees. However, such humility to the outside world also aligned with his boldness and authority in striving to reform the Vatican from the inside, from organizing the finances in the Vatican Bank to restructuring the Roman Curia itself. Francis has been consistently clear that this process is both necessary and difficult. In 2015, he listed a series of “diseases” from which the Roman Curia suffers, among them a “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and a “pathology of power.” Last December, he also compared reforming the Vatican to “cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush.” Despite the challenges, his actions over the past five years have testified to his resolution to overcome the hardships.

Besides demonstrating such firmness regarding internal matters, Pope Francis has not only shown humble and merciful gestures to the outside world, but also clearly and firmly expressed his positions to political leaders, nations, and the whole public in general. The last five years are marked by Pope Francis’s explicit political positions. He used, for example, his last traditional Christmas “Urbi et Orbi” blessing, addressed “to the city and to the world,” to pray for peace in Jerusalem and reiterate the Vatican’s long-standing support for a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Just days after President Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Pope Francis’s address was a direct message to the extremists on both sides of the conflict.

Though direct and frequent, the pope’s political statements have often been placed out of context, which comes from the misguided intention to fit his perspectives or the whole Catholic doctrine into either the conservative or progressive category. There is a common tendency among some Western news agencies to pit Pope Francis and his “progressive reforms” against a Roman Curia that strictly adheres to a “conservative doctrine.” While there is some historical support for such a narrative, labeling the pope’s positions or the Church’s doctrine as such misses the big picture, merely propagating a restricted and incomplete analysis of Pope Francis and what has gone on in the Church over the past years.

Unlike what some progressive activists have claimed (or what media has often alleged), Francis is not against the Catholic doctrine and in favor of liberal agendas like a “sexual revolution.” Instead, he has framed his approach in a way that tries to reach out to everyone. His answer in 2013 to a question about a gay lobby inside the church, which has been widely covered among many news agencies, exemplifies this approach. First, he reaches out by asking “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” Later, he goes on to reaffirm the Church’s doctrine that homosexual acts, not homosexual orientation itself, are sinful and that gay people “should not be marginalized because of this but that they must be integrated into society.” Another example is his encyclical Amoris Laetitia, in which he praised the family constituted by father, mother, and children, exhorting them to live more fully. He considered major challenges afflicting families today around the world and how their society and the Church could include them. Divorce was a minor issue in this encyclical, though historically a common issue addressed by the news coverage of Amoris Laetitia. In the encyclical, however, Pope Francis made it clear that while the Church does not value or accept divorce, he does look for pastoral ways of integrating these families into the community, especially on a case by case basis in the dioceses and parishes. Therefore, Pope Francis has managed to leave the Catholic doctrine intact while at the same time framing it in a way that attempts to reach out to everyone and emphasize mercy.

One may claim that Pope Francis has not denied Catholic doctrine, but instead has actually just focused on parts of the doctrine that have usually not been emphasized from a US perspective, on matters such as poverty, immigration, and climate change. On the US political spectrum, however, these particular stances are often considered to be progressive and tend to push back against current American policy.

Pope Francis’ wide-reaching, humanitarian bent is clearly rooted in his experience in Latin America, where the Church has often held clearer political positions and consistently emphasized the missionary zeal and preferential option of the Church for the poor. In Argentina, the “Theology of the People,” which turns to popular practices of faith for theological reflection, had a great influence on Pope Francis as an archbishop, especially through his practices in the slums of Buenos Aires and his advocacy of a Church that is poor and is for the poor. Also, in Argentina and many other Latin American countries, the Church has played a role in opposing many dictatorial regimes in the last decades of the twentieth century. For instance, the Colombian Catholic Bishops’ Conference has taken an active stand in the peace process with the FARC, and their Brazilian counterpart has done so against President Temer’s economic reforms. Most of these countries also adhere to the principle of separation of church and state, but the Church ultimately ha sgreater cultural influence in certain political positions due to Catholic majority populations and the institution’s significant role in each country`s historical development.

Pope Francis’ understanding of Catholic doctrine stirs the US religious and political environment, as reflected in his take on issues classically linked to the Catholic doctrine in the United States, such as being opposed to abortion. Pope Francis frames this stance in a way that merely being against abortion becomes not enough for fully “supporting life” in such a way the Catholic doctrine, which puts the human person at the center of economy, politics, or society, requires. As he insists in his encyclical Laudato Si, “everything is connected” and there are, therefore, many other issues that also present a “life threat” in the current “throwaway culture” that challenges the world and disregards the “essential value of the human person,” as he puts it. Linked to “the innocent victim of abortion,” there are the “children who die of hunger or from bombings,” the “immigrants who drown in the search for a better tomorrow,” and “the environment devastated by man’s predatory relationship with nature.”

One important origin of the many threats to life that appear in Pope Francis criticisms is this “throwaway culture” associated with an “economy of exclusion and inequality.” As he articules it in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded… In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

Just as his personality blends humility and boldness, Pope Francis connects an “economy that kills” with inequality, climate change, the refugee crisis, the value of family, and indifference towards the dignity of life at every stage. This clearly goes beyond the common labels of conservatism and progressivism that permeate the American political spectrum. In a country with a political system as polarized as that of the United States, it is at least intriguing that a leader that knocks down these ideological walls is seen favorably by 87 percent of the population, according to a poll led by the Pew Research Center in the beginning of 2017. If labels only restrict the understanding of Pope Francis’s political positions, perhaps their widespread use is also a major reason for the current US lack of productive political discourse.