By Jaspreet Singh Boparai, The Critic
Pope Francis began regularly using a wheelchair in public in 2022, around the time he stopped celebrating Mass in public. On 14 February he was admitted to the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. His end grows nearer. Faithful Catholics seem increasingly anxious, less about the pope’s health than the question of who will be elected his successor on the Throne of St Peter.
Many Vatican-watchers are concerned that the next pope might well be the oily Pietro Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican’s current Secretary of State, or else the slickly philistine former Archbishop of Manila, Luis Cardinal Tagle. Both men are viewed as more competent than Pope Francis in terms of implementing the reforms that they and many of their peers in the Vatican seek to impose on the Church, regardless of whether the Catholic masses (or what is left of them after sixty years of such reforms) in fact want them.
Non-Catholics are often shocked at how unpopular Pope Francis is amongst the ever-dwindling number of faithful Mass-going Catholics who try to fulfil their basic spiritual obligations. Few who claim to love Pope Francis seem to obey basic Church teachings or go to Mass every Sunday. If you talk in confidence to Catholic priests, you will find that most of them are exhausted, frustrated and demoralised after a dozen years of erratic, sometimes abusive management by this pope and his key advisers. Then there are the scandals.
It is difficult to keep up with the list of corrupt, disgraced, sometimes criminal clergy and prelates with whom Pope Francis has surrounded himself. The distinguished scholar Professor John Rist, former Regius Professor of Classics at Aberdeen, helped compile a list of these in a statement published in May 2024 calling for the pope’s resignation. Philip Jenkins published a less detailed, more digestible short summary on the Patheos blog on 7 March.
Perhaps the best-known of these scandals involves Theodore McCarrick, who was once one of the most powerful figures in the American Catholic Church. He rose to become Archbishop of Washington, but was revealed in 2018 to have engaged in a practice best described as “seminary date-rape”. McCarrick’s preferred victims were young men training to become priests. He was removed from the College of Cardinals and subsequently defrocked.
According to McCarrick’s former secretary, Mgr Anthony Figueiredo, Pope Benedict imposed strict sanctions on McCarrick as long ago as 2008, but was too weak to enforce them. After Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation in 2013, Pope Francis rehabilitated McCarrick despite being well aware of both the sex-crime allegations and the sanctions. This was first revealed in an explosive report released on 22 August 2018 by Mgr Carlo Maria Viganò, Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana, who served as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016.