VATICAN CITY (AP) — As Amazonian bishops gathered at the Vatican on Oct. 21, 2019, a man entered a nearby church after dawn and stole three Indigenous statues brought to Rome for the occasion. He threw them into the Tiber River in a videotaped protest to denounce what he called the “pagan idolatry” taking place on Pope Francis’ watch.
The incident underscored the lengths to which Pope Francis’ traditionalist critics were willing to go to vent their opposition to history’s first Latin American pope. From individual protests to social media campaigns, conferences and petitions, conservatives made clear they believed themselves to be more Catholic than the pope and forged unusually vocal resistance to his authority.
Their token leaders in the College of Cardinals will likely be maneuvering to ensure someone more sympathetic to their sensibilities will be elected to replace Francis, who died Monday at 88.
‘Some wanted me dead’
Every pope has his critics. And Francis probably expected he would face opposition to his radical reform agenda after Catholics for two generations grew used to more conservative popes.
“Some wanted me dead,” he quipped once after he heard some prelates in Rome had started plotting a future conclave while he was in the hospital.
Francis’ critics were unique in having a living alternate as a point of reference, Pope Benedict XVI, who resided as pope emeritus in the Vatican Gardens for the first decade of Francis’ pontificate.
Such an anomaly made the dynamics of the Francis opposition a historical first. It exacerbated divisions that experts say must be addressed before another pope decides to step down. They say norms are necessary to prevent a retired pope from being an inspiration for the faithful in ways that discredit his successor or impact his leadership.
Francis tolerated the right-wing opposition for a while, often responding to their attacks with silence.
At times, he even seemed to relish in the criticism as evidence of how far a church “obsessed” with rules and regulations had strayed from Jesus’ Gospel-mandated call to welcome the stranger, feed the poor and show mercy to all.
“It’s an honor if the Americans attack me,” he once said, referring to the U.S.-based nexus of opposition.
After Benedict’s death in 2022, Francis tried to blunt the opposition and consolidate his progressive reforms, even though it seemed the right-wing knives were out for him.
Within days of Benedict’s funeral, his longtime secretary published a tell-all memoir highly critical of Francis. It also emerged posthumously that Cardinal George Pell wrote a devastating memo that circulated anonymously, calling Francis’ pontificate a “catastrophe.”
While saying he welcomed criticism, Francis tried to neutralize the opposition through key appointments and targeted removals, even while trying to make the church a welcoming “field hospital for wounded souls,” especially LGBTQ+ Catholics.
After one gesture of outreach — Francis approved blessings for same-sex couples — African bishops united in disapproval in a remarkable continent-wide dissent to a papal directive.
“If you look at all the history of the reform of the church, where you have the strongest resistance or debated points, it’s really usually a very important point,” said Sister Nathalie Becquart, who helped spearhead one of Francis’ progressive agenda items to make the church more responsive to the needs of laypeople.
Wary of Francis from the start
Conservative and traditionalist Catholics were wary of Francis after their beloved Benedict became the first pope in 600 years to resign.
They grimaced when Francis emerged on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after his 2013 election without the ermine-rimmed, red velvet cape of his predecessors. They gasped a few weeks later when he washed the feet of women and Muslims on Holy Thursday, a ritual previously restricted to men.
“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into his papacy. “The Dictator Pope” was the title of book by a British traditionalist published a few years later.
Over time, the critics’ worst fears came true.
One breaking point came in 2016, when Francis opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion. Some accused Francis of heresy.
Four conservative cardinals formally asked him to clarify himself, issuing “dubia” or questions to him. They argued church doctrine held that Catholics who remarried without a church annulment were living in sin and couldn’t receive the sacraments.
He never replied.
Reversing Benedict on the Latin Mass
Conservatives could not have known that Francis would take one of the most controversial steps of his pontificate by reimposing restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed.
The reversal of Benedict’s signature liturgical legacy was evidence that Francis had essentially declared war on traditionalists, the ancient liturgy and Benedict’s papacy itself.
“Francis HATES US. Francis HATES Tradition. Francis HATES all that is good and beautiful,” the traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli tweeted. But it concluded: “FRANCIS WILL DIE, THE LATIN MASS WILL LIVE FOREVER.”
Francis insisted his aim was to preserve church unity. Critics accused him of the opposite, of driving a wedge, and the outrage wasn’t limited to U.S.-based conservative Catholic media or fringe right-wing bloggers who had popularized Francis-bashing.
Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the “dubia” prelates whom Francis sacked early on as the Vatican’s supreme court justice, blasted the “severity” of the papal crackdown.
Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican’s retired liturgy chief, responded with tweets quoting Benedict’s original 2007 law to relax the restrictions that Francis had overturned. They were accompanied by a photo of Benedict wearing the red cape that Francis had eschewed the night of his election.
A year earlier, Sarah orchestrated a media firestorm by persuading Benedict to co-author a book reaffirming priestly celibacy at a time when Francis was considering ordaining married men to address a clergy shortage in the Amazon.
The book, and the prospect of a retired pope trying to influence a reigning one, created the nightmare scenario that canon lawyers and theologians had warned of in 2013, when Benedict decided to retain the white cassock of the papacy in retirement and call himself “Emeritus Pope,” rather than revert to his birth name.
The scandal died down after Benedict removed himself as a co-author and Francis fired his secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, believed to have been behind it.
After Benedict died and Gaenswein penned his highly critical, tell-all memoir “Nothing But the Truth,” Francis exiled him from the Vatican. Then, after a time in his native Germany, made him an ambassador.
After Burke joined a bigger group of cardinals questioning Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future, Francis cut him off financially.
Francis was more tolerant with another critic, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen. He excoriated the pope for agreeing in 2018 to a deal with China over the nomination of bishops, accusing Francis of selling out China’s underground Catholics who stayed loyal to the Holy See during decades of persecution.
Francis received Zen at the Vatican and later called him a “tender soul.”
Francis won few friends with his frequent denunciations of “clericalism” — the idea that priests should be put on a pedestal. He made it a tradition to use his Christmas greeting to publicly shame Vatican bureaucrats, accusing them of being careerist, money-grubbing gossips with “spiritual Alzheimer’s.”
German Cardinal Gerhard Mueller complained that Francis treated Vatican monsignors like “uneducated children.”
A major U.S. critic emerges
Francis’ biggest conservative critic was the Vatican’s former ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano. In 2018, he said Francis had covered up accusations that then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American, had slept with his seminarians.
Vigano demanded Francis resign for allegedly rehabilitating McCarrick from sanctions imposed by Benedict. The furor faded after Francis defrocked McCarrick and Vigano was discredited with conspiracy theories about COVID-19. McCarrick died earlier this month.
In 2024, Francis excommunicated Vigano after finding him guilty of schism.
Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh said Francis dismantled much of the resistance. He lists the Amazonian synod as a defining positive moment of his pontificate — not because of the incident with the statues but because the meeting emphasized his key pastoral priority of accompanying the faithful.
“The native peoples of Amazonia were right here in St. Peter’s Square, and Francis walked across to the synod with them,” Ivereigh said, recalling the feathered headdresses and Indigenous statues that were on display.
“The pastor among his people, walking together. And I thought, ‘That is him. That sums him up,’” he said.
