Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the Bible was when there were people trying to make a profit in the Temple. Contrast that to people who will attend a megachurch but hate gay folks. Francis did not condone gay marriage. He simply said that if a gay couple comes to you for pastoral advice, that you love them and attempt to give them the help they need. But you'd think the dude was prancing around in rainbow underwear on camera with the way people reacted to his love and grace.
I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character. This was exacerbated in turn by the media's selective quotation of statements that were, if quite reasonable in their entirety, not exactly robust to misinterpretation.
Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.
> while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character
He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
> People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions.
I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.
Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.
But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.
Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi: "It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."
Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.
I share some of your frustrations, and yet there is also a spiritual peril in failing to extend charity in the interpretation of these remarks, let alone in claiming to know that anyone who interpreted them differently is being willfully obtuse.
The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.
Honestly, if you're going to be a member of a church and you fully believe that the dude is holding the seat of the founder of the faith, the least you could do is actually have enough of an attention span to fully hear him out. It isn't his fault that people decided to do what people do. He explained himself and people chose not to listen.
