I was in Spanish class in 2013 at my Catholic college when the church bells all around campus began to ring and didn’t stop. My good friend in that class and I exchanged looks and knew something important about those bells: they were heralding the election of a new pope. Just a few weeks before that day, Pope Benedict had announced his surprise resignation and thrown the Catholic world into confusion and chaos. In fact, I had been in the shower when the news of Benedict’s resignation broke, and on this day in Spanish class, I was in a similarly weird place; the class was immersive in terms of learning the language, so we weren’t supposed to use English, but we didn’t know the right words to express to our professor that we knew that the bells were announcing the election of a new pope.
Finally, the class ended; we took off running uphill to the other side of campus, and we ran to the TV just in time to hear those exciting words:
Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus Papam!
“I announce to you a great joy: we have a pope!”
Then the man who had taken Francis as his papal name stepped out onto the balcony with a simple wave, and I broke that year’s Lenten penance by going on Facebook to post about the new pope. Thus started a long, tumultuous personal journey of learning what it means to be Catholic and learn from the pope.
In 2013 I was in an isolated bubble of Catholicism defined by money, privilege, and an insular approach to the Church, an approach which simultaneously frustrated me and managed to pervade my own way of thinking. I was in a Catholic organization which took itself excessively seriously and looked at itself with a prideful haughtiness, judging and excluding those who did not fit that sterile and comfortable approach to Catholicism. I tried not to let myself fall into that way of thinking, but I know that I did. Even so, I pushed against it when I could, recognizing that this approach to the world was not one which I wanted to espouse. So when the new pope began a series of activities which rejected the regal and stuffy expectations of how a pope should behave, I was thrilled. Francis’ decision to pay for the hotel room where he had been staying during the conclave, the fact that when he was a cardinal he rode public transportation, his emphasis on simplicity and service—his approach to the papacy was a breath of fresh air and sustained me until I was able to get out of that suffocating environment in which I found myself in college.
After graduation I moved home and started to try to figure out who I was in a secular world very different from the Catholic bubble in which I had lived for the past four years. This new world was good for me: for the first time in years, I had to engage with the everyday world which desperately needed an encounter with the love of God. My new friends teased me about my belief in God, but we also respected each other and valued each other’s different perspectives. Still, their apathy toward religion challenged me, and so I spent a lot of time on various Catholic websites and blogs, looking for clear, decisive teaching about all sorts of different things, building a sense of trust in these Catholic figures. I looked for solid arguments and analysis of ecclesiastical and worldly events and cultivated an ecosystem of voices which confidently proclaimed the truth—or at least, so I thought.
Around this time, something very important happened, a series of events which laid the groundwork for me to descend into a world of distrust for the papacy. When Pope Francis declared the death penalty “inadmissible,” I reacted with unease, because the Catholic voices to which I was listening questioned the legitimacy of the teaching. Of course, once one domino falls, others fall with it, and I began exploring the dark underside of the online Catholic world, encountering what seemed to be compelling arguments for ignoring what Pope Francis said about the death penalty and many other things, voices which assertively declared what they considered to be authentic Catholicism.
I had found the world of radical traditionalism, the rad trads, and I was eagerly absorbing their ideas.
Interestingly, and unsurprisingly to me now, this worldview lends itself to anger toward the world and the Church, cultivating a distrust of the pope’s teachings and leaning heavily upon one’s own distorted understanding of Church history and theology. I listened to videos from prideful Catholics who claimed that Pope Francis was teaching error, and I wondered if that claim was true. Certainly the traditionalist arguments seemed solid. I remember talking to some close non-Catholic Christian friends at a few points; when they asked me, sometime in late 2019, what I thought of the pope, I derisively replied, “The papacy itself, or this pope in particular? Not a fan of this one.” I had arrived at the logical conclusion of my way of thinking: I know better than the pope, or at least I should trust other people’s interpretations of Catholicism and what they claimed that Pope Francis was doing. These people always interpreted what he was doing and saying in a way which reflected badly on Pope Francis.
Then something hugely consequential happened: COVID. Dioceses restricted public Masses, and the media which I consumed at the time reacted with fury, accusing the Church hierarchy of restricting access to the sacraments. Concurrently, I continued to explore content which pushed for the superiority of the pre-Vatican II form of the Mass, and I withdrew into an insular worldview which looked with suspicion on the modern Church and the things our bishops said, staying in that mindset for many months, cutting myself off from the Catholic world at large, until I realized something important, something fundamental:
I was getting weird.
So I made a deliberate choice to disengage from the traditionalist media which had formed my information bubble for years, opting instead to read a website which many of those bloggers and figures had falsely dismissed as deeply flawed and heretical: Where Peter Is, a website dedicated to engaging with and exploring what Pope Francis says and does, explaining those things in a way which emphasizes what Pope Francis actually says, not what the angry Catholic bloggers claim that he says. The old joke asks, “Is the pope Catholic?”, and I realized that the answer is emphatic and unambiguous: “YES!”
And just as the dominoes had fallen to lead me away from trusting in Francis, the dominoes righted themselves with increasing speed as I learned what Pope Francis had actually said and done. Whereas I had once reacted with glee when the Amazonian Synod led to an uproar about indigenous expressions of devotion, I read about the devotions in a context which was not antagonistic to Pope Francis. Likewise, when Francis released letters and encyclicals which focused, to borrow a line from the 1960s movie about Jesus named King of Kings, on “the brotherhood of man [humanity],” I heard the clamor and discord from the usual suspects, who claimed that the pope was not preaching the Gospel explicitly enough. But when I read the encyclicals in question, I discovered the real voice of Pope Francis, advocating for a deeply Christian culture of encounter, accompaniment, and listening, and I began to realize that Pope Francis’ message sounded much more like the God to whom my parents and family had introduced me when I was younger.
In short, I realized that I would much rather follow the God of Pope Francis who advocates for the poor and ignored in our midst, rather than the God of the angry online Catholic echo-chamber who looks vengefully on us and sees only our faults, especially those of the weak and downtrodden.
And so I began to feel deep inside that I had finally found once again that Catholicism which doesn’t emphasize minutia in rules and rubrics as much as it does a God who lives among us in our messiness and frailty, and I began to feel free. Jesus of course says that the truth will set us free (John 8:32), but it was remarkable to experience that sense of freedom once I began to listen to voices which actually told the truth about what Pope Francis and the Church say about things. It’s amazing how freeing it is to trust the Holy Spirit to guide the pope and the Church and not to rely on trying to figure out the “real” Catholic teaching myself.
So, here we are in early 2025, with Pope Francis extremely sick and unwell. I pray that he recovers, because in his voice I hear the voice of Jesus raising up the poor and marginalized. Our world needs him, because he shows us the way in which God loves the world—support for the poor and the weak, the integrity and well-being of the natural world around us, the advocacy for peace in a war-torn world. But if God decides that Pope Francis’ time has come, I am thankful to God for pulling me back from the precipice. No matter who is pope this time next year and beyond, I know that God will lead him and that I can trust in what he says.
Habemus Papam: We have a pope. And thank God for that.