[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

The twelve-year reign of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, as the head of the Roman Catholic Church began shortly after the strange and still-unexplained resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, and seven weeks into the second term of Barack Obama as president of the United States. It was fitting that Obama was president during the first four years of Francis’ papacy, as Francis was the Barack Obama of popes: just as Obama did as president of the United States, Pope Francis worked to weaken, instead of strengthen, the institution he was leading, and to provide aid and comfort to its enemies, while confusing and maddening its ardent supporters.

Pope Francis was the first pope, at least in modern times, to put the answer to the old question, “Is the Pope Catholic?,” in doubt. Argentine President Javier Milei didn’t think Francis was much of a Catholic, deriding him as a “Communist” and even saying that he was “the representative of the evil one on earth.” Francis sowed so much confusion about Catholic doctrine that in 2022, Cardinals Walter Brandmüller and Raymond Leo Burke, along with the support of three other Cardinals, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Robert Sarah, and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, asked him a series of public questions about where he stood.

The pope replied the following year, clarifying his position on these issues and trying to dispel the impression that he had departed from the actual teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Vatican News identified these issues as “the interpretation of Divine Revelation, the blessing of same-sex unions, synodality as a constitutive dimension of the Church, the priestly ordination of women, and repentance as a necessary condition for sacramental absolution.”

However, the issues at hand were not the most arresting aspect of this entire controversy. The pope’s answers weren’t even the most important aspect of this affair. What was most important about it was the fact that it had happened at all, that it had been necessary to question the guardian and anchor of the Roman Catholic faith over his own adherence to that faith. There was no parallel to this in modern times, and it exemplified how much Francis, in the minds of many both inside and outside the Church, had departed from the Roman Catholic faith.

Francis even cast aside the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional definition of itself as the Church that Christ founded. The Catholic Herald reported in Sept. 2024 that he had declared that “all religions are a path to God.” He explained: “They are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God. If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t’, where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are [Sikh], Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”

In this, Francis seemed to be contradicting both Jesus’ statement: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). He also seemed to be contradicting the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, which emphasized that it was “the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.” (Nostra Aetate 2, 4) The Catholic Herald noted, apparently by way of explanation, that in making these remarks, the pope had set aside his prepared remarks and was speaking extemporaneously.

Predictably, Francis was a doctrinaire leftist on political issues. He seemed to think that it was incumbent upon the people of Europe and North America to relinquish their national character and culture voluntarily, and become minorities in their own countries. In 2016, he declared that someone who built a border wall was “not a Christian.” In Feb. 2025, he sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, excoriating Trump for securing America’s southern border. He repeatedly insisted that welcoming any and all migrants was a Christian duty, and rejected “any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

Like many other leftists, the pope was also a dutiful shill for the warriors of jihad. He worked hard to build bridges with the international Islamic community, downplaying jihad terrorism, ignoring the rampant Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa, and even obliquely justifying the 2015 murders of cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo who had lampooned the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Francis said that “it is true that you must not react violently, but” — ah, yes, there is always a “but” at such moments — “although we are good friends, if [an aide] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then (something can happen). In freedom of expression, there are limits.” This was, in essence, a submission to Islam’s blasphemy laws which would, if followed, mean the end of free societies.

What will the Roman Catholic Church do now? If it continues to follow in the way of Pope Francis, it will destroy itself. Will it pull itself back from the brink? We shall see.