"What kind of reformer is Francis?"

That's the question they are asking over at National Catholic Reporter. Well, not really. What they have done is written a piece intended to mollify those who are getting discouraged because Francis has been pope for two years now and so far has only made stylistic changes.

The key line in the NCR piece is this one:

Reform of the Curia, however, remains at a homiletic level.

That's a deliberately obscure way of saying that Francis has talked a lot but he hasn't actually done much. And that theme runs through the article: it discusses changes of style and not of substance. In fact, the only concrete reforms that the article can point to are the establishment of "meaningful checks and balances" for Vatican finances and the creation of committees. It pains me to have to say this, but those are the classic moves of a bureaucrat seeking to create the illusion of doing something.

And now he is preparing some sort of pastoral communication on the environment. You know, if I was a corrupt member of the Curia desperately trying to protect my entrenched privileges, I'd be strenuously advising him to busy himself about the environment.

Meanwhile, there is the job the cardinals elected him to do.

Francis was also selected by his peers to accomplish reforms closer to home, particularly of a Curia and a clerical culture that had become so distorted that leaders brazenly betrayed the community and the Gospel in crises ranging from the horrors of sexual abuse of children to more prosaic financial scandals.

Make no mistake: that is the only standard by which this papacy will be judged. There are two aspects here. The first is an internal concern: the cardinals are more and more embarrassed by the bureaucratic juggernaut that keeps undermining the church. They want the problem fixed and, please note this, the only meaningful way to begin such a task would be to make the bureaucracy a whole lot smaller than it currently is and make it a  whole lot easier  to actually fire people who mess up. The implementation of "meaningful checks and balances" is just style, firing people is substance. And not just in Rome: the church is overly bureaucratized right down to the diocesan level. The second is the thing that has us ordinary people in the pews exercised. We fully understand that there will always be bad people in the church. What we don't want to see is a church hierarchy that is more interested in protecting these bad people than it is in protecting children and earning the trust of the people who put their hard-earned dollars in the collection basket.

On both those fronts, Pope Francis has done nothing significant. Yet.

Yet! Nothing would please me more than to have to write a follow up post someday in which I have to eat these words and admit that I'd completely underestimated Pope Francis.

(I'd note in passing that the second issue of restoring the trust lost through sex abuse and financial scandals is tied to the vocation crisis. Yes, there was an existing clericalism and culture of secrecy that made the scandals possible but the fear of losing yet more priests from a rapidly declining base also played a part. The lack of vocations also helped create the bureaucratic juggernaut: when leaders can't depend on front-line decision makers, their own priests in this instance, they will expand the bureaucracy because that is the only thing they can do. )

Pope Francis update

What does desperation look like? It looks like this:

In some ways, the "Pope Francis effect" doesn't seem very effective at all. 

Despite the immense popularity the aged Argentine has won since his election last year, not a jot of doctrine has changed, nor has the Catholic Church swelled with American converts. 

But there's more than one way to measure a pontiff's influence on his far-flung flock.
Start asking around -- here in Boston and beyond, Catholics and atheists alike -- and it's easy to find people eager to share how one man, in just one year, has changed their lives.

Short version: "There is no data so I'm going to rely on anecdotes!" And does he ever. He is Daniel Burke and he has written a long, long piece on CNN and it is full of a faith of surpassing sincerity; by which I mean Burke has a touchingly sincere faith that the plural of "anecdote" is "data".

The great liberal hope in Pope Francis will ultimately come down to one issue: Can he put liberal Catholic bums back on pews? As time has gone on, liberal Catholics have tended to go to church less and less often and, consequently, to donate less and less money. This has happened in the Catholic church even though the hierarchy of the church is dominated by people who support most forms of liberalism; the Catholic church hierarchy leans left on economic issues, left on immigration, left on crime, left on health care, left on the environment and right on sexual morality.

If you're a member of the liberal establishment that dominates the management of the church, this puts an entire way of life at risk, not to mention a steady source of paycheques and retirement benefits. Their hope is that Francis can turn things around by making the pews a welcoming for liberals. In practice this has meant, amping up the anti-poverty PR and turning down the volume on sexual morality. It's important to grasp that both moves are purely PR gestures.  The Catholic church already does more than any non-governmental agency on the planet to help the poor and it does considerably more than many governments. Changing the Pope's expensive red shoes for cheaper ones of a more restrained colour is just a gesture. On sexual morality, the church cannot make major changes to its doctrine. It just can't. There will be no same sex unions and no women priests. The only option available to Francis is a change of tone and even that has been far less significant than his friends in the press would have you believe.

And that is why the desperation creeps in. If you're a liberal Catholic, more welcoming can't mean simply improving the PR; more welcoming has to mean getting more liberal Catholics to go back to church and put enough money in the collections to support the liberal institution that keeps all those liberal Catholics collecting paycheques and looking forward to retirement benefits. The blunt but unspoken fact in Burke's article is that, so far, Francis has not done this. Expect the cries of desperation to get louder as time goes on. 

When someone accidentally blurts out the truth in passing

I remain unconvinced on Pope Francis. My hope is that I'll have to eat my words, that, several years from now, I'll be writing a post where I say that I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

But I keep reading things that discourage me. Notice, here, for example, how John Allen, seeking to praise the Pope makes a staggering admission in passing:

In Rome the pendulum is swinging from public theater to behind-the-scenes substance this week, as two closed-door meetings tackle two of the most serious challenges facing Pope Francis: Vatican reform and the child sexual abuse scandals.

A more direct, and more honest, way to make the same point would be to say, "He hasn't actually done anything yet."

And that is a little troubling, don't you think, after a barrage of articles about how wonderful he is. John Allen is probably the best English-speaking Vatican journalist in the world and here he is allowing that Francis hasn't actually done anything. Pope Francis was made Time magazine person of the year in 2013 and here is the best-informed journalist we have on the subject casually allowing that the Pope's achievements are just street theatre!

And then there is this from the same article:

As is his custom, Francis is sitting in on the meetings but generally not saying much, preferring to listen to the discussion without injecting himself into it.

I'm sorry, but that isn't encouraging. As I say, I hope and pray that I am as wrong as wrong can be on this but what if this man is just a clever PR master who isn't up to the job? What if he is getting all this good press while sleepwalking into disaster?