Key Ways to Overcome the Negativity Against Pope Francis with a Positive Attitude by Dr. Pedro Gabriel
Special to Catholic News World by Dr. Pedro Gabriel :The date marking the ten-year anniversary of Francis’ pontificate was a natural occasion to analyse and reflect on what the past decade brought to the Church. All around Catholic media, we have seen commentators making a balance of the different aspects of Francis’ papacy. Unfortunately, for a certain part of this Catholic media, especially in the English-speaking world, the conclusions seemed to be negative.
This should not surprise us. Since 2016 (arguably since 2013, the very beginning of Francis’ reign), these same media and commentators have been the main purveyors of this negative image. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Francis has been perfect or that reasonable criticisms can’t be made to some aspects of his rule. But the way it has been done has resulted in a wave of negativity that, unfortunately, has erased many Catholics’ filial devotion to their Holy Father. A simple perusal of Catholic social media will show a cacophony of uncharitable insults and accusations directed against their pope.
Of course, these negative voices were not the only ones being heard on this occasion. Not everyone shares this distorted view of Francis’ papacy. At Where Peter Is, many contributors shared quotes from Pope Francis that touched and inspired them. My wife, disappointed with the negative coverage, immediately dove into the Vatican website and wrote an article highlighting Pope Francis’ deeply spiritual mediations at the House of Saint Martha.
Here, we can see a difference in attitudes. Whereas the negative coverage seems to promote opinion pieces focusing on a subset of controversies that have been overblown and twisted by Catholic media, those with who tried to counter the negativity allowed Pope Francis to talk, without filters or much commentary. They were more concerned about showing how Francis touched their lives, showing that they allowed themselves to be touched.
I’m reminded about an experience I had with the previous pontiff, Benedict XVI. He too experienced broad negative coverage from the media of his time, though he had mostly to deal with secular media, not Catholic media like Francis. This meant that his wisdom and intellectual prowess was not allowed to shine through the dark lens of the mass media and reach his people, his flock. It was very hard for me to meet someone with a positive image of Benedict, at least someone who did not know him from his own writings and speeches.
When in 2010 Benedict visited my home country of Portugal, many people came to me and said: “This pope is actually quite nice! I had no idea!” They had been conditioned to view him as the Panzer pope, an authoritarian fundamentalist, an antipathic and cold person. How different was he now, with his shy but warm demeanor, always smiling and waving, with his speeches imbued with God’s love!
“Let me tell you a secret”—I would say—“He is always like this.” A few years later, I and other commentators would say the exact same thing, at one of the pinnacles of Pope Francis’ pontificate. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Francis took the spiritual leadership of a tired and suffering world, during an extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing. At that time, everyone’s eyes were placed on him, throughout the whole thing. Everyone followed the ceremony from beginning to end. In other words, Francis was allowed to be himself, without the dark filters of the usual commentators. For this reason, even his fiercest critics acknowledged that Francis had been at his best.
As I wrote at the time, this was not because Francis had performed differently. Rather, they had just met the true Francis. “Here’s one of the best kept secrets about Francis: he talks like that all the time”—said Mike Lewis from Where Peter Is, mirroring what I had said to my stunned countrymen during Benedict’s visit.One of the overtones of Pope Francis’ pontificate is the “theology of the encounter.” This theology had already been foreshadowed in Benedict’s magistral Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”This person we must encounter is Jesus. But this also shows that the essence of being a Christian is an encounter with someone. Encountering someone means going beyond our own self-centered ideas and certainties and go to the existential peripheries that exist beyond our own self. This happens whenever we meet the Other, as he really is, not the way we think he is.
Those who shared Francis’ quotes had, as I said above, allowed themselves to be touched by him. This is why they allowed him to speak for himself. They wanted to convey to others how enriched they were for having met this Other, who taught them, who challenged them to go beyond what they thought they knew, who changed them for the better.
People might thing that I’m promoting a naïve perspective here, eschewing the concrete realities of Church politics and ideological alignments to promote a kind of illusion bubble, isolated from reality. Nothing could be further from the truth. The encounter is not an idealization of the person of the Other, it’s meeting him as he actually is. It’s the most honest and safe search for the truth that exists regardless of our personal opinions.
For instance, it’s not uncommon to find people on social media accusing Pope Francis of being a Marxist materialist that places the world above God. But my wife, who allowed herself to encounter Francis, could easily refute this prejudiced idea, by merely going to the Vatican website and unearthing the treasure trove of spiritual reflections that Francis has produced throughout the years—and continues to produce still. How can someone read those reflections and come out with the idea that Francis doesn’t have a profound, rich, vast spirituality?
Those who believe the dark, negative image of an unspiritual Francis are, in fact, the ones living in an bubble isolated from reality. Those who allowed themselves to encounter Francis as he is, those who read his own unfiltered words, those who heard his own unfiltered speeches, those who watched his smile and dedication and actions, those are the ones who permitted truth to reach them.
So, in the end, what balance do I make of this past decade of Francis? For me, the balance has been extremely positive, but I can’t answer for others. What I can say is that Francis’ pontificate has a lot of buried gems that lay hidden behind layers of negativity, hyperbolic outrages, gossiping, prejudice, and fake news. The only way to access these treasures is by going outside of our certainties and encounter him as he is. A good place to start is the Vatican website, where the primary sources of his teachings and philosophy lay, without the dark lenses of biased reporting.
As Pope Francis said, in one of his reflections at Saint Martha’s, referring to Jesus:
“When we allow ourselves to be encountered by him, he enters into us and renews us from within… when he comes to me, he may tell me what he wants me to do, which is not always what I want him to tell me… He looks at us one by one, in the face, in the eyes, for true love is not something abstract but rather something very concrete. Person to person. The Lord, who is a Person, looking at me, a person… Let us begin this journey in prayer, charity and praise, so that the Lord might come to meet us, but let us allow him to meet us with our defences down, in openness!”
A special submission to Catholic News World by:
Comments