“Who Am I to Judge?”

 Ex officio, of course, he was Antichrist. Nonetheless, we found him quite admirable.  

The late Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who reigned as Pope Francis from 2013 to 2025, has died or, if you prefer, entered the Church Triumphant.  His vita can be sketched out around a series of dates: born and  baptized in 1936, a Jesuit since 1960, ordained in 1969, consecrated bishop in 1992, made Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and a cardinal in 2001. 

Of course there is far more to it than dates.  He was born as totalitarian governments were rising all over the world, and when he died almost ninety years later, they were rising again. A quick review of Argentina’s history reminds us that Bergoglio’s life and career were shadowed by malign political forces, from the US-approved Rawson coup in his early childhood, through the tumultuous decades of Peronism, and the “Dirty War” of the 1960s and 70s, in which government forces brutalized anyone suspected of leftist sympathies — including some of the Jesuits. (Accusations have been both made and disputed that, as the very young provincial of his order, Bergoglio was at least insufficiently forceful in defending some of his priests from state violence).

Archbishop Bergoglio was by no means a “liberation theologian” of the sort one found in those days, including among Latin American Jesuits like Leonardo Boff and Juan Luis Segundo. He was a more traditional institutionalist figure, busy with building new parishes, reforming diocesan finances, and opposing abortion. But he was also, and clearly, passionate about the church’s work among very poor people, not only symbolically, with Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremonies in jails and slums, but also by doubling the number of priests assigned to villeros, or shantytowns.

As pope, he was clearly the same man.  While the press sometimes tried to portray him as a radical departure from previous popes, such stories often ended by complaining that he really wasn’t. Perhaps Francis looked momentarily shocking when, stepping onto the balcony, he eschewed the ermine stole in favor of a white cassock — but that was mostly because his immediate predecessor had done so much to restore the old-fashioned finery that John Paul II had relegated to the Vatican’s no-doubt-vast wardrobe closets. In fact, much of Francis’ papacy was devoted to finances (continuing the effort to clean the Augean stables reform the Vatican Bank); he was steadfast on abortion; he was really no better than his immediate predecessors at dealing with sexually abusive priests. Women are no closer than before to ordination in the Roman church, and indeed canonically even a bit further away.

But it is said that, on the eve of his election, he was given a hug by Claudio Cardinal Hummes, who whispered, “Don’t forget the poor.” There was little danger. The new Bishop of Rome was as clearly and publicly concerned for the indigent of his diocese as had been the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Early on, it was leaked to the press (surely by a public-relations officer) that the new pope slipped out at night in a plain black clerical suit, to provide pastoral care to his flock. The foot-washing continued. More to the point, perhaps, he made clear that he was modeling the behavior he wanted to see from all the clergy.  The shepherd, he said, ought to smell like the sheep. 

So why, if Francis was basically a typical modern pope, albeit dressed more simply than some and a bit more hands-on in his concern for the poor, was he so often perceived, or imagined, to be something more unique, even extreme?  Part of it, no doubt, was the informality of his personal style — which will have come as no surprise to anyone who has spent much time in Latin America, or for that matter the Western Hemisphere.  But another, and likely larger, part, was the resistance he encountered from a particularly intransigent faction of church leaders. Yes, we’re looking at you, Cardinal Burke.

From the moment he shunned that ermine stole, they called him a dictator.  Their argument was, in the beginning, as dumb as “he places himself above tradition in matters of regalia,” a claim that simply sets aside the freedom in such matters enjoyed by all popes, especially recently. (Tyranny is an especially odd charge to bring against the pope who most signally promoted “synodality,” or the relative freedom of regional bishops to make decisions for themselves.) Then, paradoxically,  they called him wish-washy about doctrine, since although he wouldn’t endorse divorce without annulment, he wondered aloud if people who had gone that route might not receive the Eucharist, Likewise, although he would not not ordain women, he made the remarkable move of giving them an official voice in church affairs.  Worst of all, we suspect, was his infamous public failure to judge.

You know the story.  It was July, 2013. On return flight from Brazil, the new pope was talking with reporters, informally (it seems) but on the record.  Sounding out the pontiff, and surely searching for a headline, somebody asked if a “gay lobby” existed within the Vatican. His answer was long and thoughtful.  He said that the question is treated well in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which called to avoid marginalizing gay people, including those with a clerical vocation, but to integrate them into society; that special-interest lobbies themselves (such as those of Freemasons or greedy people) are a significant problem, because “we must all be brothers.”  And, still speaking off the cuff, he said the words that will no doubt form a part of his historical legacy:

If someone is gay, and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?

Hardly an atom bomb, on its face. There have been gay priests as long as there have been priests, and the business of not judging has an honorable heritage, beginning with the Sermon on the Mount. But this thoughtful, Scriptural, Catechism-based phrase brought down upon Francis the wrath, if not of God, then at least of those who considered themselves godly.  Any chance that he might have had in their eyes was over.  His critics were and remain merciless.

To his credit, Francis put up with it well. His skin was fairly thick.  Only after a decade did his patience run out.  In 2023, he removed Joseph Strickland from his post as Bishop of Tyler, Texas — after Strickland refused to step down following the decision of an investigation into his effectiveness. The same year, he removed the stipend and subsidized luxury apartment of Raymond Cardinal Burke. Critics make it sound as though he rendered Burke homeless (he did not); supporters observe that it took Francis a decade to do what, were their situations reversed, Burke would have done in a week.

Well, that particular rivalry is over now. After a grueling illness and the indignity of extending hospitality to JD Vance, Pope Francis survived to see one last Easter Sunday in Rome. From now on, it will always be Easter for him. We give thanks for his life and ministry.

And if you are offended by our opening remark, please take it in the spirit in which we offered it.  As Lutherans, we at the Egg are confessionally committed to the proposition that the papacy is, because of the claims it makes to spiritual superiority over church leaders and the church itself, “the true end-times antichrist,” in Smalcald Articles 2:4:10-12. However, like most Lutherans these days, we regret the medieval phrasing of that article; and like Melanchthon himself, in hs famous signature to it, we can easily admit the potential value of a universal pastor who promotes peace and unity within the church, granted that he rules by human rather than divine right, and above all that he promotes the Gospel of grace and mercy.

It seems to us that, if any pope since the Middle Ages can be said to have approached this ideal of service, it was Francis.  From a Lutheran to a pope, there is no higher praise.