ROME — Pope Francis once envisioned serving only a few years as pontiff. On Monday, he commemorated his 10th anniversary as leader of the world’s Roman Catholics, saying it seemed “like yesterday” that he took control of an ideologically divided church that has opposed him from the right for going too far and criticized him from the left for not going far enough.
Throughout the past decade, Francis, now 86, has visited far-flung countries and strode across the international stage as a major figure willing to use his moral capital on the major issues of the day. He has made the College of Cardinals, which will pick his successor, much more global and has opened doors to debate in the church, seeking to make a torn institution more collegial, unified and less centralized in Rome.
But deep into Francis’ longer-than-average papacy, many of the faithful are wondering whether the pope, slowed by a bad knee but perhaps less inhibited after the death of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, will make concrete and transformative change or decide once and for all that such shifts will not happen on his watch.
“It’s been 10 intense years,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and second-highest-ranking figure after the pope, told reporters on Monday evening. He said that the reform of the Roman bureaucracy that governs the church, which is deeply resistant to change, “took a lot of time and a lot of energy.”
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, added in a brief interview on Monday evening that the pope “realized many things” during his pontificate. “Mainly the new ideas, building bridges.”
But Francis has had less success in bringing bishops along with him, something he views as essential for making lasting change.
“In all these years, we didn’t see a clear majority of reformers among the bishops and priests all over the world,” said Marco Politi, a veteran Vatican analyst and author of “Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution.”
While Francis has for a decade faced unrelenting pressure from conservatives — especially in the United States — who oppose his more inclusive style, social justice focus and de-emphasis of the sexual culture wars, the latest pressure has come from Francis’ left flank, on an issue with which he made his mark as a transformative figure.
This weekend, the opposition came from the powerful, wealthy and progressive German Roman Catholic Church, once a bedrock of European Catholicism that produced the last pope but that is now a deeply shaken institution that believes it needs to give laypeople more of a voice after devastating sexual abuse scandals accelerated an exodus of worshipers.
Germany’s Catholic bishops defied the Vatican by overwhelmingly voting this weekend to approve voluntary ceremonies to bless same-sex relationships, as well as those of couples who divorced and remarried outside the Catholic Church. The Germans also voted to urge Francis to reconsider the question of priestly celibacy.
The vote appeared to throw down a gauntlet for Francis, who has made outreach to marginalized gay Catholics a touchstone of his papacy, famously saying, “Who am I to judge?” He has also ministered to transgender Catholics, counseled gay couples on the upbringing of their children, endorsed same-sex civil unions and recently asserted that “being homosexual is not a crime.”
But the church doctrine, which considers homosexuality “intrinsically disordered,” has not changed, and in 2021, the church’s orthodoxy watchdog banned the blessing of gay couples by arguing that God “cannot bless sin” and that it would be “illicit” for a priest to acknowledge same-sex unions.
While blessing such relationships has become increasingly common in Germany in recent years and has even included orchestrated, live-streamed ceremonies, the Vatican sought to prevent the German bishops from officially moving ahead and clearly did not appreciate their having done so.
Asked on Monday evening if the German church was in rebellion, Cardinal Parolin said: “Let’s not speak of rebellion. In the church there has always been tensions and different positions.” He added that the Germans were “clearly” making decisions that “don’t exactly correspond with what is the actual doctrine of the church.”
Cardinal Parolin said the Holy See had made its position abundantly clear. In November, Vatican officials tried to shut down the German assembly during a meeting in Rome. In January, top Vatican cardinals, with Francis’ explicit approval, said they would accept no overhaul of church governance in Germany that gave laypeople the potential to overrule bishops.
Francis himself suggested he did not recognize the German church’s reform process and warned that it was “very, very ideological” and “made by the elites,” a sign he was worried it did not reflect the church’s base.
The Vatican need not look far to see the divisive power of the issue. The Anglican Church has been split apart by gay rights, with conservative provinces, including many in Africa, breaking off relations with Western provinces that accept and bless same-sex relationships.
At the meeting of Catholics in Frankfurt over the weekend, Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke of Eichstatt warned during the debate over the proposed blessing that he hoped “this step is not going to tear us apart the way the Anglican Church finds itself.”
Francis told the leader of Germany’s Catholic bishops in 2022 that the country already had “a very good Evangelical church” and “we don’t need two.”
Francis would clearly prefer that the blessing of same-sex couples be discussed with bishops at a major meeting — a synod — that he is organizing for October and next year.
Some analysts have compared the meeting to a miniature Second Vatican Council — the landmark church assembly of bishops in the 1960s that opened up the church to the modern world. Francis has made it clear that he wants many, if not all, of his bishops behind him, and analysts say the German church risks not only raising the pope’s ire, but also exposing how alone it is on the issue of gay blessings in a global church.
The German bishops did appear to bow to some papal pressure, delaying carrying out the blessings for three years, which will give Francis time to run the issues through his major meeting.
Cardinal Parolin said it was a “good sign” because an individual national church needed to engage in earnest dialogue with Rome and the rest of the universal church “to clarify what are the decisions to be taken.”
It is the wider church meeting in Rome, experts say, that will matter most.
“We will see the real situation with the universal synod; we can see the strengths of the different groups,” Mr. Politi said. He added, “Francis has opened doors and windows and new paths which are and which will continue to be important for the Catholic Church. There is no going back.”
But the church’s liberals remain frustrated by what they view as a holdup.
“Today, it seems clear that Pope Francis has a ‘Gorbachev problem’ — enormous acclaim outside the Catholic Church but increasingly brazen opposition from within,” John L. Allen Jr., the editor of Crux, a news site specializing in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, wrote on Sunday, comparing Francis to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president.
“Also like Gorbachev, Francis’ foes come both from a traditionalist right unhappy with his progressive agenda and an impatient left increasingly hungry for actual revolution rather than mere reform.”
Francis has shifted from entertaining talk of resigning to speaking more about the papacy being a lifetime ministry. But after health ailments that have him leaning on a cane or using a wheelchair some wonder how much time for change is left.
“Time flies,” Francis said in a Vatican podcast on Monday. “When you gather up today, it is already tomorrow.”
