Reading Francis

I never intended to become the Papal Meme Police. I blame Esteban for turning me into an internet Javert.

It started after the death of Pope Francis, when my social media feed was filled with friends posting the heartwarming yet completely false story of Esteban, the alleged dog who refused to leave the side of the ailing pope and then encamped at Francis’ grave. While a sweet story that in no way reflected poorly on the late pope (who honestly had a tepid position on pet ownership at best), it irked me that a fable with no basis in reality could attach itself so easily to someone about whom many factual uplifting stories could be told. I struggled to understand why my negative reaction to this story was so strong, especially because, when I told friends that Esteban was a fake, I got the sense that they saw the falsehood as disappointing, but harmless. For the most part, they seemed to resent that I’d burst their melancholy bubble.

I decided, though, that even this innocuous lie posed a serious risk of further eroding our ever tenuous ability to identify what is real and trust it as such.

After Pope Leo XIV’s election, though, I realized that Esteban was child’s play.

Suddenly my feed was filled with “quotes” by the new pope, followed by AI-generated fake videos, in which Leo blasts the current American political leadership and encourages the faithful to “stay woke”. As was the case with Esteban’s story, these quotes and videos have no basis in fact. Thanks to Vatican News and the website of the Holy See, as well as a number of reputable news outlets that cover the Vatican, Pope Leo’s statements, speeches, and homilies are readily available. None of them reflect any of the sentiments I often see attributed to him.

Here’s a real example of why this bothers me so much:

One Facebook friend who posted one of these fake quotes said “I love this new pope.” A commenter on the post, referring to an (out of context) headline of a statement of Catholic doctrine that the pope actually said, replies: “He’s against (progressive policy x). I miss Francis already.” (Even though Pope Francis adhered to and spoke on the same doctrine.)

Repeat ad infinitum, and you get false booms and busts of papal support more mercurial (and less grounded in truth) than the Florida housing market. More importantly, you feed the idolatrous beast of modern politics.

When I wrote my book Abandoning Temples, it was sparked by my encounters with American politics at the highest level and the realization that our political allegiances (among other things) have become idols. 

I don’t mean necessarily that we believe that our political leaders are actually divine; what I mean is that we make politics our ultimate source of meaning and our ultimate standard by which everything else in our lives is measured. When the shows we watch and the brands we buy and the communities we join and the church we follow and even the faith we proclaim are subject to prior evaluation according to our political leanings, then we are fooling ourselves not to admit that we are making a false god that reflects our own biases.

Many of my friends who have fallen for fake Leo quotes, I think, are primed for anything that serves as a counterweight for the modern American allegiance of religious leaders with conservative politics. They grasped onto the ways in which Pope Francis’ insistent message of God’s mercy stood in contrast to the American religious emphasis on culture war political issues (ignoring the ways in which Francis underscored the Church’s doctrine on some of those issues, even as he deprioritized them), and they hope that Pope Leo will build on and expand his predecessor’s perceived repudiation of conservative politics.

All of this gets it wrong, I think by putting politics first in the equation and measuring everyone and everything by its standards.

I do not expect Pope Leo to be “woke” or progressive. I also do not expect him to be “trad” or conservative. And I think the degree to which we obsess about where he falls on that spectrum says much more about our idolatrous politics than it does about the pope or the Church.

Time may help things shake out; it’s no great leap to assume that the new pope will put out a broad programmatic document in the near future, and I am betting based on precedent that he might offer a major encyclical on AI, income inequality, social cohesion and the future of work sometime next year (since 2026 is 135 years since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum began the tradition of Catholic social doctrine). While I have no idea whether he’ll engage in the free-wheeling interviews that Pope Francis held on papal plane trips, it seems a safe bet that he will be more precise and consistent in the messages he sends, based on his first few days. Give him time, and we will know where he stands.

We already know that this pope cares deeply about a proactive, positive peace that begins with but goes far beyond the cessation of violence. We know that he will continue to speak in defense of the essential human dignity of migrants and the poor. And his focus on unity within the diversity of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the globe will likely lead him to move “synodally”, leading by listening and encouraging encounter between people of different perspectives, on issues in which intercultural differences could be divisive. That will likely frustrate those with strong feelings on issues like the blessing of same-sex couples or Latin masses or the ordination of women deacons. It also seems likely that he will continue to espouse established Catholic doctrine on issues like abortion and sacramental marriage and religious freedom.

If your reaction to that amateur forecast is that Pope Leo is either a “woke Marxist pope” or “too conservative for Francis’ legacy”, take a breath and reflect on how that assessment privileges your politics over your faith. If this papacy will be successful by Leo’s standards, I suspect it will be in the rediscovery that our differences, though important, are always secondary to our commonality as beloved children of God. The political filters we apply always stand within that broader context.

I am no expert on his religious order, but from what I understand, Pope Leo’s Augustinian roots show up most strongly in his emphasis on unity, and in his recognition that everything that is not God fails to satisfy that desire within us for the truly divine. We may see an emphasis on keeping believers with diverging views on the same journey together so that we can learn from each other and grow in love. We may discover that we are stretched by encountering God amidst those who don’t look and think exactly like us, that living with those who irritate us also make us better people. That may end up being the Leonine measure of success (and as such a continuation of Francis’ push for synodality). 

Growth is often irritating. The wisdom of community is in part discovered in that we soften each other’s rough edges like sandpaper. We will be better for the irritation than if we insist on wrapping ourselves in the comforting synthetic blankets of myths like Esteban.

Even so, I’m turning in my Papal Meme Police badge. I don’t have the discipline or the time to keep up the Javert routine. Just check your memes for source references, please.