Brendan Hoban: ‘Francis effect’ has not taken hold in the UK              

Western People 20.5.2025

I’m sure that I’m stretching my readers’ interest and my editor’s patience by returning to a papal theme for more times than I care to remember but this may be the last bite of that particular cherry. (Or do I hear someone say, I wouldn’t bet on it!)

After all the genuine regret at the death of Pope Francis, all the worry that his vital legacy might be compromised by those who opposed him and even reviled him, all the relief and excitement that the election of Pope Leo has generated, all the media coverage that has generated new interest and purpose in Catholicism – after all that, it would be naïve and dangerous to presume that the reforms that Francis initiated were now automatically going to slide smoothly into operation.

Not so. I’ve often wondered how the Francis reform received such a variety of responses in different parts of the globe. It’s understandable that in Africa where, for example, an embedded antipathy to LGBT+ is part of the prevailing culture, that Francis’ famous response to the LGBT+ issue – Who am I to judge? – would have received a poor reception.

But, how to explain why, for example, the United Kingdom response to Francis’ synodality campaign – in effect, putting in place ‘a People’s Church’ as envisaged in the Second Vatican Council – has received such a modest and qualified support. In the UK, loyalty to Catholicism (among its members) and respect for the papacy have a long and impressive history. But this is not at all obvious to those who assess its response to the Francis/Vatican Two agenda – comparable to other European churches.

I’m told, by those in the know, that ‘the synodal process’ in the UK  has been almost non-existent apart from the occasional formal episcopal comment to take the bleak look off the effective and widespread clerical opposition to Francis’ reform. The way, for instance, popes John Paul II and Benedict XIV often praised the Council and underlined its importance in routine formulaic pronouncements while effectively opposing its implementation.

Recently, in a BBC Radio 4 Sunday Special from St Peter’s in Rome, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, the effective head of the English Catholic Church, suggested that synodality is ‘not a process by which we (the Church) make decisions’. He should know, even if he seems not to know, that the Final Document of the recent Roman Synod says that it is. It IS a process that is intended to be part of decision-making in our Church into the future.

Another less charitable explanation (which I am reluctant to spell out) is that Cardinal Nichols does know what the Synod document says and does appreciate how it is effectively now the policy and teaching of the Catholic Church but that he has aligned himself with the Cardinal Gerhard Muller/Cardinal Robert Sarah/Cardinal Raymond Burke/ etc. pushback that has sought to oppose Francis and to rubbish his reforms. Or is Nichols’ reservation  just another unthinking riposte from those in positions of power and influence in the Church who seek to minimise or to delay the introduction of the synodal process?

The harsh conclusion may be that Cardinal Nichols either hasn’t read the Synod document carefully enough or that he doesn’t accept its import. It may be no more than a straw in the wind that Cardinal Nichols has told the Associated Press that Francis’ ‘initiatives’ need ‘rooting’ so that they ‘aren’t just the ideas of one person, one charismatic person’.

This seems unmistakably a way of categorising Francis and his ‘initiatives’ as little more than a well-meaning enthusiast who can be put in his box by more serious souls. It sounds too as if it’s an echo of the comment made by Cardinal Beniamino Stella that Francis had ‘imposed his own ideas’ by opening positions of authority in Rome to the non-ordained, an outburst that was leaked to the press and was, in the view of Austen Ivereigh, an expert on things Vatican, ‘a glimpse of the existential displacement some have felt under Francis, and their desire to ‘put things back in order’, a line that Ivereigh commented ‘felt like pre-agreed messaging’.

Does this mean, then, that the pushback against Francis was more than just the last dying gasp of a tiny minority of extreme Catholics in thrall to the Latin Mass and that the expected pushback to Leo XIV will be from a broader base than that already emanating from the pushback funded from America – where the Catholic Church seems to have lost its way.

Clearly over two-thirds of the 133 cardinals who elected Leo XIV decided that, as Austen Ivereigh writes in The Tablet, the issue facing the conclave was ‘how to take forward 12 years of epoch-changing reform’ (by Francis). The other one-third comprised the supporters of Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungry who apparently was the totem pole around which the Muller/ Sarah/Burke camp tried to manage the election of a conservative pope. Or  those discomfited  by the fall-out from Francis’ reforms where clerical power, privilege and supremacy were threatened by the incoming tide of synodality.

In the early debates when the cardinals gathered to discuss possibilities, clearly there was a majority of cardinals who bought warnings of the risk of the Church ‘becoming self-reverential and losing its relevance’. Just days after the Francis funeral and the extraordinary response to his pontificate as witnessed by the huge overflow of respect and gratitude ­– the Francis pontificate was still fresh in the cardinals’ minds. It seemed obvious to (almost) everyone that a Francis II pope was needed to recapture how to evangelise a new chapter of the Christian story that would help to fill, as Francis did, the gap in moral leadership in the wider world.

The conclusion of the cardinals was that there was no other way. As Francis once suggested about the synodal process, there ‘was no other game in town’, an accolade that referred to ‘the Francis effect’ on the entire Catholic Church and beyond. It seems, at first sight, that the Holy Spirit discovered in Leo XIV the nearest the conclave had to another Francis.

We’ll see.