A Pope Who Was a Jesus Follower, but Never Quite Got to Accepting that Women Are Equal

Pope Francis was a genuinely good man while many “Christians” sided with the money changers against “the least of these,” but he could never quite bring himself to reject history's Biggest Lie: ♀ < ♂

Photo: Robert McElvaine, Vatican City, October 23, 2013

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“We are often chained like Peter in the prison of habit. Scared by change and tied to the chain of our customs.”

– Pope Francis (2022)

Pope Francis was a remarkable man. He followed the actual teachings of Jesus much more than most of his predecessors. He did not take Matthew chapters 5-7 to be the “Suggestions on the Mount.” He placed the welfare and humanity of people above enforcing rules.

“Kindness is firm and persevering intention to always will the good of others, even the unfriendly," the late pontiff said. "We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace."

Taking his papal name from St. Francis of Assisi, this first pope from the global South, though of Italian ancestry, brought a tradition of populism from Argentina into the Vatican. To mention two among numerous examples: he declined to reside in the extravagant papal living area and washed the feet of a young Muslin woman in a prison one Holy Week.

A DEI Pope

Francis spoke up for the oppressed, not their oppressors, as so many self-proclaimed “Christian nationalists” do these days. While they are aligning with the modern versions of the moneychangers of Jesus’s day and preaching hate, division, and exclusion, Francis constantly preached kindness, love, and acceptance. He can accurately be described as a champion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as Jesus was, and the United States at its best has been.

He was progressive in many respects. In his first news conference as pope in 2013, he famously said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” He was echoing Jesus who, according to Luke 6:37, said, “Who am I to Judge another, when I myself walk as an Imperfect person." Francis went on to say that God not only forgives—he forgets, and “we don’t have the right to not forget.”

During his papacy, Francis gave priests permission “to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.” He rejected the calls from rightwing Catholics to deny communion to Catholic political figures who support women’s ownership of their bodies, explicitly pronouncing President Biden to be a “good Catholic” and advising him to keep receiving Holy Communion.

“What is built on the basis of force … will end badly”

Of Biden’s predecessor and successor, Francis has made many negative comments. In February of this year, the Pope sent a letter to United States bishops and all Catholics, reminding them that immigrants are fellow human beings who must be treated with dignity. His message made it clear that he was addressing the policies of Trump:

"With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.”

“This is not a minor issue," he wrote. "An authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized.”

That what Francis was saying was intended as a rebuke to Trump’s programs and a warning about where they would lead is unmistakable:

“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

These images of Francis with Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the first year of each man’s presidency speak volumes:

“Today’s builders of Babel … the construction site of hell”

Trump laid out his ludicrously anti-Jesus beliefs in an Easter message that no other American president could have imagined sending out:

The next day, hours after the death of Pope Francis, Marjorie Taylor Greene joined in her master’s attack on all that is good and holy by suggesting that God killed the pope because he represents “Evil,” She tweeted:

In his final Good Friday “Stations of the Cross,” two days before his death, Francis made this remarkable statement for the Third Station (Jesus falls for the first time):

Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard, or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth.

Presumably aware that he would soon be leaving the earthly realm, Francis made crystal clear where he stood in the argument between the greedy moneychangers of today and the unambiguous teaching of Jesus. Francis quoted from the Gospel according to Mark (10:21):

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

Who Could Ask for Anything More? Women and all of us who believe in Equality

To quote out of context (as is often my wont), in this case from George Gershwin, “Who could ask for anything more?”

Though it had not occurred to me when I thought of using that quotation, the fact that it comes from the song, “I Got Rhythm,” provides a segue into the one major area in which Pope Francis could not bring himself to go all the way, as it were.

Traditionally, “the rhythm method” (not having intercourse during the time a woman is likely to be ovulating) has been the only method of avoiding pregnancy acceptable to the putatively … uh, incel—no, make that “ vcel” (voluntarily celibate)—Catholic hierarchy. They have taken the “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28) to mean … well, what Elon Musk advocates: men colonizing as many uteruses as he can find to increase the (white) population.

For his part, Francis moved towards less unequal treatment for women and allowed discussion of topics that traditional Catholic leaders simply rejected. These included expanding roles in the church for women and the requirement that priests be celibate. But his willingness to discuss such issues did not lead him to make the major changes that are needed.

“He [God} is our father; even more he is our mother”

– Pope John Paul I, Angelus (1978)

Pope John Paul—soon to be known, as it turned out, as John Paul I—made that declaration on September 10, 1978, the fifteenth day of his papacy, while President Jimmy Carter (a real Christian) was working at Camp David with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Just over two weeks later, John Paul was dead.

Probably his death coming so soon after he made that statement was just meaningless coincidence, but there are those who suspect that a papal pronouncement suggesting that God is as much female as male was a bridge too far for some of the conservatives inside the Vatican and they did him in. An alternative theory is that God is only male and He was so angered by John Paul’s aspersions on his masculinity that He struck him dead.

But perhaps those possibilities were sufficient to give Francis pause about going “all the way”—in this case, all the way to rejecting the Agreed-Upon Fiction that has misshaped millennia of history and is the largest source of our current crisis with authoritarianism: The Big Lie that women are inferior to men.

I am writing a book on that topic, and this is not the place to get more deeply into it.

A daring Church leader could make an important contribution to the effort to escape the prison in which the long imagined “natural” order of man > woman and all the other vertical binaries of race, class, gender identity, and so on are based.

What the first chapter of the Bible says about male and female both being in the image of God can provide a good place for such a religious leader to start to make that case:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

– Genesis 1:27

The totally different account of creation that begins in the second chapter of Genesis is one of male creative power, dominance and authority and it has been among the most powerful promoters of the lie that women are inferior. But the first story points towards a radical understanding that could change the world for the better, too radical for even a great pope:

God is Nonbinary.

Have a think on that. If Francis had done so, he might have gone beyond being a very good and important—even great—man and become a truly world historical figure.