Pope Francis’ Turbulent Pontificate Under the Microscope

Peter Kwasniewski discusses Dominic J. Grigio’s forensic and exhaustive new study of the tumultuous and profoundly problematic reign of the late pontiff who died a year ago on April 21st.

Pope Francis leaves Dhaka airport after arriving in Bangladesh, November 30, 2017. (Photo: Edward Pentin)

The pontificate of Pope Francis was traumatic, highly controversial and for many practicing faithful who took an interest in Rome matters, deeply disturbing.

One Catholic layman remarked recently that he felt “waterboarded” for 12 years and is only now, with trepidation, coming up for air.

Scarcely did a week go by without an attack on orthodoxy, apostolic tradition, and the body of the Church, and while the pontificate was praised for highlighting the mercy of God and inadvertently exposing much hidden corruption and ingrained heterodoxy, it is regarded by many theologians and others to have been, in the words of Cardinal George Pell’s 2022 Demos memorandum, “a catastrophe.”

Now, a year on since Pope Francis’ passing, a new book called The Disastrous Pontificate — Pope Francis’ Rupture From the Magisterium has catalogued in exhaustive detail all that happened, noting the many and various statements and decisions that contradicted Catholic doctrine and conflicted with the perennial practice of the Church.

Each scandal, error and misstep committed during those years is meticulously recorded and listed in chronological order. Its pseudonymous author, Dominic J. Grigio (see interview with him here), then draws on the Church’s rich apostolic tradition to shine a contrasting light on the Church’s authentic teaching, helping to clear up the deep confusion of those years.

The length, breadth and scholarly nature of the research in the book which runs to nearly 1,000 pages makes it an important contribution to the historical record, as well as providing a valuable resource for seminarians and anyone interested in Church history.

The book’s publisher is Dr. Peter Kwasniewski’s Os Justi Press. In this April 14 email interview, Kwasniewski explains the main motives behind the book, which of the pontificate’s errors he believes broke most clearly with apostolic tradition, and how he believes the problems were exacerbated by “hyper-papalism” — a subject he has written about extensively.

“Alas, at present, the majority — clergy and laity — are in denial,” he says. “We need to generate a groundswell at grassroots level to address the errors of Pope Francis.” Failing to face the hard truths of the pontificate, he argues, would create a “false precedent,” and do “no favours for souls at risk or for the Church on earth.”

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Peter Kwasniewski, what was the impetus for Grigio’s book? Who is it primarily aimed at, and what do you and the author hope it will achieve?

Concern for the salvation of souls is at the heart of this book. Dominic Grigio is acutely aware that wrong teaching endangers souls, and right teaching helps souls get to heaven. The author told me that there were times during Pope Francis’s pontificate when he couldn’t sleep because of the harm being caused to souls. The constant confusion, weaponized ambiguity, gaslighting, and gravely erroneous teaching were traumatic. Pope Francis seemed to delight in attacking faithful Catholics who resisted his innovations. He constantly mocked us. Even worse, he misled sinners about the danger of unrepented mortal sin to their eternal salvation. Coming from a pope, it hit home very hard.

We’re still living with the consequences. Many know that something went seriously wrong, but often Francis’s erroneous teaching has been camouflaged by emotive appeals to mercy or expressed in cunning ways that make it difficult to pin down. The book is meant to serve as a handbook for priests, teachers and parents responsible for handing on the Faith to help them identify and correct these errors, warn sinners, and transmit the deposit entrusted to them.

Which episodes or documents in Francis’s pontificate do you think most clearly show the rupture described in Dominic Grigio’s book?

Pope Francis’s fundamental rupture from the magisterium was his elevation of personal, subjective experience above the objective truths of divine revelation, expressed in a trilogy of documents: Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), Fiducia Supplicans (Supplicating Trust), and Dignitas Infinita (Infinite Dignity).^[1]

Dr. Josef Seifert warned that Amoris Laetitia contained a “‘moral theological atomic bomb’ that threatens, in its logical consequences, to tear down the whole moral edifice of the Ten Commandments and of Catholic moral teaching.”^[2] By this he was referring to paragraph 303 that deals with adulterous and other “irregular” couples:

Yet conscience can do more than recognise that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognise with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal.

The radioactive fallout from the detonation of this atomic bomb includes Fiducia Supplicans breaking the prohibition of blessing sin, no matter how “morally unacceptable from an objective point of view” the couple’s situation (no. 31); and Dignitas Infinita’s rupture from the doctrine of original sin and its wounds, insisting that man has an inviolable, pristine ontological dignity no matter the “inestimably profound acts of evil” he may have committed (no. 7). By privileging experience over revelation, Pope Francis makes sinful man the judge of God’s divine truth, rather than God’s divine truth the judge of sinful man.

The work juxtaposes the teachings of Pope Francis with Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium. Yet today those supportive of Pope Francis’ “revolution” insist that his changes now represent the new orthodoxy and that these are the Magisterium now. What are we to believe, and how does one distinguish between legitimate papal development and what the book describes as a rupture from the Magisterium?

Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the self-correcting relationship between Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium to preserve His teaching from corruption and distortion at the hands of sinful human beings. One might call it the “immune system” of the living Body of Christ animated and guided by the Holy Spirit. As a consequence, the Church, since the time of the Apostles, has been alert to the intrusion of alien, man-made doctrines. As expressed by St. Paul, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema” (Gal 1:8).

St. Vincent of Lérins and St. John Henry Newman tell us how the Church’s immune system distinguishes between true teaching and false teaching.

Vincent taught that the growth of doctrine in the Church was like an organism which grows and matures while remaining identical in essence. Doctrine becomes more consolidated, more strengthened, and more refined, while at the same time remaining uncorrupted and unadulterated. He warns that “novel contagions” may threaten to corrupt and adulterate the perennial magisterium. We must “collate and consult and interrogate the opinions of the ancients, of those, namely, who, though living in various times and places, yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, stand forth as acknowledged and approved authorities” (Commonitorium, ch. 3, par. 8).

Cardinal Newman, in his tests to discern genuine developments of doctrine from corruptions, also states that a true development maintains the same essential “type” and doesn’t morph into something of a different kind. Doctrines may grow and enlarge, but the underlying principles remain permanent and unchanged (see An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ch. 5, sec. 1 & 2). He is definitely not a doctrinal Darwinist, so to speak.

In keeping with Vincent and Newman, Grigio’s book, by gathering so many Scriptural, traditional, and magisterial counter witnesses, helps the readers identify and fight off the novel contagions that Francis introduced into the body of the Church.

You have written extensively about the problem of “hyper-papalism” and the role of Vatican I in Francis’s pontificate. How did these help create the crisis of Francis’ pontificate?

On at least three occasions, Vatican News—the Holy See’s official news portal—made a Freudian slip that perfectly expresses the hyper-papalism that had grown around Pope Francis, referring to him as the “Successor to Christ,” confusing two papal titles, “Successor of St. Peter” and “Vicar of Christ.” Though unintentional, it was very revealing. Hyper-papalists conflate the Pope’s teaching and juridical authority with the divine authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, resulting in the bizarre situation that the Pope’s personal opinions even when they contradict the Deposit of Faith are treated either as unquestionable “divine” doctrine or defended as non-contradictory when by every rule of logic and interpretation they are manifestly so.

With the Church’s long philosophical history of prizing logic and rational analysis, how did we end up in this absurd situation? I think it can be traced back to a toxic cocktail consisting of one part papal infallibility and one part secularism’s legal positivism. The caricature ignores Vatican I’s very precise conditions on the exercise of papal infallibility—that the pope must “religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles” and must not “make known some new doctrine” (Pastor Aeternus)— and instead insists everything the pope says is “infallible,” or at least treated as such, and consequently must be obeyed. Combined with legal positivism, you ended up with a pope who rules as an absolute monarch capable of imposing any teaching or law he sought to devise, unrestrained by natural law or the Deposit of Faith.

Which of the book’s arguments do you expect faithful Catholics will find most challenging, and why?

Catholics love the Pope and cherish the filial relationship between the faithful and the reigning Successor of St. Peter. There is a deep emotional and spiritual bond, like that between a father and his children. There’s also a supernatural dimension that acknowledges the link between the reigning pope and St. Peter, expressed in the phrase, Petrus locutus est—Peter has spoken (cf. acts of the council of Chalcedon). It is not a political relationship between rulers and citizens that can be reduced to a battle of ideas.

In view of this, there are two arguments in the book that are most challenging for faithful Catholics. The first is the Petrine dichotomy of “Rock” and “Satan,” traced back to Our Lord’s institution of the papacy (Mt 16:13–23). The Church Fathers examined the duality within Peter, wanting to understand how he could be both a “Rock” and a “Satan” as well as a “stumbling stone” [skandalon]. St. Augustine explained this dichotomy as the Peter who follows God’s divine revelation and the Peter who follows fallen man’s sinful thoughts. Scandal arises whenever Peter stops being a follower of Jesus and instead has the presumption to try to assume the position of leadership by “getting ahead of the Lord.” By presuming to impose his own fallible, erroneous thinking on God, Peter became a satan, an adversary of God. It is challenging to have to view a pope from this perspective (see Grigio, Disastrous Pontificate, 38–39), even though Joseph Ratzinger clearly endorses it:

Left to his own resources, the one who by God’s grace is permitted to be the bedrock is a stone on the path that makes the foot stumble. The tension between the gift coming from the Lord and man’s own capacity is rousingly portrayed in this scene [of Matthew 16], which in some sense anticipates the entire drama of papal history.^[3]

The other challenging argument is St. Thomas Aquinas on the duty to criticise a pope if his acts prove to be a “danger to the Gospel teaching.” Reflecting on St. Paul rebuking St. Peter (Gal 2:11-14), Aquinas argues it is not presumption to correct a pope because, if done as an act of charity, it is meant to help him, not punish him: “There is no presumption in thinking oneself better in some respect, because, in this life, no man is without some fault” (see Grigio, 40–41 for several citations). Faithful Catholics sometimes want to give “hero worship” to the pope, as children tend to do with their fathers. Dominic Grigio, with Aquinas, reminds us that we have, in fact, a greater responsibility to guard and transmit the Deposit of Faith than we have to speak well of or defer to the pope. Normally these things do not clash, but they may, and a mature Christian is prepared for that moment.

What do you say to critics who think the book risks undermining confidence in the papacy itself, and that it is too soon after Pope Francis’s death for such a work, not least because so many of the faithful remain traumatised by the pontificate’s incoherence and scandal and wish to forget it?

We cannot bury our sorrows in forgetfulness. We have to take action to correct the fallout of those twelve horrible years before it hardens into false precedent. Can we look hundreds of thousands of martyrs in the eye (metaphorically speaking), who sacrificed their lives to uphold the Faith and hand it on to us, and tell them that the emotional and spiritual trauma we suffered at the hands of Pope Francis dispenses us from the urgent task of correcting his errors that put souls in danger of hell? No, we could not; they would roundly condemn us.

Grigio’s book does everyone a favour: it provides an accessible, matter-of-fact record of Francis’s words and deeds, with 3,441 references, in order to render transparent his abuse of his teaching authority, his imposition of his personal opinions on the Church, and his patronage and promotion of heretics and criminals. To condemn documenting the truth as undermining confidence would be like accusing Johann Burchard [the famous chronicler of the papal court during the Renaissance] of undermining confidence in the papacy because he recorded in his Liber Notarum the immoral behaviour of Pope Alexander VI.

If a future pope wanted to repair the damage you identify, what concrete steps would need to come first?

First, this book needs to be placed in the hands of cardinals, bishops, priests, professors, formators, and parents to alert them to the state of urgency created by Pope Francis’s rupture from the magisterium. We need to warn as many of the faithful as possible that Francis taught grave errors in major doctrinal areas. We need to teach the next generation about these errors just as the English Catholics taught their children for hundreds of years about the errors of the Protestantism that nearly suffocated them. It is from this group of children that, God willing, the next generation of priests, religious, bishops, and popes will arise who will formally undo the harm caused by the last pontificate.

Grigio’s book is only one in a series of works of theology and apologetics that will result in a counter-Bergoglian renewal of the Church. Other books that could be mentioned are the anthology Ultramontanism and Tradition: The Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith (Os Justi Press, 2024), John P. Joy’s Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility (Os Justi Press, 2022), A Shepherd Solicitous for the Whole Church (Os Justi Press, 2024), Unresolved Tensions in Papal-Episcopal Relations (Os Justi Press, 2024), Fr. Serafino Lanzetta’ Super Hanc Petram: The Pope and the Church at a Dramatic Moment in History (Os Justi Press, 2023), Fr. Reginald-Marie Rivoire, Does ‘Traditionis Custodes’ Pass the Juridical Rationality Test? (Os Justi Press, 2022) — as you can see, my publishing house has been very busy!—and works from other publishers, such as Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies (Arouca Press, 2021). There is no lack of serious resources for the task at hand. Alas, at present, the majority—clergy and laity—are in denial. We need to generate a groundswell at grassroots level to address the errors of Pope Francis.

Despite the depth and scholarly nature of the book’s research, it seems that — like so much of the criticism of the Francis pontificate — it is being ignored, or reaction to it muted. Why is this, given the eternal implications these issues have for souls?

When the newly founded Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris and King Philip VI of France sent a letter to Pope John XXII criticising his eschatological error, the Supreme Pontiff took the intervention with utmost seriousness, and eventually took remedial steps. The thirteenth century was a time when popes, kings, and theologians viewed doctrine, heresy, and the salvation of souls as incomparably the most important issues facing the Church. Today it seems as if the Church cares more about the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals or the welcoming of immigrants than about dogmatic truth and the Four Last Things. Defending the Faith and protecting the salvation of souls from heresy and unrepented mortal sin have slipped far down on the agenda of the postconciliar Church.

The other change is that the popes—and all who benefit by being seen as “establishment” figures—imitate secular politicians by ignoring or demonizing anyone they perceive as “opposition” that challenges their authority. While some have begun to engage with Grigio’s work, it is far easier to pretend it doesn’t exist. I think such a lack of honest engagement can stem from a habit of living in denial, to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay. This may be an understandable inclination, but it is selfish and short-sighted, doing no favours for souls at risk or for the Church on earth.

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^[1] Amoris Laetitia (2016) is Pope Francis’ post-synodal exhortation on marriage and family, offering a pastoral, narrative-driven presentation of Catholic teaching, with strong emphasis on accompaniment, discernment, and integrating “irregular” family situations into ecclesial life. Among many controversial aspects, the most significant was Chapter 8 and a key footnote which were read by many as permitting, in some cases, access to the Eucharist by divorced-and-civilly-remarried Catholics without continence, prompting the “dubia” of four cardinals and accusations that it contradicted prior magisterial discipline and created doctrinal confusion.

Fiducia Supplicans (2023) is a declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith which opened the door to brief, non-ritual, “pastoral” blessings for couples in “irregular situations,” including same-sex couples, on the basis of God’s mercy sought in concrete life circumstances. Critics, the most vocal being in Africa, rejected the document, saying not only did it contradict the 2021 responsum that said the Church “cannot bless sin,” but that it implied the Church approved of objectively sinful unions, and introduced pastoral and doctrinal incoherence and scandal even while insisting that doctrine on marriage and sexuality had not changed.

Dignitas Infinita (2024) is a DDF declaration on human dignity, synthesising magisterial teaching to affirm an “infinite” and inalienable dignity rooted in the imago Dei, and applying this to a wide range of issues including poverty, war, abortion, euthanasia, gender ideology, “sex-change” procedures, and the death penalty. Several theologians and philosophers argued that the declaration’s language about “infinite dignity” was not just rhetorically high, but conceptually excessive: strictly speaking, only God’s dignity is infinite, so attributing “infinite” dignity to every human being risks blurring the Creator–creature distinction and overstating what can be said about fallen human nature by reason alone. Once you absolutize dignity in this way, they argued, you logically push toward sweeping, exceptionless moral conclusions (for example on the death penalty) that go beyond, and arguably jar with, the more traditional account of how dignity, guilt, punishment and the common good interrelate in Catholic moral theology.

^[2] J. Seifert, “Does Pure Logic Threaten to Destroy the Entire Moral Doctrine of the Catholic Church?,” 2017.

^[3] Joseph Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today (Ignatius Press, 1996), 61.