Contempt for the “globalist” agenda also shaped right-wing criticism of Pope Francis, the venerable Argentine Jesuit cleric who died Monday after suffering a stroke and cardiocirculatory collapse. His support for the rights of migrants, activism over climate change and qualified acceptance of homosexuality saw U.S. right-wingers cast Francis as a “woke” pope, sympathetic to the “liberation theology” of the Americas reviled by Vatican traditionalists and Western conservatives. Erstwhile Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon once told far-right counterparts in Europe to view the pontiff as the “enemy.”
The Lepanto Institute, an ultraconservative Catholic think tank that raged against the Francis pontificate, frequently insisted the pope was doing the work of “Communists.” The pontiff’s decision in 2021 to apologize for the 16th century atrocities carried out in the New World by Spanish conquistadors in the name of the Catholic Church provoked anger in Spain, with a spokesperson for the far-right Vox party scoffing: “I do not understand how a pope of Argentine nationality can apologize on behalf of others.”
Francis was not spared the ire of fellow Argentines, either, as ultralibertarian Argentine President Javier Milei declared in an interview before taking office that the pope was “a representative of the evil left.” (Milei has since been more conciliatory, and waved away at their “minor” differences in a statement mourning the death of Francis.)
It’s a small irony that one of Pope Francis’s last major meetings was with Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism who has since styled himself as a “postliberal” nationalist, in a nod to a particular tradition of reactionary Catholic thinking. In the early weeks of this Trump presidency, Vance attempted to frame his nativism in medieval Catholic terms, citing the concept of “ordo amoris,” or “order of love” or “charity,” that suggested one had a greater obligation to those closer to you than farther away.
Up to his last days, Francis had little time for such arguments. “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote in a recent letter to U.S. bishops. In Trump’s first term, Francis suggested the White House’s building of border walls and separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children made the president “not Christian.”
The pope’s Easter address delivered this weekend by a surrogate bemoaned the hatreds of any increasingly illiberal age. “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants,” the text said. “I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear.”
Francis spent years doggedly trying to counter this fear of the stranger. He washed the feet of Arab migrants seeking asylum in Europe. He begged forgiveness of Rohingya Muslims in a public ceremony after critics accused him of not doing enough to champion their plight during a 2017 visit to Myanmar, whose authorities treat the persecuted minority as stateless interlopers. And he broke with papal precedent to argue in 2023 against secular antigay laws and said “being homosexual is not a crime.”
“His was the image of the Good Samaritan, and through him, the image he gave of the church was of a Good Samaritan,” Marco Politi, a papal biographer and longtime Vatican watcher, told my colleagues.
Francis saw himself as a “globalist,” but not in the terms laid out by those who revile “globalism.” In an address last year to the World Economic Forum — that bastion of globalists — he said “the process of globalization” had made clear “the interdependence of the world’s nations and peoples” and therefore carried “a fundamentally moral dimension.” He called on states and businesses to promote “far-sighted and ethically sound models of globalization” and to subordinate “the pursuit of power and individual gain” in the cause of a greater common good. In 2018, he urged the “globalization of solidarity,” appealing for support for the poor and those stranded in warzones or mired in humanitarian disasters.
Such entreaties have often gone unheeded and seem wholly at odds with the worldview of the White House, where Trump has invoked narrow national self-interest to justify the gutting of U.S. humanitarian aid to the rest of word and the slashing of environmental regulations and pledges. In 2017, Francis gifted Trump a copy of his 192-page encyclical on ecology that noted the solid scientific consensus about human-driven climate change and called for dramatic action to reduce carbon-based emissions. The U.S. president — never much of a reader — didn’t seem to take the message to heart, as he later pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
Francis was elected by conclave in 2013, after many countries that were home to the planet’s 1.4 billion Catholics had lurched out of the global financial crisis. But the ensuing years have seen waves of crises and instability. International diplomacy failed to stop hideous wars across the globe, including in Ukraine and Gaza — where Francis has long called for a lasting ceasefire. An epochal pandemic convulsed the world. In Western democracies, economic inequality expanded, the liberal establishment kept crumbling and angry right-wing populism came to the fore.
It’s unclear which cardinal will follow Francis, but there’s a possibility an ultraconservative backlash could yield a more doctrinaire successor. Such a figure would be less adversarial with Trump and Vance, but would remind others of what has been lost in this pope’s passing.
“He still was a voice — a moral voice, moral in the sense that he stood up for peace and justice and the dignity of people,” Brigitte Thalhammer, an Austrian nun who was standing next to a fountain in St. Peter’s Square on Monday afternoon, told my colleagues. “And I wondered: Who can be that voice now?”