Francis was always an enigma, baffling to Catholic and secular observers alike. This was true even at the level of his personality.
The Two Popes, a bad film about a hypothetical meeting between Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, is premised upon a contrast between the austere German intellectual whose chief relaxation was playing Schumann on the piano and the freewheeling Hispanic man of the people gushing about the Beatles.
This was nonsense. In literature, music, and art, Francis’s tastes were anything but populist; his imagination was more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of German Romanticism than Benedict’s. He valued difficulty and idiosyncrasy for their own sakes, and admired artists and philosophers with reputations for being inaccessible. One of his favorite conductors was Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose unconventional style—and complete disregard for tempo markings—are preserved in low-quality recordings cherished by a handful of enthusiasts. His favorite poet was
reputed to have been Hölderlin, the inscrutable mystic for whom the pagan gods were real personages rather than symbols. In his reflections on technology, Francis’s main influence appears to have been Heidegger, whose philosophical awakening had begun with his rejection of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic theology that was for centuries the default grammar of the Church. Before Francis, it is difficult to imagine a papal document citing Donna Haraway, the pioneer of “cyborg” feminism, for example.
This confusion extended beyond Francis’s personal interests and intellectual influences to his beliefs regarding fundamental theological—and, especially, moral—questions. Did Francis really believe, for example, that it was permissible for Catholics to receive Holy Communion if they had divorced and entered into second marriages while their first spouses were still living? The answer is yes. But so, of course, did his sainted predecessor John Paul II, who reversed the previous discipline that had subjected such couples to a kind of de facto excommunication, and permitted them to receive Communion on the condition that they refrained from sexual intercourse. In
Amoris laetitia, an apostolic exhortation issued in 2016, Francis was candid enough to acknowledge that universal compliance with this norm was unlikely and urged offending couples to go to confession. For this he was accused of being a heretic who did not believe that marriage was a sacrament.
