Philly Archbishop Emeritus Charles J. Chaput recently wrote about Pope Francis. His take is narrow and troubling.
Chaput may assert the pope was "inadequate to the real issues," but the truth is that Francis was challenging to those more often concerned with ideological policing than with pastoral care.
Archbishop Emeritus Charles J. Chaput’s recent critique of the late Pope Francis in the publication First Things, published with the authority of someone who once led Philadelphia‘s archdiocese, presents a narrow and troubling view of a pontificate that resonated deeply with millions of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
His assertion that Pope Francis was “inadequate to the real issues facing the Church” rests on a flawed premise that fidelity to the Gospel must resemble rigid continuity with the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in form, rather than in spirit.
Francis was not hostile to the Second Vatican Council, nor to his predecessors.
What he challenged, rightly, was the uniquely militant strain of conservatism that has taken root in segments of the Catholic Church in America. This is a conservatism more often concerned with ideological policing than with pastoral care, more invested in patrolling doctrinal borders than in proclaiming the liberating joy of the Gospel.
Far from undermining the council’s legacy, Francis sought to fulfill it. Where others clung to doctrinal rigidity, he embodied the council’s deeper vision: accompaniment, mercy, and a church that speaks with humility to a wounded world.
It was Francis who called the church to emerge from self-referential isolation and engage the margins, not as a strategy, but as a moral imperative. Where Chaput sees “ambiguity,” the broader church hears something Francis’ critics seldom speak: the language of mercy. Where Chaput sees “confusion,” many of us hear the radical call of Christ to justice, compassion, and inclusion.
It is Archbishop Emeritus Chaput, not our late pontiff, who seems profoundly out of step with the moment we are in.
This is the same archbishop who once called for the cancellation of the Synod of Bishops on young people in the wake of the clergy’s sexual abuse crisis in 2018, a suggestion that fundamentally misread the roots of that scandal. As I argued at the time, the abuse was the product of secrecy, clericalism, and a leadership culture more accountable to itself than to the families it claimed to serve. Francis knew that healing would not come through more withdrawal, but by opening the church’s doors wide to the people who had been betrayed.
The vision of the church as a doctrinal fortress to be defended, rather than a people to be accompanied, finds its most troubling expression in the militant traditionalism gaining influence among Francis’ critics.
This is not a “loyal opposition,” as Chaput claims, but a full-throated rejection of the church’s missionary identity in favor of liturgical nostalgia and clerical isolation. It clings to a past not out of reverence, but out of fear of the present and resistance to the future.
Nowhere is this starker than in the calls among some of the militant conservatives for a return to the Latin Mass, a rite conducted in a dead language, unintelligible to most Catholics, with the priest literally turning his back on the people. That gesture speaks volumes: a church turned inward, away from its faithful, away from the world it is called to serve.
It seeks to preserve a church frozen in time, not evolving and, more troublingly, never intending to.
Pope Francis understood that the vitality of the church is not found in the preservation of externals, but in the constant renewal of its heart. That‘s why he named himself after Francis of Assisi.
He did not get everything right. No pope ever does. But to dismiss his pontificate as a failure is to overlook the extraordinary courage it took to speak plainly about the poor and the marginalized, about refugees, about the earth, and, yes, about the grave sins of the church itself.
That is not inadequacy. That is the Gospel made flesh in our time. That is the legacy of a shepherd who chose to walk with his flock, not stand above it.
To fail to see that legacy is not a matter of candor. It is a failure of discipleship.
Alfred G. Mueller II is assistant dean of the William T. Daly School of General Studies and Graduate Education at Stockton University and the former dean of arts and sciences at Neumann University (2013-2023). He is the author of “In the Name of God” (2004) and a former Fulbright Scholar in the Republic of Armenia.