The early years of Pope Francis’s reign coincided with an HBO show about a young, chain-smoking pontiff who takes the suggestive name Pius XIII and brings back the papal tiara upon taking office. For a small but influential cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals—many of us converts to the faith—Jude Law’s Pius was the Roman pontiff we wished we had: a traditionalist with a revulsion for modernity born of his own abandonment by his hippie parents.
The pope we got in real life was an Argentine Jesuit who couldn’t stop talking about the climate, seemed to wink at divorce, and framed young traditionalist priests as latter-day Pharisees who’d merely substituted Saturno hats for wide phylacteries. Yet in retrospect, it’s clear that Francis was just the pontiff we needed. The substance of his message was far more “trad” than critics appreciated. And his governing style challenged us to practice what we preached about authority.
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