Why is Pope Francis Criticizing Catholic Conservatives?

I was standing in St. Peter’s Square when Pope Francis was announced as the next pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

White smoke. Habemus Papam. Habemus Francis!

The name choice was lost on no one. Pope Francis was likening himself to St. Francis of Assisi, the saint tasked by God with the unenviable job to “rebuild my church.” Dogged by scandals, the Church was in desperate need of a rebuilder. A unifier.

I had spent the prior several days defending unpopular church dogma on every television station, a task which has earned me the label of “conservative Catholic.” It’s an American political term that doesn’t fit a global Church with one billion members, but it’s the press’ best attempt at ‘orthodox’ or ‘faithful’.

It’s a label I usually shrug off, and yet 2013 me would not have expected 2024 me to see Pope Francis, my spiritual father and the purported emblem of Christian unity, on “60 Minutes” taking the political bait and calling "conservative" Catholics “suicidal” and stuck in “a dogmatic box.”

This is not only unfairly harsh, but it simply isn’t true.

The American Church — which for reasons that elude many earns the seemingly regular rebuke of the Holy Father — is far from suicidal, and neither are the Catholics that fill her pews.

Is Mass attendance down, especially since Covid? Yes.

But the Church is so much more than one statistic. It is her seminaries, many of which are teeming with young men faithful to church doctrine and eager to give their lives in service to the church. According to Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the head of my diocese in Washington, D.C., who recently called President Biden a “cafeteria Catholic,” we are experiencing a more than 60-year high in vocations.

The surge in vocations in many parts of the country is primarily driven by a desire for a return to tradition and orthodoxy, something the Associated Press recently described as an “immense shift” in the Catholic Church.

“Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change,” they wrote, “with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.”

“The shift,” they continued, is “molded by…increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for orthodoxy,” and has “reshaped parishes across the country…”

The AP is a bit late to the game, as Georgetown University’s Center for Advanced Research in the Apostolate (CARA) noted fifteen years ago that the fastest growing religious orders are those that, “follow a more traditional style of religious life…They also wear a religious habit, work together in common apostolates, and are explicit about their fidelity to the Church and the teachings of the Magisterium.”

That’s code for “conservative.”

Conservatives, suicidal? More like conservatives, engines of revival.

But the labels are so old. What’s not is the actual work of the Church. It’s her schools, which were bursting during the pandemic when public schools were closed. It’s her charities that nourish millions of the hungry. It’s her hospitals that provide one in seven hospital beds to a disproportionately indigent community. It’s that part of the Church that embodies that “freshness and fragrance of the Gospel” that Pope Francis so famously called us to, back when his words inspired instead of insulted.

The optimism and dynamism that defines American Catholicism, whatever label you choose to give it, is well captured in a recent book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, by Francis X. Maier, former chancellor to Archbishop Charles Chaput, a giant of a prelate who somehow managed to build up both the diocese of Denver and Philadelphia into bastions of faith despite being yet another Catholic labeled “conservative.”

The American Church has continued to forge ahead and thrive despite a decade of confusion and division from afar. The European church is on the brink of schism. Some of the African Church is openly rejecting papal decrees that muddy the waters on human sexuality. The financial and sex abuse scandals are far from cleaned up by the Vatican. A synod on synodality has been convened to purportedly bring about kumbaya, all the while the Holy Father seems to spend more time kicking his unfavored sheep than shepherding them. 

And yet we forge on, working to build up our Church despite the shackles of our so-called “dogmatic boxes.” As for the work of unity, Pope Francis appears content to leave that to his successor.