The real Pope Francis Effect
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 23, 2025
It was well past midnight on the morning of Saturday, February 8th, when Deacon Dave Reynolds, the assistant director of public policy for the Connecticut Catholic Public Affairs Conference, finally had his chance to testify before the Government and Administrative Affairs Committee at our Legislative Office Building in Hartford. The public hearing had been going on for nearly thirteen hours at that point and Dave had been there all day, waiting to speak against SJ 35, a resolution to amend our state constitution to include late-term abortions and gender transitions. Speaking in his official capacity on behalf of our state’s bishops, Dave explained how the Catholic Church’s attorneys had determined that SJ 35 posed a grave threat to religious freedom in Connecticut. It would override all the protections for religious liberty that had been included in the state’s “non-discrimination” laws of the previous twenty years. Further, Dave explained, European studies had shown that gender ideology was no longer supported by the facts and that European countries were abandoning it.
As is the rule at our state legislature, Dave was allowed three minutes to speak, followed by Q and A with the legislators on the committee. And that is when it happened. Sen. Mae Flexer criticized Dave Reynolds—and by implication his bosses, all the Catholic bishops in the State of Connecticut—for not being as faithful to Pope Francis as is the Connecticut Democratic Party. You see, there was another proposed amendment to the state constitution on the agenda that day too, having to do with the environment, and Sen. Flexer wanted to know why the Catholic Conference was only testifying on the abortion/transgender amendment and not the environmental one, “given Pope Francis’ leadership” on the environment. Flexer said she considered her Catholic faith “deep and important” to her but that she was “incredibly frustrated” by the Catholic Conference’s “narrow” representation of it at the state Capitol, because the Church testifies “year after year” against the pro-abortion and LGBT bills Flexer and her party are always pushing and not on the matters that, apparently, she thinks Pope Francis would rather they testify on.
As Catholic Culture readers likely know, there is a hierarchy of issues in Catholic Social Teaching. The U.S. bishops have repeatedly affirmed that the right to life is the “preeminent” human rights issue of our time. Though even our bishops, like Dave Reynolds that day in Hartford, have had to reaffirm that teaching over and against those claiming to speak on Pope Francis’ behalf.
You can see Dave Reynolds’ testimony here beginning at 12:39:00. Sen. Flexer’s questioning of Dave (and his masterful response to her) begins at 12:43:17.
While you’re watching that, would anyone mind if I open my window and scream? It has been a long twelve years for Catholic pro-life activists, filled with many Pope Francis moments like that one.
Before I continue, let me just say: I actually like Pope Francis. I don’t mean that in the propagandistic way that we have seen in some corners of the Catholic internet these past 48 hours, as if there was nothing weird there. It was a really weird pontificate. But the depth of animosity that some Catholics expressed toward him has always shocked me. Among other things, I could not understand how any Catholic could grind his teeth over having a Pope who was the most popular man in the world, particularly in the wake of the sex-abuse scandals. Pope Francis’ popularity was a gift. I loved that the Holy Father could charm people like, well, Sen. Flexer, even if she would not see in his environmentalism what I see.
I loved the images of the Francis pontificate. His meetings with the downtrodden, the marginalized, the disfigured. I was moved by the sight of him praying in an empty St. Peter’s Square during the pandemic. Not wanting to be the Prodigal Son’s older brother, I gave him the benefit of the doubt when he seemed to throw guys like me—conservative “culture warrior” types—under the bus for the sake of welcoming home those who were lost. All part of a coming “Francis effect,” I thought.
But there’s the rub. At the end of the day—at the end of this pontificate—there was no “Francis effect.” Was that on him? Or us? Did we leverage the world’s affection for Pope Francis to evangelize it for the sake of the gospel? Or did the weirder aspects of the Francis pontificate drive us so batty that we instead wasted our energy fighting each other?
I don’t mean those questions rhetorically. I ask because I honestly don’t know.
At the start of the Francis pontificate, in the early days of “Who am I to judge?” and “it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” it was our opponents that were the evangelizers. “Ha! Poor Family Institute of Connecticut. Even the Pope is against you now,” one of them posted on a local blog. “I thought you wouldn’t like Pope Francis’ comments on gays,” a relative told me at a 2013 family gathering. “He said you shouldn’t judge them.” Those episodes at the beginning, and Dave Reynolds’ exchange with Sen. Flexer a few months ago, serve as bookends of the Francis pontificate. The people saying those things were not converted by Pope Francis.
Nor were those who were already Catholic. Many of them, previously attentive to every papal utterance, began to tune him out. The traditionalist critique of conservative Catholicism as being too focused on the Pope, to the point of falsely making an oracle of him, became increasingly persuasive as the Francis pontificate wore on. And that, ironically, is the real “Francis effect.” At least in the United States, as this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal discussed yesterday. Ten years ago Ross Douthat saw in the Francis pontificate “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism.” Today, it is liberal Catholicism that is again in crisis.
As I told a local news channel Monday, citing our own Archbishop, Pope Francis did guard the deposit of faith. I do not come to the end of his pontificate with anywhere near the depth of emotion I felt when it was John Paul II or Benedict XVI. But I am grateful that the worst fears of faithful Catholics, and the dark hopes of dissident ones, were never realized. The faith “once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) survives, whole and complete, to be guarded by the next successor of St. Peter. Deo gratias.
Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.
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