Upon his election in 2013, some expected Pope Francis to undo the excesses of the imperial papacy, the model of centralized church governance associated with proclamation of papal infallibility at Vatican I. But even as Francis promised to prioritize horizontal governance, he leaned into the vertical exercise of power, “just doing things” in ways that would have stunned his predecessor Pius IX. He did so, however, in a novel way. The Francis papacy saw the rise and triumph of the managerial model within the Church. Francis wasn’t the first pope to make sweeping assertions of his juridical powers, but he was the first pope to give the Vatican a human-resources department. That change is part and parcel of a decisive and dangerous shift, which will prove hard to roll back.
Managerialism is, at its core, the prioritization of process over product. Optimizing process means that objective, concrete outcomes are subordinated to a particular state of mind; the manager is not so much a boss as a life coach. Managerialism avoids the overt frictions and conflicts that come from the pressure to achieve specific objectives. The casualty of managerialism is personal responsibility. By resorting to mutable guidelines, by preferring vague communication, managerialism teaches the art of talking in circles, of never really saying anything for which one can be held accountable.
“He was deliberately ambiguous in doctrinal statements.”
Francis’s governance of the Church reflected these managerial priorities. He was deliberately ambiguous in doctrinal statements. He habitually, sometimes conveniently, forgot what he said in the past, as he did when confronted over whether he allegedly told a woman in 2014 to forget about the Church’s teaching on communion and divorce. These are standard strategies managers use to deflect accountability. Conservative critics alleged intentional duplicity. But what did Francis’s opacity actually hide?
A decade into his papacy, it remained unclear what his master plan was. Theological liberals were disappointed; they never got married priests or female deacons. The Order of Malta and Latin Mass Catholics may have felt the wrath of the Peronist dictator-pope, but this ruthlessness evaporated when it came to fixing the Vatican’s finances or reorganizing bishop conferences.
“Synodality,” a managed process of consultation that was supposed to empower ordinary Catholics, was presented as one of Francis’s signature innovations; but it became, in the words of Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, “heavy on process and deficient in clarity,” degenerating into administrative circling back to largely ineffectual recommendations. Conservative fears of Francis pulling heterodox documents out of the synodal hat never materialized. Moreover, after the initial years of his papacy, Francis’ encyclicals and apostolic exhortations read like the product of committees rather than of a singular mind with a clear objective.
None of this meant, however, that the pursuit of the process wasn’t destructive of custom and law. Managerialism’s emphasis on process can look like a continuation or exaggeration of legalism. But it’s not about the rule of law so much as optics. One could see this in one of Francis’s earliest decisions, to wash the feet of prisoners during the Mass of Maundy Thursday. This Mass commemorates the Last Supper. In canon law, the pope is supposed to follow the example of Jesus Christ and wash the feet of his apostles—which is to say, priests and deacons. It is, for one evening, a reversal of the Church’s hierarchy, a demonstration of how the pope should serve the ordained under his juridical authority. Francis opted for something different. Washing the feet of prisoners was a potent media gesture. But it was not an ecclesiology. It was a communications strategy, set to be repeated again and again.
In 2015, Francis created the Secretariat for Communication, bringing all the Vatican’s media outlets into one body. This was not in itself a bad reform; but as in any office, it is telling what the boss chooses to spend resources on. A US senator who spends most of his office’s budget on communications rather than on policy research can’t really claim he’s interested in legislating or governing.
As part of his 2022 reforms of the Curia—through which the Vatican ended up with a human-resources department—Francis revamped communications. The Secretariat of Communication, now renamed the Dicastery for Communication, became one of the Vatican’s most important offices. It spends nearly as much as the Secretariat of State, which is tasked with running the Holy See’s embassy network around the world. It spends more than the Dicastery for Evangelization, and a staggering 19 times as much as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In the managerial setting, the communications office takes on the register of left-progressivism. “Conspicuous compassion,” in Musa al-Gharbi’s phrase, is a seductive, polished rhetoric that speaks to those across business, academic, and other managerial enterprises, gaining social accolades and praise without really having to do much to follow up.
In 2015, Francis released Laudato Si’, widely hailed as the launch of a new era in Catholic social teaching. But his team scuppered their own project. A few months later, Francis released Amoris Laetitia. The latter, more than the former, defined the papacy. Amoris Laetitia was deliberately vague on the essential question of whether it was changing Church teaching on the impermissibility of communion to the divorced and remarried. That was the point: to create the impression that any answer was permissible. Little more needed to be done other than signalling a certain tenor. There was no decisive doctrinal change, but the Vatican’s communications strategy took on the cadence of conspicuous compassion. Inside the Church, Francis’s most important initiatives were thereafter overshadowed by the cultivated ambiguity of Amoris Laetitia. Controversy frustrated faithful Catholics and squandered their trust in Rome. But outside the Church, the controversy helped Francis win a favorable press. This was largely successful. Francis escaped the media inquisitions that had assailed Pope Benedict. But this efficacy masked his papacy’s real tragedy.
Despite the claims of Francis’ defenders that he sought to escape the tired binaries of American politics, he and his entourage were obsessed with them. In September 2019, Francis remarked that it was “an honor that the Americans attack me.” That struggle defined the last years of his pontificate. Francis did more than any other pope to bring the concepts of the modern American political scene into Catholic teaching, trying to theologize opposition to the American right. In June 2020, he modified the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary to include praising her as “Solace of Migrants,” following this in October with the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which warned about “myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism.” Timed for an election year, the target of these theological interventions was obvious. The dénouement of Francis’s papacy saw a messaging battle with Vice President JD Vance over immigration.
Thus progressives easily fit Francis into their preferred narrative. Francis’s obituary in The New York Times celebrates him as a pope who “steered the church in another direction,” appointed “a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral, welcoming approach” who “sought to open up the church” that had grown “inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.”
Like many managers, Francis’s team was skilled in pushing the envelope of acceptability in speech with nods, winks, and symbolic gestures. But managers are not great reformers. If pressed to deliver on promised reforms, the most skilled change the subject. Managerialism is the system of doublespeak, where organizations purport to be pursuing daring innovations while pursuing “best practices” that reinforce the status quo. The Catholic alliance of office and altar never showed that it could be anything different.
Both Catholic and secular managerialism are at once radical and trivial. Grand exhortations and symbolic gestures never seemed to really lead anywhere. Unable to point to a “Francis effect” bringing Catholic back to the pews, many of Francis’s apologists fell back to praising Francis for “a willingness to open questions for debate.” Talking and listening sound bold, but it’s hardly an agenda for real reform. In politics, the cost of this substitution of “listening” for reform is stagnation. In theology, the cost of this approach is incoherence. Under Francis, the faithful learned that they were better off just ignoring what Rome said, rather than trying to make sense of it. That’s what one does to survive a troubled time, but it’s hardly a recipe for ecclesial harmony. Faced with a fragmented church in which Catholics trust their personal judgement and tribe more than their shepherds, future administrators will be tempted to use managerial vagueness for the simple task of keeping the peace and avoiding conflict.
Of course, managerial communication wasn’t the full story of Francis’s papacy. His initial theological initiatives—on ecology, on the critique of technological civilization, on the “throwaway society” from the sweatshops of globalization to abortion and euthanasia clinics—were brilliant sketches of our profound civilizational malaise. The technical, economic thinking of our time remains the fundamental antithesis of Catholicism. But Francis’s papacy turned from this essentially political conflict to a message of advocacy that was indistinguishable from that offered by other not-for-profits.
At times, Francis intuited the managerial temptation. In one of his early speeches, Francis declared, “If we do not confess to Christ, what would we be? We would end up a compassionate NGO.” But Francis, despite his obvious desire to confess Christ, succumbed to that temptation. Prioritizing media over message muted the Catholic witness. The world saw not a sign of contradiction, but someone who wanted the Church to become a little more like the world.