The Tupamaro pope is dead, the damage endures

The Vatican’s most political pontiff since the days of the Borgia has died. Pope Francis, a man who preferred gestures to theology and ideology to liturgy, leaves behind a Church hollowed out in doctrine, distracted by activism, and all too comfortable in the company of those who hate Jews.

From the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto the balcony in 2013 as “the bishop of Rome,” it was clear this papacy would be different. Not in a way that would deepen Catholic faith or renew moral seriousness, but in a way that would turn the Church into a soft power tool of fashionable global causes: immigration maximalism, climate anxiety, and, most disturbingly, a rebranded hostility to the Jewish state.

Francis’s roots in teología de la liberatiòn, the Latin American theology born in the heat of Marxist insurgency, were never peripheral. They were the axis of his worldview. His vision of the Church was not primarily sacramental or metaphysical. It was programmatic. Justice on earth, not salvation in heaven. Priests as social workers, not shepherds of souls. The Jesuit-Peronist fusion that formed him in Argentina bore fruit in a Vatican that began to talk like the United Nations Development Programme and stopped talking about G-d.

But it is Francis’s posture toward the Jews, and toward Israel, that stands as one of the ugliest parts of his legacy. Unlike John Paul II, who stood at the Western Wall and called Jews “our elder brothers,” or Benedict XVI, who called for theological humility in dialogue with Judaism, Francis often veered into something closer to the Vatican’s darker instincts of the past.

At first, Jewish leaders extended the benefit of the doubt. He met with rabbis. He spoke warm words at Yad Vashem. But the tone shifted—subtly, then blatantly. He invited Mahmoud Abbas to the Vatican and called him “an angel of peace.” He met with Holocaust-denying clerics like Mohammad Hussein, the Palestinian Authority’s Grand Mufti. He equated Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. And he did all this while maintaining a studied ambiguity that allowed him to retreat behind interfaith platitudes when challenged.

Francis was the pope of “both-sidesism” when it came to Jewish suffering and Palestinian terrorism. After Hamas’s pogrom on October 7, 2023, when babies were burned and women raped in the name of jihad, Francis waited days to speak. When he finally did, he demanded an end to “violence on both sides.” This was not the language of a moral leader. It was the evasive, oily idiom of a diplomat desperate to avoid upsetting his ideological allies.

No pope since the Second Vatican Council had treated the Jewish people’s right to self-defense with such irritation. The Catholic Church, under Francis, returned to a posture that flirted with the old suspicion: that Jewish sovereignty is a problem, and Jewish nationalism a moral offense.

This was not just rhetorical. Under Francis, the Vatican refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, even after the United States did. The Holy See supported UN resolutions that deny Jewish ties to the Temple Mount. The Vatican mission in Jerusalem acted less like a custodian of Christian sites and more like a low-grade anti-Zionist NGO.

It would be convenient to blame these outrages on advisors or diplomatic constraints. But the pattern was too consistent. Francis had time to welcome Greta Thunberg and Emma Bonino to the Vatican, but never visited a synagogue in Jerusalem. He had strong words for Donald Trump’s border policies, but none for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He condemned capitalism as “the dung of the devil,” but could not bring himself to say plainly that Hamas is evil.

His defenders will point to his love of the poor, his gentle style, his humility. But a man can live simply and still do great harm. In Francis’s Church, simplicity became a screen for political radicalism and theological erosion. The altar was replaced with the soapbox.

Under his leadership, Catholicism’s center of gravity shifted away from Europe and toward Latin America and the Global South, not in numbers, which was long in motion, but in ideological coloration. Liberation theology, once chastised by Rome, returned under a new name: “the Church of the poor.” The result was a Vatican that aligned itself with movements more interested in slogans than sacraments, and more comfortable with post-colonial grievance than with the Ten Commandments.

Francis wasn’t the first pope to politicize the pulpit, but he was the most effective at doing it under the guise of humility. The sandals, the small Fiat, the gestures of washing Muslim migrants’ feet—these were optics that cloaked a deeper regression: a Church whose leader lost interest in the Jewish roots of Christianity and began sounding increasingly like a Latin American foreign minister during the Chávez era.

He is dead now. But the damage is not. The anti-Zionist instincts he normalized, the flattening of theology into social messaging, the flirtation with radical politics, these will outlive him. He may be remembered by some as the “Pope of the Poor.” Others will remember him as the man who made Catholic anti-Judaism intellectually fashionable again.