The church that leaves Pope Francis, who died at 88, is once again divided between body and soul. Among the spiritual power, what in words defended Jorge Mario Bergoglio, born in Buenos Aires in Argentina on 17 December 1936. And the temporal power, the conservative lobbies that in his twelve years of pontificate have clung to the columns of San Pietro with their hands, feet and sometimes the public words, against his alleged reforming work.

The forecast: “Someone says that the time has come”

Soul and body, in fact. As always. Waiting for Francesco to get aside. Halving or leaving his earthly life, as happened now. And who knows that someone, on the morning of Monday 21 April at the news of death, did not even recite the praises. He had foreseen him, in conversation with the premier Giorgia Meloni, in their meeting in February 2025: “I know that there is someone out there who says that my hour has come. They always pull it on me”.

He was very expected from Pope Francis. Also from lay people. Since his settlement on March 13, 2013 after the sensational resignations of Pope Joseph Ratzinger. The first pontiff to choose the name of the great saint of Assisi. No pope had ever dared before. A gesture of rupture with the temporal tradition. A signal to the Catholic world. And above all a warning to the traditionalist current in the Roman church which has in the Curia of Rome, for geographical proximity to the state of the Vatican, its main ram.

The silence on the accusations to the Jesuit Marko Rupnik

Pope Francis did a lot, in the belief of having to make the Church more popular. It focused it in its four encyclicals, the pastoral letters that each Pope addresses to Catholics. Explicit words already in titles. He loved us (2024). All brothers (2020). Laudato yes, like the Canticle of San Francesco (2015). Light of faith (2013). Raise your hand who of you read them, from the first to the last word. But he also uniform a lot. Returning to his decisions. Or denying himself.

The Jesuit Bergoglio certainly had the courage to remove the obscene veil with which in the past the Holy See hid from earthly justice the culprits of pedophilia. But then he closed himself in silence when he was to face the case of the Jesuit father Marko Rupnik (we talk about it here), “the subject of a criminal investigation of the Holy See” and “expelled from the Jesuit order in 2023 because it was accused of psychological and sexual violence by at least 15 nuns”, as Federico Tulli recalls on Dosses Romatoday.

The Pope’s gaffes: “Russia is a great people”

He continued the transparency operation in the financial flows of the IOR, the Vatican Bank transformed in the past into a dark temple of temporal power and therefore infiltrated by duplication, recyclators and real criminals. But he then entrusted the most delicate tasks to people who in some cases betrayed him.

He spoke of peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, however forgetting that the Ukrainians were attacked by the Russians and reducing the Russian massacres of Ukrainian citizens to a question of mercenaries. Because, according to the pontiff, the cruelty “is not of the Russian people perhaps, because the Russian people – are the words of Pope Francis – are a great people: they are mercenaries, they are soldiers who go to war as an adventure”.

From diplomatic void to “frocilosa” in seminars

In other times, it could be a diplomatic signal in view of important agreements. But the diplomatic void that accompanied the pontificate of Francesco then showed that it was only a gaffe. Like that time, about a year ago, in which it has exclaimed that there is too much “friargegus” in the seminars. Forgetting – without bothering the Gospel – that there are regimes, or simply neighborhoods, where those who flaunt homosexual affections are massacred. Italy included.

The seminars are the great failure of Pope Francis. Their progressive emptying goes hand in hand with the lack of priests in the churches and the evaporation of the faithful. Bergoglio has missed the great opportunity to reform the obligation of celibacy that is transforming Catholicism into a cathedral of benches and empty altars. It is not up to us to find the solution. But demographic desertification has now exploded. While the Lutheran shepherds, who can have wife and children, are certainly not less Christian than the Pope.

The death of Pope Francis: will there be another eighty year old?

In other words, with the personification that has given to his papal role, the second thoughts, the shots of anger that have made the void around him, Pope Francis must also be remembered for the total chaos in which he leaves his pontificate. The only justification of these twelve years paved with expectations and disappointments can be the personal data: age.

In this Pope Francis is the pontiff who closer to another character of our time, who instead will go down to history, for better or for worse: the Ondivago president almost eighty -year -old from the United States, Donald Trump, of which the Pope has received deputy James Vance, the day before he died. We only have a question that will soon be the conclave to give an answer: the gerontocracy, that is, the power in the hands of the elderly, is still able to govern the complexity and speed of the world?

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