QUel assessment draw from the pontificate of François? After twelve years of reign and a succession of unpublished initiatives in the history of the papacy, the pressure to answer this question as quickly as possible is necessarily insistent, while it would call on the contrary the prudent maturation of the analysis. And it is all the more difficult to try an answer since reflection is parasitized by the most contradictory assessments – from the most dithyrambic to the most violently outrageous – which swept through it throughout its trajectory in the Vatican.
His predecessors were certainly disputed, within and outside Catholicism, but none of them was the object, as much as François, of hostile campaigns organized, relayed and amplified by social networks, directly targeting his person and his legitimacy. Nor, no doubt, had reached, as shown – among others – the reception of the encyclical Laudato if ' on the safeguard of the “Common house” [texte phare de François publié en 2015 sur l’écologie]to also resonate a Roman word far beyond the borders of the Catholic world.
Major breakdown
If it is obviously impossible to assess the mark that François' pontificate will leave in the future of Catholicity, it is not easier to project that that the Argentinian Pope will print in the memory of the faithful and in opinion. Will we remember the major rupture-with regard to centuries of homosexuals without appeal-made up of the question that has become famous “” [Si une personne est gay]who am I to judge? »»or the violence of the designation of doctors practicing pregnancy interruptions such as “Bet killers” ?
Will we remember the audacity he had by naming women to key positions in the curial administration, or the endless procrastination of the decision relating to their possibility of accessing the diaconal ordination? His sincere concern for the recognition of their pastoral work in the Church, or else the essentializing “magnificent” of the supposed specificity of their vocation, by definition by the exercise of sacred power?
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Source: Lemonde