The Francis Filtration

Pope Francis, Filtered

by George Weigel

About a year ago, I suggested to one of the top editors of a major American newspaper that his journal’s coverage of things papal left something to be desired, as it seemed based on the assumption that Pope Francis was some kind of radical wild man, eager to toss into the garbage bin of history all those aspects of Catholic faith and practice that mainstream Western culture finds distasteful.

My friend replied, in so many words: “Look, you know how these media narratives are: They’re like bamboo. Once they get started, there’s no stopping them. They just keep growing.”

Alas, he was right. And while there has been a lot of talk about the “Francis Effect,” it’s worth pondering, a little over a week after the Holy Father’s 78th birthday, the “Francis Filtration.”

The Francis Filtration began in earnest during the impromptu press conference on the papal plane while the Pope was en route home from World Youth Day 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. That was the presser that produced the single-most quoted line of the pontificate thus far: “Who am I to judge?”

But as retired Cardinal Francis George of Chicago pointed out in a pre-retirement interview with John Allen, that sound bite “has been very misused … because he was talking about someone who has already asked for mercy and been given absolution. … That’s entirely different than talking [about] someone who demands acceptance rather than asking for forgiveness.” (For the record, the entire quote, which is almost never cited, was: “Who am I to judge them if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith?”)

But as my journalist-friend suggested, the “bamboo shoot” of “Who am I to judge?” has continued to grow, until it’s now a virtual bamboo curtain. And what’s being filtered out? All the things the Pope says that don’t fit the now-established “narrative” of “humane, progressive pope vs. meanie-reactionary bishops and hidebound Catholic traditionalists.”

Things like what?

Well, things like the Pope’s passionate defense of marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman, which he underscored in an address to the Schoenstatt movement right after the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family 2014 and in his keynote address to a November interreligious conference at the Vatican on the crisis of marriage in the 21st century.

And things like the Pope’s defense of the gospel of life, a persistent theme in Francis’ November address to the European Parliament. The press reports I read focused on Francis’ concerns for immigrants and the unemployed. Fair enough; that was certainly in the text. But what about the Holy Father’s defense of those whom indifference condemns to loneliness or death, “as in the case of the terminally ill, the elderly who are abandoned or uncared for and children who are killed in the womb”?


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