By Marcel Wando
On April 21, 2025, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis I, died at the age of 88, the victim of a stroke. His health was already fragile, as he also had pneumonia, and he died in room 201 of the House of Santa Marta, where he lived because he refused to live in the Apostolic Palace, in the papal apartments. This symbolic gesture represents the trajectory of Francis, who took office on March 13, 2013, after the resignation of Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, Benedict XVI.
The change was not only in the person in office, but also in the discourse and trajectory of the Church, which was under pressure to “modernize,” especially with the rise of class struggle experienced in the world between 2009 and at least 2013. Francis’ election was swift: 13 days after Benedict’s resignation and one day after the start of the conclave. It was the Church’s response to the popular clamor of the time, and that was his mission.
Francis was a turning point within the Church, an internal contradiction. He was the captain of a cruise ship who decided to change course, albeit slowly. At least that was the image he wanted to convey. He is considered by many to be a progressive, at least by the standards of the high hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This is reinforced by the sincere tears of activists around the world, the opportunistic tears of the false allies of the reformist left, and the tears of joy of his declared enemies on the far right.
There is nothing to blame in the sadness of ordinary people who saw in Pope Francis a ray of hope in the face of the despair of life in a world dominated by capital. As Marx said, “religion is the opium of the people,” although not in the moralistic sense of today, in the context of the war on drugs, but in the sense that at that time opium was one of the most expensive anesthetics, inaccessible to the people.
That is why we see that it is not only the 1.4 billion Catholics who are mourning, but a sea of people who, in the words of the Pope, felt a spiritual warmth in the midst of the icy situation in which we live.
The promise of paradise and peace from an authority figure is significant when so many others can only promise war, climate catastrophe, unemployment, austerity, deportations, prisons and police violence. But in reality, this sadness is a demonstration of the impact that a policy of class reconciliation, intelligently implemented by the hierarchy of an institution as reactionary as the Catholic Church, has had on people.
In order to understand how the Pope has managed to build this image and whether it is in line with the real role of the Church in today’s world, it is necessary to understand the Pope’s positions and the policies of the Catholic Church.
The image of the Pope of the poor
The choice to live in the Santa Marta residence instead of the official palace, the more modest papal vestments, the endless apologies, even the smallest gestures were carefully calculated to convey the idea of modesty. This was necessary, of course, but if it were all there was, it would certainly not be enough. So how has Pope Francis managed to partially reverse the image crisis of the Catholic Church, marked by conservatism, corruption, and pedophilia scandals? Let’s look at just three examples.
When the Pope asked, “If a person is homosexual and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” a scandal erupted. This is because the Church is responsible for several cases of “gay cure” therapy, which is still practiced in Italy today. It is the same Church whose holy book states that only marriage between a man and a woman is permitted and that love between people of the same sex is considered an “abomination,” and it is the very Church that refuses to perform marriage rituals for LGBT people.
This is music to the ears of those at the forefront of the struggle against oppression, as if the Pope were an ally fighting internally to advance the implementation of inclusive policies in the Church. However, even though the Church will not condemn LGBT people, it still follows the logic of the popular Protestants saying, “hate the sin, not the sinner,” meaning that they will be accepted to the extent that they renounce their practices. In January 2023, Francis said of same-sex relationships: “It is not a crime, but it is a sin,” expressing the continuity of the same rejection.
In December 2022, during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the pontiff wept as he spoke of the suffering of Ukrainians, saying they were being martyred. In his last message to the faithful on Easter Sunday, delivered by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, he said: “May the Risen Christ grant his Easter gift of peace to the war-torn Ukraine and encourage all the parties involved to continue their efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace.” By saying that the parties must “make efforts,” he suggests that the Ukrainians are partly to blame for the process, equating the Russian aggressors with the Ukrainian victims.
Also in his Easter address, he said, “My thoughts are with the people, especially the Christian community in Gaza, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to provoke a dramatic and shameful humanitarian situation.” This speech was interpreted as an expression of his alliance with the Palestinian people, which caused thousands of resistance activists to mourn his death. But in the same speech, the Pope affirmed that he defends the Israelis and the release of prisoners, putting the Zionist genocidaires and those fighting against genocide on the same level.
These double-meaning messages are constructed to be heard in one way by the vanguard of the struggles and in another way by the more conservative sectors of the Church. In this way, these messages seek to win the sympathy of activists while maintaining the conservative policies of the Catholic Church hierarchy.
This method is being used on the major issues of the class struggle, from the democratic revolutions in the Arab world, to the resistance against the Covid-19 pandemic, to the climate catastrophe we are experiencing. The speeches are tailored to win the support of the activists without breaking with the interests of the bourgeoisie. This is the traditional politics of class reconciliation, the search for “peace” without confronting bourgeois and imperialist domination.
But in the class struggle, from the point of view of the proletariat, it is necessary to fight against the bourgeoisie. In this struggle, it is essential to be clear about who the real enemies are, and the ideology of class conciliation deliberately fails to define the enemies of the proletariat, such as the bourgeoisie and imperialism. And this struggle includes, when necessary, violence against the oppressors, against bourgeois rule. The ideology widely disseminated by Pope Francis was above all “against violence”, “for peace”, equating the exploited with the exploiters. In essence, it was the maintenance of the status quo of the bourgeoisie.
The Bergoglio of the Old Testament
But Jorge Mario’s career did not begin as a pope. The Argentine pope had some experience in “field work” in poor communities and a good rapport with the masses, which the Catholic Church encouraged in its “Charismatic Renewal.” This was a policy of the Church in the 1960s in response to the revolutionary upsurge around the world after the end of World War II. Among other things, Masses began to be celebrated in the native language of each country (previously they were only celebrated in Latin), with priests facing the congregation rather than with their backs to them, and reaching out to the poorest sectors.
A by-product of this church policy was the “liberation theology” that led some members of the church, even among the Jesuits, to act as militants against the dictatorships in Latin America. This generated a certain “fame” for this congregation as “leftist,” although its history proves otherwise. The fact that Bergoglio is a Jesuit, the first pope to be one, reinforced this image.
But in reality, Francis has always been associated with the right-wing currents of the Peronist dictatorship. He is even accused by human rights groups, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Center for Legal and Social Studies, of failing to defend two Jesuit priests who were imprisoned and tortured during Argentina’s last military dictatorship. He was a very important part of the Argentine Catholic Church hierarchy that supported the military dictatorship in that country, one of the most violent and murderous in Latin American history.
In addition, he promoted marches against same-sex marriage in Argentina (which did not occur until 2010) and led fierce campaigns against women’s right to abortion in the country (which did not occur until 2020).
Bergoglio may have found redemption with Francis in the eyes of the public, but “justice is not achieved by forgetting, but by remembering,” as written in the prologue to the report Nunca Más (Never Again), prepared by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), responsible for investigating human rights violations committed by the Argentine military regime. Therefore, this cannot be forgotten.
The truth is that Pope Francis defends above all the interests of the Catholic Church. He did not become a cardinal because he opposed the conservative popes who preceded him, but because he was trusted by them. Like the 138 cardinals currently vying for the position (110 of whom were appointed by Bergoglio), they will defend the same interests. Although they may be more diverse in terms of their country of origin or their thinking, the Pope is first and foremost a monarch and head of state who responds to the capitalist needs of his country and the countries in which he participates in political life.
We live under a system that is rapidly moving towards barbarism, brought about by the financial and political elites of the bourgeoisie. We respect the sincere mourning of the activists for the death of the Pope, [but] we are Marxists and fighters for the socialist revolution. That is why we want to confront the illusions created by the Pope’s policy of class conciliation with the reality of bourgeois exploitation and oppression. And we also want to recall Bergoglio’s past record of support for the Argentine dictatorship, his campaign against gay marriage and against abortion rights in Argentina, in order to expose his true positions.
