The Easter mass message, delivered in Latin and French, was a Francis-inflected encouragement: if you look down on other people, it should only be to help them up. Simplicity and humility are the colours of the protest movement that Francis left behind. This version of religion can’t help but be political when other voices are too scared and intimidated to take up the mantle of opposition. It will long be remembered that the first public figure with the courage to speak truth to Donald Trump was a bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, the (female, Episcopalian) Bishop of Boston.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese asked for and got a day’s pause from electioneering to pay respect to Francis. It’s easy to forget how suddenly and completely Christian sectarianism vanished from Australian life. For almost two centuries of colonised Christian Australia, sectarianism split communities, political parties, professions, families – everything. For an Italian-heritage Catholic prime minister to uncontroversially stop a campaign to mourn a pope’s death would have been unthinkable. When this changed, almost overnight around 1980, our most important division became one of our least important. It’s inspiring how quickly a society can decide to be better. We should recognise, from time to time, the ways in which the present is a vast improvement on the old days.
Donald Trump stares at French President Emmanuel Macron at the re-opening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in December.Credit: AP
As religious belief has declined, fighting for relevance in a secular society has helped the churches. Sadistic and autocratic Catholic priests and nuns, having been stripped of the institutional power that protected them, have given way to individuals practising the key Christian message of humility.
Towers of power have been reduced to quiet, emotional sanctuaries. Even in Notre-Dame, bereft believers are left in peace to pray for their lost. Standing beside me, a woman begged one of France’s highest priests to bless her rosary beads. As cheery as a family grocer, he did so without a second thought. European history has been carved out of the flesh of religious wars. Priests now help the small people pick up the pieces.
My fellow-travelling atheists are quick to dismiss all this as manipulative mumbo jumbo, often with categorical judgmentalism that comes across as, for want of a better word, fundamentalist.
I don’t think you have to believe a word of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah or the Baghavad Gita to respect their potential for good in a world dominated by strongmen cults, manipulating their followers with such powerful pseudo-religious certainties that millions of committed American Christians believe they have elected a man singularly blessed from heaven. Francis was indeed divisive, if standing up for humanity against a weird personality cult is what it means. Only authoritarians see “divisive” as a dirty word.
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It was reported this week that among young British people, Catholicism is more popular than Anglicanism for the first time since (presumably) the last Catholic monarchy hundreds of years ago. Pope Francis was doing something right. As a champion of the underdog, the Vatican has helped connect the developed and developing worlds, sewing immigrant communities together more harmoniously than most governments.
You don’t have to be a believer to see that traditional churches have more experience in our most pressing social issues than the manufactured belief systems that are using the very worst mumbo jumbo, inquisitions and tests of faith that modern religions have left behind.
The conclave of cardinals might now emulate art and, like Conclave the movie, elect (spoiler alert) another compassionate champion of the weak, another “woke pope”. Poor George Christensen feels this is inevitable, because Francis “stacked” the conclave “with ideological clones – men who share his vision of a ‘synodal’ Church, pluralistic, progressive and allergic to clarity. The next pope may be even worse”.
In the absence of moderate conservatism, the Vatican has been thrown into a conflict it didn’t ask for: against absolutism. Let’s hope the conclave finds a pope even worse than Francis.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
