Pope Francis gave voice to the oppressed but epitomised the tensions in the Catholic Church, argues Vukoman Milenković

The death of Pope Francis will sadden many believers, especially in the countries of the Global South, while the right wing of the Roman Catholic hierarchy connected to reactionary regimes from Warsaw to Washington will welcome it with relief. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, known as Pope Francis, epitomised the tensions in the Roman Catholic Church.

On the one hand, he remained the guardian of the unjust authority of the Vatican, an institution that has participated in class, colonial and patriarchal forms of repression for centuries. On the other hand, he was a rare figure in that hierarchy who openly gave voice to the oppressed. At a time when Western powers were supporting or silent in the face of Israel’s terror against the people of Palestine, Pope Francis condemned it clearly as a crime against humanity.

In the domain of intra-church reforms, he made advances that, though limited, broke down barriers: he allowed the pastoral blessing of same-sex couples which, though far from recognising full-fledged church marriages, represents an historical step forward; he allowed women to participate in the election of bishops which, though it did not mean the recognition of female clergy, opened cracks in the patriarchal structure of the Church.

Moreover, as the first pope from Latin America, he brought the spirit of liberation theology, the radical Christian socialist movement that originated in his homeland, to the Vatican. Although he was sceptical of this movement in his youth, during his pontificate he adopted some of its fundamental principles: commitment to the poor, criticism of capitalist exploitation, and linking social and environmental justice. He also expressed sympathy for socialism as an ethical alternative to neoliberalism which drew sharp criticism from conservatives.

Yet, despite that rhetoric, he resolutely distanced himself from the revolutionary dimension of liberation theology, suppressing its class analysis. Instead of calling for the uprising of the oppressed, his approach remained within the bounds of reformism and the moral condemnation of injustice but not political organisation against it.

Small steps, big cracks: Gaza, LGBT and the women’s issue

During his pontificate, Pope Francis increasingly placed himself at odds with the dominant ideological currents of Western imperialism and the Church’s right. His criticism was not merely rhetorical. In some cases, such as the condemnation of Israeli terror against Palestinians, it directly challenged the political and religious hegemony that has justified the slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East for decades. When Francis called Israel’s crimes in Gaza ‘terrorism’ and suggested they might have ‘the characteristics of a genocide’, he condemned not only Tel Aviv, but also Western ‘civilisation’ which finances the massacres. His words had a strong resonance among the peoples of the Global South, showing the voice against imperialist violence can be heard even from the Vatican despite its colonial past.

On the issue of women’s rights in the Church, Francis made symbolic but significant advances. In 2021, for the first time, he allowed women to vote in the election of bishops, breaking with the centuries-old practice of excluding women from decision-making. ‘We cannot imagine the Church without the key role of women,’ he declared, at the same time rejecting the issue of female clergy. This duality between the inclusion of women in governance and the refusal to recognise them as full-fledged priests reflects the essential tension of his pontificate: readiness for certain reforms, but not for a radical rearrangement of power structures.

The Pope also challenged one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most stubborn taboos: its relationship to the LGBT community. In December 2023, it was decided that priests could give ‘pastoral blessings’ to same-sex couples, marking a watershed moment after decades of institutional homophobia. ‘When a blessing is asked, a blessing is given’ Francis said, stressing that the Church must not be a ‘judge that only condemns.’ Although he explicitly said it was not a question of recognising same-sex church marriages, the move sparked fierce opposition from conservative bishops, especially in Africa, where some bishops’ conferences openly refused to implement the decision. In Poland, Cardinal Marek Jędraszewski, known for declaring that LGBT ‘ideology’ is more dangerous than communism, called the change ‘destructive.’

Liberation theology: its return to the Church without revolution

Liberation theology represents the most radical leftist Christian movement of the 20th century, born from the struggle of the poor masses of Latin America for emancipation. Born in grassroots church communities (comunidades eclesiales de base) where peasants, workers and marginalised priests read the Bible through the prism of their own oppression, liberation theology saw Jesus in the spirit of early Christianity as a revolutionary standing on the side of the poor, not only in a spiritual but also in a political sense. Its basic principles were: a commitment to the poor that sees God’s presence primarily in the oppressed and the abject, and not in luxurious clerical ceremonies and the ordinations of politicians; a Marxist-inspired critique of the structural violence of the capitalist mode of production; and the Church as a body of politically organised Christian men and women called to work actively to establish the Kingdom of God by eradicating inequality, slavery and selfishness.

The movement paid in blood: thousands of priests, monks and lay people were killed by right-wing regimes supported by the US. Among the victims were Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador killed during Mass in 1980, and the Jesuits of the Central American University of San Salvador massacred in 1989. The Vatican under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) condemned the movement for ‘too much Marxism’, and many liberation theologians such as Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino were punished with official bans on public speaking, publishing books and teaching theology.

As the first pope from the Global South, Francis brought areal echoof liberation theology to the Vatican but replaced its revolutionary core with a more moderate ‘theology of the people’, a variant developed by the Argentine theologian Juan Carlos Scannone which avoids Marxist concepts and references to class struggle but maintains a focus on the poor.

Although reserved at first as a young priest and bishop, Bergoglio began to turn to his ‘inborn’ theology from 2013 until the end of his pontificate. This became most visible in the series of rehabilitations of liberation theologians he carried out. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the movement’s founder, was invited to celebrate Mass with Francis and the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an unexpected gesture of reconciliation. Leonardo Boff was hired as an adviser for the encyclical (an instructive letter addressed to the faithful in which the pope expresses his views on important issues of faith, morality and society) published in 2015 under the title Laudato Si’. In it, Francis linked the environmental struggle with elements of liberation theology: ‘Hearing the cry of the poor means also hearing the cry of the Earth.’ Francis also lifted the decades-long suspensions of priests Miguel d’Escoto and Ernesto Cardenal who supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Sympathies towards socialism are visible in many of the Pope’s addresses. He condemned the ‘dictatorship of the market’, the ‘logic of profit that kills’ and advocated ‘an economy that serves man, not the other way around’. He called for the introduction of a universal basic income, and in the Fratelli Tutti encyclical he emphasised that land and resources must have a ‘social function’ for the common good, one of the key principles of Latin American socialist agrarian reform. He supported Evo Morales in Bolivia and criticised Javier Milei in his native Argentina.

Although he avoided Marxist analysis of society, rejected armed resistance and calls for political organisation, Pope Francis brought certain notions of liberation theology from the margins to the Vatican. However, he reshaped its radical potential into a reformist narrative that was more moral appeal than political strategy. In doing so, he suppressed class struggle as the axis of struggle for justice and replaced it with a general call for mercy and solidarity.

As Leonardo Boff observed: ‘It is not so much whether you are for liberation theology as whether you are for the liberation of the oppressed.’ Francis accepted the former – the symbolism, narrative and the idea of reconciliation – but not the latter, the practical work of challenging the existing order. His pontificate remains a particularly paradoxical combination of prophet and diplomat in which the vision of liberation retained its evangelical tone but lost its revolutionary edge.

Power is not in Rome

The legacy of Pope Francis cannot be fully assessed without the shadows that have followed him since the days of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). As a young provincial of the Jesuit order, Bergoglio was accused of having exposed two priests to the repression of the military junta out of passivity or even collaboration. Although some like Father Jalics later retracted the more serious accusations, the truth about his role remains hazy. What is certain is that as a church leader at that time he did not stand up to the crimes of the state, which casts a long shadow on his later advocacy for the poor and oppressed. His silences in the past made his later words louder but also more ambiguous.

His entire pontificate lies in this ambiguity: between silence and testimony, between a radical message and institutional continuity. Although he opened the door to issues that had been suppressed for decades – from liberation theology, through the rights of LGBT persons and women, to open criticism of imperialism – he did so without disrupting the very structure of the Church. His reforming activity was both profound and limited, loud in form but cautious in essence.

Precisely because he remained trapped between the prophet and the diplomat, between hope and compromise, the pontificate of Pope Francis shows up the limits of the change that is possible from within the institutional church. The changes he brought – however important and symbolically powerful – did not come from the Vatican itself, but were a response to pressure from below: to the cry of the people of Gaza, to the perseverance of women who have served the Church for decades without the right to vote, to the faith of LGBT Christians who refuse to renounce God because the Church renounced them.

The real power of liberation theology has never been in papal encyclicals, but in the hands of grassroots church communities, in rebel theologians who preach despite prohibitions and in workers who read the Bible not as a book of obedience, but as a book of resistance, and who organise, strike and build alternatives. If Francis has shown that the pope can speak against imperialism, it remains for the people to show that the Kingdom of God will not come from above but that it will be built from below, from the mud of the favelas, from the mines and fields, from the streets of occupied cities, from bodies that refuse to be silent. In this sense, his death does not close a chapter but opens a question: not what will happen to the Vatican, but what we will do with the hope that he has, albeit inadvertently, rekindled.

Translated and reposted from Kontranapad