ROME—Not long after Pope Francis took office in March 2013, he ran into a wall. But it wasn’t the ancient Roman brickwork built around Vatican City. It was stronger. And it came from deep within the very church he was elected to lead. Every time he tried to introduce reforms, the wall was there. His foes were so strong he recently equated reforming the Catholic Church with “cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush.”
Still, Francis persevered, relying on his immediate popularity and innate charm, and soon the outside world began to look at the Catholic Church in a new, positive light under his guidance. Suddenly, it was cool to be Catholic.
But the traditional conservatives within the church didn’t want to be cool, and while the new pope was hardly progressive by secular standards (he is still Catholic, after all), they preferred the cold church, the one that protected them from the outside world behind layers of immovable doctrine.
While Francis reached far into the margins to minister to the […]
