POLITICS: FRANCIS FILES #1: How a Formation Became a Pontificate – USSA News

Fr Adam Purdy of the Society of St Pius X is currently teaching a series of adult catechism classes on The Legacy of Pope Francis, a document produced by the Society’s General House. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be drawing up several reflections that connect these lessons to my ongoing work for The Hayride and RVIVR–similar to my recent work on Pius X’s Pascendi. My plan is to stay more neutral, more educational than rhetorical… but if you know my work, you know how that usually goes. And you know why I’m writing all of this at all.

Here is the full document, ‘The Legacy of Pope Francis.’

And here is the ‘Alta Vendita‘, which may help this entire project snap into focus.

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When Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto the balcony in 2013 and introduced himself as the pope “from the ends of the earth,” it struck many as modest and charming. But it also marked a genuine ecclesiastical–indeed civilizational–rupture. For the first time in centuries, the See of Peter was handed not to a son of Europe, heir to its philosophical precision and theological clarity, but to a man formed almost entirely outside that world. Biography does not dictate destiny. But it prepares the soil.

In this case, it prepared the perfect soil for a Modernist bloom.

A pope from the “periphery” brings the periphery to the papacy.

Bergoglio’s early life already contained the seeds of his later worldview. The son of Italian immigrants, he learned to read history not through Christendom’s long memory but through the wounds, hopes, and anxieties of uprooted families. Migration was not, for him, something to be ordered; it was something to be welcomed. Hospitality became less a virtue requiring prudence and more a moral imperative requiring no discernment at all. Europe, in his eyes, was tired, self-protective, spiritually paralyzed. The dynamism he admired lived elsewhere.

Jorge Bergoglio was deeply marked by his family history. As the child of immigrants, he showed a special sensitivity to the issue of migration throughout his life: he regarded it as a source of enrichment for the host countries and insisted on the duty of unconditional hospitality. This personal experience likewise nourished a certain critical distance towards Europe, which he perceived as weary, aged, and at times closed in upon itself.

We see here the roots of Francis’s incessant support for what many Americans experience as the illegal invasion of their own country. Leo XIV has continued the same. These are not positions grounded in Scripture or Tradition, but in personal sensitivities and the “Immanence” Pius X warned against in Pascendi.

Bergoglio’s “elsewhere” was Argentina. There he matured within the Society of Jesus during a period of deep national turmoil. Everything Pius X warned about was on full display: Liberation theology surged; Marxist readings of Scripture circulated in seminaries; political violence shaped daily life. Bergoglio resisted the explicitly revolutionary forms of the movement, yet he gravitated toward its gentler cousin, a more palatable offshoot, the theology of the people–a framework that treated culture, especially the culture of the poor, as a kind of pre-theological revelation.

I cannot help but think of the “He Gets Us” commercials as I write.

When culture–not Christ–becomes revelation, doctrine becomes ornate decoration from a banal past.

“Old Europe.”

And what follows when popular culture becomes a theological position?

You open the door for the people not only as recipients of the Gospel but as its interpreters.

You open the door for indigenous myths to become “waiting stones” of the faith.

You open the door for collective intuition to outrank doctrinal clarity.

You open the door to moral relativism.

Where everyone has their truth.

In other words, you relocate the center of theological authority from Jesus Christ and the apostolic deposit to the lived experience of communities–precisely the epistemic shift that Modernism has always required and the very thing popes once warned about relentlessly.

Experience becomes the new magisterium.

Sentiment becomes the new sacraments.

Everyone becomes their own pope.

Thus Francis’s worldview gave rise to a predictable pastoral program:

– To embrace popular religiosity, not as a superstition to be corrected, but as an authentic expression of faith, which must be accompanied and reflected upon theologically.

– To root the Gospel, through inculturation, in local traditions, respecting their richness and originality.

– To give a place to the peripheries, not only geographical but also existential, in order to discern the action of the Spirit.

This is why his later emphases–synodality, accompaniment, inculturation, the “holy faithful people of God”–can be read as logical conclusions rather than outright innovations, at least from a neutral, charitable vantage point. Traditional Catholics, of course, to varying degrees, see something far different. His admiration for German philosopher Rodolfo Kusch–European pedigree is fine when it serves the program–further nourished the trajectory. Kusch viewed “the people” not as a rational category but as a mythic one.

And where myth rules, dogma retreats.

A pope who sees the people as mythic, innocent, and Spirit-bearing will naturally resist boundaries, distinctions, and doctrinal guardrails.

He will resist Tradition.

Which may explain why Modernists found in him not merely an ally but a culmination.

Which may explain why a certain secret society praised him so directly after his death.

Because the soil had been tilled long before 2013.

The seeds had already been planted.

Perhaps even before his birth, as Pius X and others had warned.

Old Europe had already been left behind.

And the ends of the earth had already become the center.

This is why the invasion of America is seen through a different lens by some.

This is what shaped Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

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