Thread by @CatholicSat

Our lookback at the 10 year Pontificate of Pope Francis. [Thread] #TenYearsPopeFrancis

A Pontificate with notable high points, the Covid Urbi et Orbi, the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and notable low points, the angrily accusing Chilean clerical abuse survivors of slander and Zanchetta.

On March 13 the Conclave elected a man with many idiosyncrasies, the foremost being the need to appear humble, from living in a guesthouse and not a palace, using a Fiat 500, the wheelchair instead of the wheeled platform used by his two immediate predecessors.

Pope Francis is the first man in living memory who has moulded the papacy by the sheer force of personality rather than his personality being moulded by the papacy. A return of the Pope as absolute monarch, governing by motu proprio, issuing a record number of these documents

He has been Pope at a time when the Church is in decline, demographically everywhere, increasingly irrelevant and ignored in a secular west. All this predates Francis by many decades, though his Pontificate has seen nothing to abate these trends.

The main focuses of this Pontificate, have been migrants, the climate crisis, the imminent danger of low birth rates and the demographic winter afflicting the West, fighting gender ideology, and a fixation with rigid backwardists.

On migrants and climate change, Pope Francis has been the moral leader the world looks to on these issues. The secular world, at least in the West, has been less enthused with his constant appeal to increase the birth rate and on the dangers and evil of gender ideology.

On Traditionalists, the Pope has shown himself to be overtly judgemental, cruel, and rigid. He has reignited the liturgical wars in the Roman Rite, shattering the peace brought by Benedict XVI. His rollback of his predecessors reforms on this matter betray an indietristi mindset.

His calls for mercy and have been welcomed by many, especially those who have a stereotype of Catholicism as an overtly judgemental religion.

His reforms have stalled. Amoris laetitia has been mostly ignored, not through deliberate malice on the part of those labelled his opponents. No, rather due to its inherent verbose nature, a hallmark of all the major magisterial documents in this Pontificate.

The major reform of this Pontificate, that of creating a Church as a constant permanent Synod can be best described thus far as chaotic. Delays, prolongations, abysmal participation rates among the people of God, hijacked by wealthy lobbies.

This chaos might be design, and has been exemplified by his crackdown on the use of the antecedent Liturgical Rites. Rushed, not thought through, blunt, inflicting paint, chaos, and pastoral confusion.

This is in sharp contrast by the welcoming arm he has shown to homosexuals, Protestants, and Muslims, where he has been most effective at trying to build bridges.

At the start of his Pontificate, the Pope wasn't helped when Austen Ivereigh fabricated a story in his biography of Francis, which called into question the validity of his election. Francis has been on the backfoot ever since, because a professional Catholic decided to embellish.

This Pontificate hasn't been helped by his army of online papal defenders, who aggressively, often cruelly, pursue men and women of goodwill who, God forbid, may disagree with the prudential judgements of the Pope.

Pope Francis, as all human beings, has his faults. He is certainly a human being, with a strong will, rigidly held vision for the future of the Church. He has tried his best to do what he believes is correct.

In sum, I think the first ten years of his Pontificate, will be remembered chiefly for consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

It will be seen whether any of his reforms will remain a century from now, as Francis has set the precedent of rolling back the reforms of his immediate predecessor.

The biggest disappointment of Pontificate has been the failure to confront clerical sexual abuse dispassionately. Zanchetta.