Increasingly, it is felt among the practising faithful that canonisations have little to do with the Church’s response to an organically emerging devotion to a particular deceased holy person, and everything to do with whatever consolidates the dominant ecclesiastical regime, helping to impose and enforce its ideological commitments.
It seems a decision has been made among many outlets of the Catholic commentariat to remain, for the time being, uncritical of the new pope, Leo XIV. Undoubtedly, this approach is the right one, as everyone should proceed in good will, hoping that with Prevost’s election will come a new chapter after the unhappy decade or so of Francis’s pontifical reign. But, troublingly, for the third time since his pontificate began only a short while ago, Pope Leo XIV has declared that the soul of Pope Francis is in Heaven. Most recently, Pope Leo asserted this to be the case via an official Pontifex ‘tweet’ on the social media platform X, which stated that Francis had “returned to the Father’s house. He accompanies us and prays for the Church from Heaven.”
But this eccentric habit of declaring, outside any official canonisation process, that, as it were, no such process is needed, is deeply problematic. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the faithful of the Catholic Church are being prepared for this highly controversial figure (who, as one journalist friend put it to me, “lingered over the Church for twelve years as if he were an enormous dark cloud”) to be canonised soon, as if it were inevitable and unavoidable.
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There are several very serious problems with Leo repeatedly stating that Francis is in Heaven. For one, such statements cause the faithful to doubt the gravity of Francis’s public sins. These sins are not inconsiderable, given that they include idol-worship (Pachamama), the suppression of an ancient apostolic rite of the Church, syncretism and religious relativism, the protection and promotion of predators and deviants, the abuse of the Church’s law, the teaching of heresy, etc.
Who knows if Francis was a heretic, but it’s clear that he was heretical. The distinction being that the former would have required him to be publicly accused of heresy and for him in response to have held obstinately to his heresies. Given that he customarily refused to meet with those who raised objections to his teaching or manner of governing, we were not given the opportunity to witness any obstinate attachment to heresy. But in any case, the record is not good. If such sins can be committed and the perpetrator still immediately enjoys the beatific vision upon his death, then the message to the faithful is clear: either these sins were not even as grave as our ancient faith would have led us to believe, or they are not sins at all.
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