Schweizer notes that a startling 80 percent of the cardinals who will choose the next pope were appointed by Francis himself. The worldwide breakdown of where those cardinals come from has changed, too.
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Europe has 40%, down from 51% in 2013.
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North America accounts for 10%, down from 12%.
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Asia-Pacific region accounts for 18% of voting-age cardinals, up from 10% in 2013.
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Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 12% of cardinals, up from 8%.
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The Latin America-Caribbean region has 18%, up from 17%.
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The Middle East-North Africa region has 3%, up from 2%.
When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elevated as Pope Francis in 2013, his history as a left-leaning bishop who was sympathetic to the regime of Marxist Juan Perón and his connections to what is known in the church as “liberation theology” marked a clear directional change from his predecessor, the conservative Pope Benedict XVI.
“Pope Francis’s mentors preached liberation theology, which is a sort of merger of Marxist views of world with Catholic teaching,” Schweizer says.
Pope Francis was a distinctly political pope. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election dominated by immigration issues, Francis paid a friendly visit to Cuba before holding a “trans-border mass” in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city that straddles the border with El Paso, Texas. There, the pope essentially called for an open border into the U.S., saying, “Let us together ask our God for the gift of conversion, the gift of tears, let us ask him to give us open hearts like the Ninevites, open to his call heard in the suffering faces of countless men and women. No more death! No more exploitation!”
Eggers notes in the show that Vatican City is itself notable for its walls, and the church has recently taken steps to up the penalties for those who sneak into Vatican land.
During Francis’s papacy, financial scandals within the church were partially uncovered. An investigation into Vatican finances that began in 2015 led to the firing of the man brought in to oversee it, Libero Milone, who later sued the Vatican for damages, claiming he was fired after discovering financial irregularities. The cardinal who fired him, Angelo Becciu, was himself later fired in 2020 over charges including corruption and embezzlement related to the purchase of a building in London.
Schweizer notes that in 2016 there were allegations that a Catholic charity called Peter’s Purse transferred $1 million into the political campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Eggers points out that after Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he met with and even received communion from Pope Francis, despite Biden’s being at odds with church teaching on the issues of same-sex marriage and most especially, abortion.
Biden would rescind all of the first Trump administration’s executive orders regarding the border and unleash a flood of illegal immigrants into the U.S. during his term, estimated between 8 million and as many as 13 million people. Of the charitable groups that would receive grants from the federal government to help re-settle these immigrants, one of the largest was Catholic Charities. Its Dallas chapter went from receiving $43 million in 2021 to $140 million in 2022 and $290 million in 2023 under the Biden administration. Similar increases were given to other chapters in the border region, all of which were later ended by the DOGE reforms of the second Trump administration.
Eggers says, “when you have an alignment between the pope and the president, the money will flow.”
The question is whether this kind of support for unchecked immigration will continue under the next pope, or will the church move in a more conservative direction?
Schweizer notes that in the U.S. there is some growth in Catholic church attendance and support, but it is mainly going to more traditional Catholic congregations that are less politically active who have felt out of step with Francis’s liberal agenda.
Eggers notes that those American politicians who have embraced the Catholic Church’s political agenda are often the same ones same ones who lecture others about the importance of church-state separation.
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