A year has passed since the morning of 21 April 2025, when Cardinal Farrell announced to the world the death of Pope Francis. Twelve years had passed since that balcony on a rainy March afternoon, since the “buonasera” that went round the world, since the request for a blessing turned on its head, the people blessing the Pope before the Pope blessed the people. Twelve years which the official hagiography, already in full and predictable bloom, is now turning into epic.
The task of Catholic journalism, however, is not to write the lives of saints before their time. It is to look the Church in the face as she is, to listen to her laboured breathing, to register her wounds. And it is precisely in the name of that task - to which Silere non possum has remained faithful in years when keeping silent was by far more convenient than speaking - that, one year after the Holy Father Francis returned to the Father’s house, it is necessary to state clearly what rhetoric leaves unsaid: that pontificate polarised the Church as few others in recent history have done, it produced a fracture which the pontificate of Leo XIV is now trying, with Augustinian patience, to mend, and above all - this is the heart of the matter - it offered the world an image of itself that did not always correspond to the substance.
The manufacture of gestures
In The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa, there is a line that has become a commonplace without ever being exhausted: if everything is to stay as it is, everything must change. No formula better describes the twelve years of Francis. The Pontiff who wanted “a poor Church for the poor” lived in Santa Marta rather than in the Apostolic Palace: a choice presented as a sign of humility, yet within a few years it had become the instrument of a personal and opaque form of government, removed from the institutional filters which the Curia, for better or worse, had guaranteed for centuries. The door of Santa Marta opened to whom the Pope wished, and closed to whom he did not wish: not the promised transparency, but a new - and less controllable - form of court. Not to mention the cost.
Evangelii gaudium called for a Church that was “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets”. Yet in the twelve years that followed, it was above all priests, religious and bishops who found themselves bruised and dirty: not because they had been walking, but because they had been overwhelmed by a canon law turned - as Silere non possum has documented meticulously over these years - into a punitive instrument, altered through repeated motu proprio which layered up a vexatious, complicated and often contradictory legal order. There were those, in the lecture halls of the pontifical universities, who recalled an old maxim: those who truly know a subject can explain it simply; those who complicate it betray that they do not know it. Not to mention Vatican law. The four secret rescripts signed between 2019 and 2020 - those which brought to light the existence of a special judicial regime inside Vatican City State - remain the symbol of a season in which the principle of legality was bent to the will of the monarch. And the media system, which on this day celebrates its own god, had closed ranks in exchange for a few favours. The Pope acted like a despot of the sort journalists denounce in eastern republics, but in the Vatican they had become more papal than the Pope.
Hypocrisy as a system
Here it is necessary to pronounce the word that so irritates the “professionals of disinformation”: hypocrisy. Bernanos, in The Diary of a Country Priest, observed that injustice done in the name of the Church wounds twice over: the victim, and the faith of the one who witnesses it. Under the pontificate of Francis, the distance between the official discourse and actual practice at times became abyssal.
Mercy was preached, and priests were suspended a divinis even before the substance of the accusations had been verified, simply in order to feed the media with a guilty party to exhibit. Synodality was celebrated, and those who dared to raise legitimate questions about incomprehensible texts such as In Ecclesiarum Communione were dispatched with a one-way ticket. Poverty was preached, and enormous sums were spent on the whims of the new image: wardrobes redone in order to appear more humble, the abandonment of the Apostolic Palace in favour of a Santa Marta refurbished to measure, the Palace of Castel Gandolfo abandoned and then reopened as a museum attraction; and all the while the Dicastery for Communication was allowed to turn the face of the Pontiff into merchandise. The welcome of those who had gone astray and were “far away” was celebrated, and yet those who were “near” were dealt with mercilessly through commissariamenti and suspensions that bore the marks of a harshness that had nothing paternal about it. Clericalism was thundered against, and personal friends such as Marko Ivan Rupnik were protected, while the alleged victims waited for justice. There was talk of “opening up to women”, and behind closed doors it was said that “gossip is women’s stuff”, only then to stigmatise - with a lexical choice that speaks for itself - the “frociaggine” in seminaries. A veritable worm at the heart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
When Manzoni, in chapter twenty-two of The Betrothed, sketches the figure of Federigo Borromeo, he devotes memorable pages to the distinction between charity that seeks the gaze of men and charity that hides itself away. In the twelve years of the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, there was plenty of noise. The real good, the silent good of frontier parish priests, of cloistered monasteries, of bishops who did not seek out microphones, that good was often left alone, and at times punished.
The liturgy as a battlefield
With Traditionis custodes, in 2021, the Jesuit Pope who had promised not to leave anyone behind wrote a letter that left a great many behind: those faithful who found in Holy Mass celebrated according to the Vetus Ordo not a reactionary nostalgia but a way into the mystery. The gesture, justified as a defence of unity, produced the opposite: divided dioceses, embarrassed bishops, scattered communities, boys and girls pushed - these really were - towards extreme positions from which authentic pastoral care ought to have kept them away. The present writer recalls the page in Newman, in Apologia pro vita sua, in which the English writer confesses that faith takes root when intellect and affection find their home together. One may debate the Vetus Ordo endlessly; one cannot pretend that thousands of faithful did not feel, in that season, not accompanied but expelled.
A funeral tells more than a pontificate
There is an image that returns today, and which captures better than a thousand analyses the arc of these years: the very same hack journalists who for a decade covered Francis and his entourage - offering the public an image of the Pontiff that did not exist, and thereby allowing priests, religious and bishops to be harmed with impunity - are today churning out whimpering posts, emotional obituaries, and heartrending memories. It is the price of having spent twelve years as courtiers rather than reporters. They are not mourning the Pope; they are mourning Jorge Mario Bergoglio and everything he allowed them to do. In short, some in these hours are calling him “Father”, but those doing so are precisely those “children” who love to feed on the body of the “Father”. And not a little.
And one cannot fail to recall, on this very anniversary, the treatment Francis reserved for his predecessor. When Benedict XVI died, in December 2022, it was Bergoglio himself who raised hell to ensure that the funeral was not celebrated “as if he were a Pope”. The rite was cut back, the Pontiff was taken by night, like a thief, into the Basilica on a minibus, the funeral liturgy pared down, the protocol rewritten simply to mark a difference nobody had asked for. And when Francis went up to the altar for the homily, the name Joseph Ratzinger was spoken only once. Once. A brevity that was not sobriety: it was deliberate. And then that desire to leave the square even before the coffin had been taken away. Something deeply shocking.
Today, one year on, those same journalists who welcomed that unusual protocol with enthusiasm have suddenly discovered themselves to be scrupulous guardians of Francis’s memory. Everything about that pontificate must be remembered: the gestures, the words, even the silences. Nothing of the pontificate that preceded it was to be remembered.
The two rogitos
Nothing, perhaps, says more about a pontificate than the funeral rogito that accompanies it to the tomb. Silere non possum had proposed the exercise that no mainstream commentator had the courage to undertake: setting the rogito of Benedict XVI alongside that of Francis. The first opens and closes with God: the name of the Lord marks the first line, permeates the text, seals the last. Every gesture of the Ratzinger pontificate - including the renunciation - is placed within a theological, almost ascetical perspective: the mystery of faith that precedes and sustains the work of man. The rogito of Francis, by contrast, concentrates on the human and social profile: his origins, his Jesuit formation, his commitment to peace, to the poor, to migrants, to the environment. The apostolic journeys, the magisterial documents, the reforms of the Curia are all mentioned. But of faith, of theology, of the sacredness of the Petrine ministry, almost nothing. The reference to Jesus Christ appears only once, and almost in passing, in the name of the Society to which Bergoglio belonged - that Society whose members, as the chronicle of these years has amply shown, often struggle even to remember who its Founder is. A pontificate is also recognised by what it omits. And omitting God from the document that accompanies a Pope to burial is not a distraction: it says a great deal.
The division that remains
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky entrusts to the starets Zosima a truth: each person is responsible for everything before everyone. The pontificate of Francis was celebrated as the pontificate of closeness; for many of the faithful, it was the pontificate of distance. Mothers and fathers bewildered by doctrinal changes announced and then denied, priests worn down by legislation that changed every week, bishops removed by telephone on a Friday evening, cardinals treated as subjects, theologians silenced because they recalled words of the Council that some no longer wished to hear.
The legacy and the task
Don Camillo, in the pages of Guareschi, spoke with the Christ of the crucifix in his presbytery, and Christ answered him with a patience that is akin to true mercy. That mercy does not discount the truth; it demands it, indeed, as a condition. It is the mercy that Leo XIV is now trying - with that Augustinian sobriety which is by no means set in opposition to the previous pontificate - to restore to the Church: bringing the Curia back to institutional normality, retieing threads that had been cut, listening to cardinals who for twelve years had learned to keep silent not out of virtue but out of fear.
The task of those who practise journalism, at this moment, is neither to celebrate nor to demolish. It is to remember. To remember the specific cases, the names of the priests unjustly suspended, the victims of abuse left outside the door, the opaque documents, the secret rescripts, the off-microphone remarks that betrayed a temperament. To remember because - as Paul VI wrote in Ecclesiam suam, taking up an intuition that runs through the whole patristic tradition - the Church is purified only in the truth. One year on, the dust of the funeral has settled. The white roses on the tomb in Santa Maria Maggiore will continue to be brought by the faithful, and rightly so: that tomb holds a baptised man, a priest, a Bishop of Rome. But the history of the Church is not written on flower petals. It is written on the marble of truth, even when that marble is cold.
Silere non possum: I cannot keep silent. Today those three words continue to bind us, first of all in the face of power within the Church. Because love for the Pope - for every Pope - is measured by the ability not to turn him into an idol. And because the Truth, who is a Person, has no need of our adulation. It asks only for our fidelity.
Fr.L.E.
Silere non possum