Pope Francis United a Fractured Church with Compassion

That transformation happened through the radical changes that the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John called together. It allowed worship to be in local languages and rooted in local culture, and gave space for radical theological interpretations, including Liberation Theology, which thrived under John’s successor, Pope Paul VI.

That led to a priest, the Jesuit Ernesto Cardenal, becoming a minister in the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s. By then, however, the winds of Liberation were being shut out. After the hugely hope-filled reign of Pope John Paul ended mysteriously in 33 days in 1978, conservatives took charge.

The new Pope, who took the name John Paul II, had been an anti-Communist supporter of Solidarity in Poland. He empowered cardinals Ratzinger and Arinze to suppress radical ideas, and squash the spirit of the second Vatican Council. Ratzinger even withdrew the license to teach theology of his own teacher, Hans Kung, after Kung’s book questioned papal infallibility.’

When he landed in Nicaragua, Pope John Paul II wagged a finger in Ernesto Cardenal’s face as the razor-sharp poet-painter, Columbia-graduate Jesuit priest—who was at the time the Sandinista’s culture minister—knelt before him. Predictably, Ratzinger’s reign as Benedict XVI was deeply conservative. Fifty years on, only memories of the liberating winds of the 1960s and 1970s remain.

So popular had his inclusiveness made him that President Herzog of Israel was among those who spoke of his “boundless compassion” soon after Francis’s death.