Pope Francis’ Greatest Achievement Was Emphasizing Mercy

When they gather in Rome to consider Pope Francis’ successor, the world’s cardinals will sift his legacy, asking which of the key priorities of his pontificate should be defended and built on, or whether a new emphasis is needed. Much of the media coverage will portray the decision as a contest between competing visions: one, “liberal,” reforming, modernizing and compassionate; the other “conservative,” seeking to preserve tradition, teach with clarity, and defend law and morality. Yet most cardinals do not look through that lens, and nor did Francis. They do not see truth and mercy as rivals, that more of one vision means less of the other, but that truth and mercy must be held together, as a Gospel imperative. Francis’ legacy was his insistence on this, and the way he showed how the Church can have a radical emphasis on mercy. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

He is not the first Pope to seek to recover the place of God’s mercy in the Church’s proclamation. All of the past three Popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis—were convinced that the Church has too often emphasized the proclamation of truth and doctrine without at the same time showing that mercy is the way that God interacts with us. Benedict XVI insisted that the recovery of mercy was the great line of continuity between his and his predecessor’s pontificates and that of Francis. 

What truly made Francis different from his predecessors was the bold, radical way he sought to put mercy—“God’s style”, he called it—at the heart of all the Church teaches and does, and the way he modeled that conversion in his exercise of the papal ministry. There was an urgency in this reform. Long before being made Pope, Francis understood that we are living through what he called a “change of era,” in which faith is no longer primarily inherited through law, culture, and tribal identity, but is the fruit of an encounter with mercy, which opens the door to faith. This is the “new” way in which the Church evangelizes, but it is only new compared to the past centuries. In the apostolic age, the first millennium of Christianity, when the Church did not yet have the backing of law and culture and strong institutionsChristianity spread rapidly across the ancient world. Francis, like many of the Catholic thinkers of his time, saw we were returning to such an age. In one book of the 1960s that influenced him, Power and Poverty in the Church, Yves Congar  foresaw a return to a “pre-Constantinian situation in a pagan world,” and said it would require the Church to embrace “wholly evangelical ways of exercising authority in the new world in which God calls us to serve him.” In his humility, directness, and closeness, Francis has taught this kind of authority better than anyone. And he did so by forefronting mercy. 

When Americans hear the word “mercy” they often think of an exemption from the application of the law—an act of compassion. They may even think of mercy as “being soft”—and  suspect that too many such exemptions undermine the law. But for the Church, mercy is closer to the Latin word misericordia: it is to have a heart for those who suffer. When Francis early on spoke of the Church as a battlefield hospital, this is what he meant: a place of salvation and healing that begins with attentiveness to the individual, an attention that honors the dignity of each of us, an attention that we do not deserve or merit by our actions, but which flows from God’s love for his creatures.True mercy does not mean a downgrading of morality or law. It means that morality and law are not enough. Jesus came not to announce a new code of righteousness, but to show a new way of being, one that reflects God’s way of acting with us.  

The Church’s task is no longer these days that of the lawmaker, laying down is right and good. Today’s task is to help people to live fruitfully and well, by depending on God’s grace as well as moral codes. “We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families, strengthening the marriage bond and giving meaning to marital life,” Francis notes in Amoris Laetitia, his 2016 document on the family. He saw that it was no longer enough to say marriage is for life; but rather that in a culture where transitory relationships and divorce are the norm, the Church must support people to marry for life. Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) is about equipping the Church to do just that. The Church is called “to form consciences, not to replace them,” said Francis.

From his election as Pope in 2013, Francis sought to reform by helping the Church develop its “heart for the poor,” its capacity for listening and accompanying, for sensing need and responding. In Latin America, they called this “pastoral and missionary conversion.” Francis dedicated a special jubilee to teaching the mindset—he labeled 2016 “the Year of Mercy”—and in the same year Amoris Laetitia showed how to put mercy into practice when dealing with marriage and divorce. Francis preached that you can both uphold the law of Catholic teachings and give people the space to grow in their capacity to live them. But he gave his best single insight into the conversion towards the end of his pontificate, in October 2024, when he released a document called Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”) on the devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus. 

In this document, Francis showed that the heart in the biblical and Christian tradition is not merely the place of feeling and emotion, but the truest and deepest center of us, beyond roles and projections. The heart, according to Francis, is the center from which we open out to bond with God, with others, and with creation. The heart is where we ponder and discern, learning to hear God’s voice above the din of the world. Dilexit Nos asked us to “return to the heart” and that’s as good a summary of Francis’ pontificate as it gets. 

Not only in Dilexit but in his preaching Francis constantly offered Jesus’s own way of interacting with others as the model of God’s style: seeking people out, asking what he can do for them, staying close to them, never hectoring but helping them to grow and change. It is a style that he sought to instil in his reform of the Vatican bureaucracy in Rome. Much deeper than a structural makeover and renewal of personnel—although it involved these too—it was a patient, radical reform of culture and of mindset. 

In 2022, Francis approved a new constitution for the Vatican, a document that spelled out its culture, structure, and practices. “Praedicate Evangelium” (‘Preach the Gospel’) made clear that the power handed to the Church was given not to exact service, but to serve. It was published on the Feast of St Joseph, exactly nine years after the first Mass celebrated by the new Pope, in which he spoke of true power as that which protects both creation and creatures. This was the power that Francis wanted the Church to embrace: a gentle, holy power, one that cooperates with divine power, and therefore the real power in this world, which alone is capable of creating a new future. 

You can see the fruits of his Rome reform not just in the decline of the administrative and financial scandals that were common under Benedict XVI, but in the delighted surprise of bishops who remember what it was like visiting the Vatican back then. Where once they were given marching orders or scolded by imperious curial officials, today they have a fraternal dialogue with the dicasteries. Praedicate says clearly that the Curia “does not place itself between the Pope and the bishops, but is at the full service of both.” It is a reform of the very idea of power and authority: Vatican documents, vastly reduced in number, are these days the fruit of painstaking and lengthy consultations. Before Francis, anonymous denunciations and heresy trials were painfully common. But this new constitution seeks to ensure that theologians are no longer censored and ensure that Vatican officials look bishops in the eye, listen to them, and ask how they can help. 

Though the Francis reform has been popular with bishops and cardinals, some have claimed that with regards to moral questions Francis placed too much stress on mercy, too much focus on individual circumstances, and in the process risked diluting the truth of the Church’s doctrine. Not only African cardinals were critical of a document in December 2023 put out by Francis’ close collaborator, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, declaring that, while the Church could not bless the relationships of same-sex couples, it was fine for those in them to be blessed, if they asked for it. As with Amoris Laetitia, which Fernández also helped author, Fiducia Supplicans upheld church doctrine on sexuality and marriage. But many bishops said the distinction was too subtle, too easily misinterpreted, too prone to be exploited by the liberal forces at the Church’s gates. It is a criticism that reflects the persistent fear of a law-and-order mindset that is seduced by the notion of imposing moral norms through the law, in alliances with national-populist movements, for example. The assumption is that the Church should not just witness to the truth of its beliefs, making a case for them, but seek political or power alliances to impose them. For instance, many U.S. bishops have often tried to do this by claiming that outlawing abortion was the “pre-eminent” issue for Catholics in elections. But Francis showed that this approach distorts the Gospel and reduces its ethical breadth—and it places more trust in the law and lawmakers, rather than in the power of grace.

Francis has helped to recover a longer tradition in the Church, well expressed by St Thomas Aquinas, that the law is necessary but not sufficient: and that in applying the law we need a Jesus-like attentiveness to individuals. In one of his great homilies in Colombia in 2017, Francis described how Jesus took his followers out to the lepers and the sinners and the paralytics, so that they would not rest in the security of precepts and prohibitions but would be forced to ask the uncomfortable question: “What would God like us to do?” The genius of Amoris and Fiducia and Francis’ whole approach to moral and ethical questions was to make clear the real basis of the unity of a Church: it is not that all agree, or all are good; rather, that all of us are sinners, but all are capable of being transformed by God’s grace. Leave Church teaching, then, where it is; but do not use it to judge or despise others. Instead, make room for all in the Church and let each find her own way forward with the help of the battlefield-hospital team.

“Each person encounters God in his or her own way, within the Church, and the Church is mother and guide (for) each person along his or her own way,” Francis told journalists on the return flight from Portugal. He became the first Pope to receive a transsexual man in the Vatican, telling him he was a son of the Church loved by God, and he personally supported a group of trans women in a community outside Rome. Yet he has regularly criticized gender ideology as a threat to human dignity in its denial of sexual difference and the male-female polarity. Challenged about his response to the trans man, Diego Neria, Francis acknowledged the reality of gender dysphoria, and appeared to accept that therapy may be needed. “Hormonal imbalances create a lot of problems,” he said. “We have to take each case, and welcome him, walk with him, study him, discern and integrate him. That is what Jesus would do today.”

In his radical integration of the lens of mercy into the Church, Francis has made clear it is no longer enough to stay in the abstract, at the level of ideals and generalities. He asks us to discern realities, holding the wisdom and insights of the Church in fruitful tension with concrete individual stories and experiences; and in that tension to and open ourselves, prayerfully, to ask what God asks of us. For this we need a discerning heart, capable of seeing suffering and not flinching from it, able to not just lament and condemn but also to discern and reform. That was the extraordinary message he gave us in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, when from a dark, deserted St Peter’s Square he addressed a world in fear, assuring us that there God was with us, calling us not to be not just broken but broken open, and so changed. The temptation was always to recoil back into ourselves, to depend on our own resources, to try to cling to what we feared to lose rather than open ourselves to what God sought to give us. 

After Covid, Francis invited the world’s faithful to open themselves in this way, to ask how, now, the Church needs to change in order to undertake its mission. The three-year “synod on synodality” which concluded in October 2024, was arguably Francis’ most significant reform. It was the largest global listening exercise ever undertaken, and through its many stages—local, national, continental and universal—produced a blueprint for a broad transformation of the culture of the Church. Synodality refers to the habit of gathering, listening, discerning and deciding, a way of operating that involves all the faithful in the life and mission of the Church. It takes for granted that all of the baptized—Pope, cardinals, bishops, clergy, religious, lay men and women—are equal in dignity and all called to take part in the life and mission of the Church. It holds that the Spirit has been poured out on us all, and by getting together to listen deeply to each other we discover what the Spirit is saying to the Church.

Like all Francis’ reforms, synodality involves rescuing a dimension of the Church that it has lost, and reinvigorating it for our time. It will be his greatest legacy: a school of conversion to “God’s style” of relating, of serving, of developing the heart. Many of the cardinals who will elect Francis’ successor have been involved in the synod process, and have seen the transformations. They have seen how, over the past 12 years, the Church has begun to relate to humanity in a whole new way—a way that looks much more like the Gospel. Whatever else they think the next Pope needs to do, they will believe that implementing synodality will be his key task—not just for a Church entering a new era, but to show an increasingly polarized and divided world that another way of relating to each other is possible.