In the days between the death of Pope Francis and the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, Bishop Robert Barron wrote an assessment of the late Pope. It appeared through Zenit on 4 May 2025, credited to First Things, and then, four days after the election, in First Things itself as “Francis in Full.” Near its end: “I considered him my spiritual father and sincerely mourn his passing.” By the standard of episcopal tributes, it is unusually candid.
What the essay names
On doctrine it does not flatter. It says that after Amoris Laetitia “a sort of ‘doctrinal anarchy’ was let loose,” and concludes: “If a primary responsibility of the pope is to maintain unity in doctrine and morals, it is hard to see how Pope Francis met that obligation throughout that synodal process and its aftermath.” It judges that “the pope at least gave the strong impression of religious indifferentism,” and calls the Pachamama episode “a self-created and completely unnecessary kerfuffle.”
On the way Francis spoke about conservative Catholics, which is Barron’s term, it is sharper still. “I believe it is fair to say,” he writes, “that his rhetorical venom was, more often than not, directed at conservative Catholics,” and he lists phrases he attributes to Francis, ending with the most famous, “backwardists.” Francis used that word more than once, and applied it expressly to self-described traditionalists. On the flight home from Canada in July 2022 he said of “many who call themselves ‘traditional’”: “No, they are not traditional. They are ‘indietristi’ people who look to the past, going backward, without roots.”
Barron records what such words did: “these withering criticisms often deeply discouraged orthodox Catholics, especially young priests and seminarians.” He calls the pattern “a curious fixation on, and demonization of, the more conservatively minded,” and he answers its premise with the observation that “the Church is flourishing precisely among its more conservative members,” citing the growth of the Church in Nigeria and the vitality of those parts of the Church in the West that “embrace a vibrant orthodoxy.”
The words, and not the acts
The essay does criticise some of Francis’s acts: his handling of the synods on the family, Fiducia Supplicans, the Pachamama episode. When it turns to the Catholics Francis’s words wounded, however, it places the whole injury in what he said and none of it in what he did. The word “Mass” appears once in its 3,300 words, in an anecdote about a Chrism Mass homily. Traditionis custodes does not appear, and neither does anything that followed it.
Between 2021 and 2023 the Holy See published the following.
- In Traditionis custodes (16 July 2021), Francis declared the liturgical books of Paul VI and John Paul II “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite” (art. 1). He directed that the older Mass be offered only in places the bishop designates, “not however in the parochial churches and without the erection of new personal parishes” (art. 3 §2), and required priests ordained after the document to submit a formal request, on which the bishop “shall consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization” (art. 4). The official Latin is stronger: licentiam rogabit, “shall ask permission.” The Congregation for Divine Worship later called it “not merely a consultative opinion, but a necessary authorisation.”
- In the letter that accompanied it, he wrote that the bishops’ responses to a questionnaire “reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”
- In the Responsa ad dubia published in December 2021, the Congregation ruled that bishops may not permit the pre-conciliar Pontificale Romanum, the bishops’ book of rites, among them confirmation and ordination, and may permit the older Rituale only in canonically erected personal parishes. It would allow a parish church to be used “only if it is established that it is impossible to use another church, oratory or chapel,” and such a Mass “should not be included in the parish Mass schedule.”
- In Desiderio desideravi (29 June 2022), he wrote: “For this reason we cannot go back to that ritual form which the Council fathers, cum Petro et sub Petro, felt the need to reform,” and “For this reason I wrote Traditionis custodes, so that the Church may lift up, in the variety of so many languages, one and the same prayer capable of expressing her unity” (n. 61).
- A rescript of February 2023 reserved “in a special way to the Apostolic See” two dispensations: the use of a parish church or the erection of a personal parish, and permission for priests ordained after Traditionis custodes to celebrate with the 1962 Missal. A bishop who had already granted either was obliged to inform the Dicastery.
Together these acts settle where the older Mass may be offered and which priests may offer it. A priest can bear being called a backwardist. Bearing it does not let him offer, in his parish church, the Mass his people ask for.
Francis gave reasons. He judged that the concession of his predecessors, “intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division,” and that “ever more plain in the words and attitudes of many is the close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true Church.’” He acted, he wrote, “in defense of the unity of the Body of Christ,” and he was “saddened by abuses in the celebration of the liturgy on all sides.” Whether the bishops’ responses to his questionnaire bore out that reading has been disputed, and more sharply since a report on them leaked in July 2025, a matter taken up in The Scoundrels’ Alibi.
Those reasons can be weighed and argued with. A candid account of how Francis treated these Catholics has to include them, together with the acts they justified. By tallying the Pope’s “very real accomplishments” without weighing those acts, the essay leaves unstated a grievance central to the Catholics attached to the older Mass, who were the plainest targets of the word “backwardists.”
A generosity that runs one way
The essay extends Francis a charitable reading where one is available. On his remarks about all religions as legitimate paths to God, Barron writes, “I want to be generous in my interpretation of his words,” and offers a reading drawn from the Council before stating his objection.
The young clergy are defended only on grounds of proportion. In October 2023, in an aside within a passage on clericalism, Francis told the Synod that one need only visit the ecclesiastical tailors of Rome “to see the scandal of young priests trying on cassocks and hats, or albs and lace robes.” Barron finds it “exceedingly strange” that the Pope raised the matter before such an audience, and grants that “there may indeed be some immature priests and students who are preoccupied with such things.” He does not ask what those priests were doing. Earlier, among the good effects of Francis’s simplicity, he had listed that “ostentatious clerical garb was out.”
A generous reading of those priests was available. Canon 284 provides: “Clerics are to wear suitable ecclesiastical garb according to the norms issued by the conference of bishops and according to legitimate local customs.” A young priest buying a cassock in Rome may be doing no more than that law asks of him, and the essay does not raise the possibility.
Charity owed in both directions
Benedict XVI wrote that “without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality.” A tribute to the dead is rightly merciful, and mercy toward one party cannot be paid for with silence about what was done to another. In its charity toward the Pope, the essay falls short in charity toward the Catholics he disparaged. They needed a bishop with Barron’s reach to speak for them at least as plainly as he spoke for Francis.
A defender will answer that Barron did not list Traditionis custodes among Francis’s faults because he does not judge it one. It is the law, and his own diocese has applied it. That may be so. The essay, however, records the discouragement of young priests and seminarians, and for the priests ordained since 2021, who must ask Rome’s leave to offer the older Mass, much of that discouragement was law. An account that names the discouragement owes the reader its cause, whatever one thinks of the law.
The judgment here is of the essay; judgment of persons the Church entrusts “to the justice and mercy of God” (Catechism, n. 1861). The faithful, “according to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess,” have “the right and even at times the duty” to make known their opinion “on matters which pertain to the good of the Church,” with “reverence toward their pastors” and “attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons” (canon 212 §3). The same canon binds them to follow what their pastors establish as rulers of the Church (§1).
In fairness
Bishop Barron wrote in the days between a pope’s death and a conclave, about a man he loved, and restraint in that setting is understandable.
In his own diocese he has kept the traditional Mass. In February 2023 he ended its celebration at the Basilica of St. Stanislaus in Winona, a parish church, and the diocese said that he has “no intention of eliminating the celebration of the Mass in this form,” and that, “in seeking to follow the Church’s laws more faithfully,” it was looking for places other than parish churches. The basilica’s own website now lists the Latin Mass “according to the 1962 Missal, with the permission of the Bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester,” at St. Mary of the Angels Chapel in Winona.
“Little monsters,” a phrase the essay attaches to young priests and seminarians, comes from a 2013 conversation with superiors of religious orders, in which Francis warned formators: “We must form their hearts. Otherwise we are creating little monsters.” It was a warning about formation.
What a full account would say
A full account would keep Barron’s candor about the words and add what the essay left out: that the Pope who called some Catholics backwardists also restricted by law the liturgy many of them love, placing their Mass outside their parish churches, and that for the priests ordained since 2021, and for the faithful whose Mass left their parish, the discouragement Barron recorded had causes beyond words.
Since the essay appeared, Rome has spoken of the matter in both registers. In March 2026 a letter sent on Pope Leo’s behalf by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin, told the bishops of France that “it is troubling that a painful wound continues to open within the Church concerning the celebration of the Mass, the very sacrament of unity.” It said that healing the wound requires “a new way of looking at one another,” and prayed that the Holy Spirit would inspire “concrete solutions enabling the generous inclusion of those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo, while respecting the orientations desired by the Second Vatican Council regarding the liturgy.”
The law has not changed. In a letter to Cardinal Roche for a conference on liturgical formation, dated 29 June and published 14 August 2026, Pope Leo recalled “the respect that all those called to prepare the celebration of the divine mysteries, and priests in particular, must show toward the rites promulgated by Pope Saint Paul VI and Pope Saint John Paul II.” In July, Cardinal Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, told The Tablet: “Pope Leo is not going to change Traditionis Custodes, and he’s not going back to Summorum Pontificum.”
“Francis in Full” is candid about the words and silent about the Mass. The Catholics most attached to the older Mass are still living with the law.
References
- Robert Barron, “Francis in Full,” First Things, June/July 2025 (online 12 May 2025); also published via Zenit, 4 May 2025, credited to First Things, as “The Pontificate of Francis: An Analysis by Bishop Robert Barron.”
- Francis, in-flight press conference returning from Canada, 29 July 2022 (Italian: “No, non sono tradizionali, sono ‘indietristi’”); see also his address to Italian professors of liturgy, 1 September 2022 (“the temptation today is backwardness disguised as tradition”).
- Francis, Traditionis custodes (16 July 2021), arts. 1, 3 §2, 4; Latin text.
- Francis, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Traditionis custodes (16 July 2021).
- Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Responsa ad dubia with explanatory notes (dated 4 December 2021, published 18 December 2021), dubia 1, 2 and 5.
- Francis, Desiderio desideravi (29 June 2022), n. 61.
- Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Rescriptum ex Audientia SS.mi (20 February 2023, published 21 February 2023).
- Francis, intervention at the 18th General Congregation of the Synod, 25 October 2023.
- Francis, conversation with the Union of Superiors General, 29 November 2013, published in La Civiltà Cattolica, January 2014; English as reported by Catholic News Service in America (3 January 2014).
- Code of Canon Law, cann. 212 §§1, 3; 284.
- Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate (29 June 2009), n. 3.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1861.
- Diocese of Winona-Rochester, statement on the Traditional Latin Mass (13 February 2023), as reported by CNA / Catholic World Report and Our Sunday Visitor (14 February 2023); Basilica of St. Stanislaus, Latin Mass.
- Pietro Parolin, letter on behalf of Pope Leo XIV to the Plenary Assembly of the Bishops of France, 18 March 2026 (French original); English translation by OSV News in America (26 March 2026).
- Leo XIV, Letter to Cardinal Arthur Roche (29 June 2026).
- Arthur Roche, interview with The Tablet (July 2026), as transcribed by OnePeterFive and Rorate Caeli (30 July 2026).