Francis I, Evangelical Catholicism, and the Global Struggle over Sexual Ethics

Since becoming pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has shifted the Church’s emphasis from sexual morality to social justice. This shift led two American journals – the illustrated news magazine Time and America’s oldest LGBT publication, The Advocate to name him their Person of the Year for 2013. These accolades engendered a well-publicized debate among liberal pundits and in the LGBT community about the merits of praising the Pope for a change that many argued lacked substance; his inclusive, unofficial statements on sexual ethics resulted in no parallel change in Church doctrine. Yet, while secular commentators accused Time of prioritizing magazine sales over global impact and The Advocate of being misguided, grassroots Evangelical Catholics in the US and Europe launched a different attack. They accused the pope of heresy and of abandoning the dedicated cadre of Catholics who had answered John Paul II’s call for a new evangelism, in which promoting the Church’s sexual conservatism took precedence. In short, these most loyal Vatican supporters felt betrayed and some even spoke of schism.

Yet, the reaction of the conservative core in Europe and the United States does not figure prominently in popular or scholarly commentary on the pope’s shift from sexual ethics to social justice. Instead, these accounts focus almost exclusively on the reaction of liberal Catholics, who have distanced themselves from the Church: Will the pope’s action bring them back into the fold? Through an interdisciplinary and transatlantic analysis of Vatican II theology and the subsequent conservative retrenchment from which evangelical Catholicism emerged, this paper argues that the exclusive focus on liberals results in a distortion in the theological and political landscape of the modern Church and consequently underestimates the stakes of Pope Francis’ stylistic change.