On March 13, 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected by the College of Cardinals to succeed Jozef Ratzinger as pope.

Pope Francis was the third non-Italian, after Karol Wotyla of Poland and the aforementioned Ratzinger, to lead the church in over 500 years. There was a great deal of celebration and expectation at his elevation to the papacy, including from this columnist.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon didn’t last very long.

Fairly early into his papacy, Francis began to do and say things that sent up trigger warnings to those of us in the American church who didn’t like his “who am I to judge” stance. We thought that if he, the leader of the church, wasn’t prepared to make judgments on sin and virtue, good and evil, who was?

We were accused of being mummified traditionalists who didn’t understand the needs of an evolving society.

That usually means two things: the church needs to lighten up on the sexual issues and start hiring women for the white (as in Roman) collar jobs.

And Francis began to give the progressives in the church reason to think he was one of them. In recent years, he has abandoned the nuance of his earlier comments and launched........

© Yuma Sun