Uncovering the hidden key to Pope Francis’s politics

Is the Pope a conservative? After the papal zingers which landed in Strasbourg last week, some — Nigel Farage, writing in the Catholic Herald, for instance — seem to think so. Europe was ‘now a grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant’, Pope Francis told a startled European Parliament, before saying that, to reconnect with ordinary people, the EU had to respect national values and traditions. ‘In order to progress towards the future we need the past, we need profound roots,’ he told the Council of Europe, a phrase redolent of Edmund Burke.

If some (including many Catholics) were surprised, it is understandable: most people still don’t know how Pope Francis thinks. After he made what some took to be easygoing remarks about sexuality, people have assumed that he is just another liberal in the western mould. This is a big mistake. Jorge Mario Bergoglio may be, as I argue in my new biography, a ‘great reformer’ in the tradition of St Francis of Assisi — a gospel radical who recalls the church to its dependence on Christ and the Holy Spirit rather than power and status.