Part of the attraction of Pope Francis, even to professional literal communists online, comes from negative space. He was all the more impressive because of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a corrupt power-hungry operator like the Borgia and Medici popes, nor was he a stern conservative patriarch like Pope Pius IX.  But this was also part of the problem, one that cuts through to the heart of the Church and its very survival in the West at least, where its attendances and number of churches are in general decline. This was the Pope as a progressively tinged statesman, and the Church a kind of spiritualized NGO. There’s nothing that indicates an organization in peril or doubt more than when it feels the need to justify its existence. It did help that Pope Francis followed Pope Benedict XVI who, in public image terms, had the bedside manner of Darth Sidious and was seen as a heavyweight conservative theologian upholding tradition against the evils of modernity.

By contrast, Pope Francis represented a break from the past and a swing to the Left. He named himself after St Francis of Assisi, champion of the poor and patron saint of animals and adopted the motto Miserando Atque Eligendo meaning “Lowly but Chosen”. Clad in white, Pope Francis rejected the regal pomp Popes had long adopted, placing themselves aristocratically above their flock. This, along with his preferred acts of humility — the kissing of feet, the embracing of the marginalized, advocacy for those brutalized by poverty and war, begging on his knees for peace — resonated with recovering Catholics like myself who had come, via the Church’s many sins and cover-ups, to see it not as something noble and exalted, and more akin to the hellish screaming popes of Francis Bacon.

All this symbolism was key to Pope Francis’s image as a radical. He certainly appeared to be a reformer. He was a vocal critic of the worst excesses of neoliberalism, and materialism generally. He advocated continually for the developing world, the poor, migrants, prisoners and interfaith dialogue. He highlighted the brutalities inflicted upon children, and civilians and advocated for peace at times and places against the mainstream narrative. He even stated, during a hastily backtracked interview, that “a hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists”. At every juncture, he was met with opposition from the Church’s more reactionary elements.

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The actual meaningful impact he made upon the Church itself, structurally or theologically, is questionable. This is partly due to the intransigent Byzantine bureaucracy within the Vatican. But also a large part of it is because, beyond symbolism, Pope Francis was not the radical pope he is often touted as. On the majority of topics, he ultimately toed the line with established Church orthodoxy. They were often presented with the gloss of “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there was still little doubt sin was involved. Take the issue of contraception. The Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has been ruinous, even callous, especially in AIDS-stricken parts of the developing world. Pope Francis changed little.

The closest predecessor to Pope Francis, in spirit, was the “Good Pope” (“Il Papa Buono”) John XXIII. They shared a similar temperament, charismatic, modest, with an affable ease with the public and an intellectual openness. Yet their differences are illustrative. The “Good Pope” set off major liberalizing changes in the church by calling the Second Vatican Council. He had previously wielded his influence and the apparatus at his disposal as nuncio to help save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. These were remarkable actions at an abyssal time, and comparisons may be partly unfair. Pope Francis’s efforts to highlight the cruelties and injustices inflicted in today’s world are undoubtedly noble. Whether they represent the maximum use of the Vatican’s diplomatic and economic power is more debatable. Man shall not live on symbolism alone. The world has little need of a patron saint for the increasingly grim and ineffectual spectacle of “raising awareness”.

Much was initially made of his being the first Jesuit to become Pope — it was a controversial appointment, as they are often seen as rebellious troublemakers, frequently clashing with the Vatican to the point of once being banned. But for all his professed dedication and pastoral ministry to the poor, Bergoglio was an unusual Jesuit. He came to prominence during the Argentinian dictatorship, when it was a dangerous time to be an advocate of the dispossessed. The military junta was paranoid and sadistic towards anyone they suspected or could frame as being communist. It was a time of massacres, death flights, rape and torture chambers, murder squads and disappearances.

At the time, Liberation Theology had emerged as a truly radical strain of Christianity, focusing not just on poverty but those who created and profited from it. And the authorities, either in Buenos Aires or Rome, saw them as heretical pseudo-Marxists. The Argentinian form of Liberation Theology soon had the junta’s attention, and the murder of clergy commenced.

The future Pope Francis, though, was critical of Liberation Theology. He initially seemed to think that the Church should address poverty apolitically, as if poverty were not political. The Jesuits did not look favorably upon his opposition to radicalism, and he was gradually alienated within the order. There have been signs that the era weighed heavily on his mind; in one address, he spoke of “the complicit silence of most of society and of the Church”, a tacit acknowledgement of his own wilful ignorance of the crimes taking place then perhaps. It could have been something even worse, with accusations being leveled by a journalist Horacio Verbitsky that Bergoglio effectively threw two Jesuit priests Fathers Yorio and Jalics to the wolves by denying them the protection of their order (Jalics later reconciled with the Pope and said he had not denounced them). In this light, his move towards a more radical position later in life could be contrition, an admission of guilt that he failed to rise when it mattered. Or it could be seen as a rebranding exercise for the Church, a victory of style over substance, a purging not of the Vatican’s sins but their public image, and an appropriation and dilution of radicalism in the process. In either case, Pope Francis was far more of a survivor than a rebel.

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Where does that leave the Church now with his passing? Despite the lack of substantive change, Pope Francis has shown there is renewed popular appetite for socially conscious religion. His message resounded especially in the developing world where Catholicism is on the rise. Intentionally or otherwise, he has cleared a viable path through the thickets that a genuinely radical pope might be able to move through, by standing up to intransigent Vatican authorities, in principle at least, and showing a relative outsider could preach with greater global impact than a more cloistered insider could. There is an important role for a force of the Vatican’s size and influence to challenge global capital, especially given “the Left” has collapsed into internecine civil warfare of identity politics. Even if you’re pro-choice or in favor of euthanasia, it would be in bad faith to deny there is a vital role for an organization advocating for the rights of unborn children and for those vulnerable towards the end of life, especially given our neoliberal drift to extremes, moral relativism and the abstraction of human lives.

Faced with the contemporary world, there is a temptation for the Church either to retreat into tradition and veer Rightwards (as seems likely), or to dilute itself into abject meaninglessness as Anglicanism has. Both would be a grave existential error. There are paths off the forked road of tradition and modernity, that take stranger more enlightening routes through ethics, technology, vernacular, ecology, the numinous, the syncretic, the gutter and the stars. The Church’s survival depends on deeply engaging with the world, especially at its worst, but also offering a sanctuary from it.

The very fact that the Catholic Church does not fit today is one of its strongest reasons it should exist. This is a place, one of the very few, that is not solely driven by the profit principle, where you can go without spending money, where you can meditate or confess your failings. To sit in a Gothic cathedral is to experience something beyond just the wonder of architecture and craftsmanship. It is an anachronism but not necessarily a retrograde one. Through it, ideas of pilgrimage, ritual, redemption and grace have survived into an age that scorns any practice without monetary value or not beholden to ego. It is one of the few realms where good and evil are still recognized as existing, let alone the divine. “A religion without mystics,” as Francis recognized, “is a philosophy”.

Rather than becoming an obsolete fossil or following relativism into nihilism, the Catholic Church could embrace its innate weirdness. It is completely out of place and thus, at its best, it could be a refuge from late capitalism and a bulwark against it, existing both outside of the world and in its darkest places. It was this that originally gave us the church of the catacombs and the outer fringes, from the Stylites to Celtic Christianity to Santería, which brought light to hard lives in ways both intensely local and cosmic. There is a myriad of alternatives to the centralized vision of the Vatican City, as the Jesuits and others have shown.

What the Church can offer is the precise qualities for which it is dismissed or mocked. Karl Marx wrote that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”. The assumption was that these were dishonest or impossible things. Yet imagine a world that will not allow these to exist or aspire to creating them, even if impossible. If the Church turns away from its surreal miraculous fantasies and supra-modern position, it will be on the same decline as political parties now, beholden to a world that makes everything the same, that deconstructs all loyalties and meaning, where everyone is out for themselves and everything is for sale. “Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the center of our lives,” Francis warned “they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings.” As it is for individuals, so too is it for religious institutions.

C.S. Lewis, who Pope Francis read and quoted, wrote, “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside”. The Church has still not truly faced its past, nor the inequities of the present. Added to this is Christ’s calling to his apostles to give up everything they own and follow him. If the Church ever did these things, they would open that door and exit Hell. Some of us might even be tempted to follow them.

For now, though, there is a battle at the heart of the Church. This did not begin with Pope Francis, nor even the tidal shifts back and forth since the Industrial Revolution. It has always been here. The history of the Church is one of schisms, heresies, dialectics, synods and competing factions. It is not between Left and Right, the past and the present. There is a battle because that is the nature of conscience and guilt and what it is to be human. The Church will have to wrestle with its soul as Pope Francis, a flawed but decent man in indecent times, clearly did. We all must, if we are to remind ourselves that we even have souls. Until the Church rises to the challenge of its own calling, it will have to dwell here with the rest of us in the Inferno, a broken institution in a broken world, with the knowledge there is no one stopping us leaving but ourselves.

The Church is in a desperate state. Covid was an absolute disaster. Being asked to close our churches — and to people in great need — sent a signal that we were not really there for our flocks in their hour of need. I was barred from entering my church to pray, but allowed in to check things for insurance purposes. So much for priorities. Understandably, people left in their droves. And many never came back. While the average weekly attendance in church rose by almost 5% in 2023 to 685,000, the third year of consecutive growth, we are still well below pre-Covid numbers. Might we recover? Perhaps. But it will be a struggle. Will the leadership heed my suggestions?

***

1. Burn down The Machine

Many of the clergy have burnt themselves out trying to arrest the death slide. In October, Dr Liz Graveling, senior researcher for clergy wellbeing at the Church of England, delivered a lecture to the Clergy Support Trust. The figures she outlined are staggering. More than one in five clergy is clinically depressed; one in three is mildly depressed. We are isolated, demoralised, knackered. We feel profoundly unattended to and are worried about our personal finances. As a vicar friend of mine commented with typical understatement: “It’s just not as much fun as it used to be.”

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A big part of the reason for the demoralisation is the fact that, under Welby’s tenure, the Church has reinvented itself as a top-down bureaucracy. Evangelicals, like Welby, have always thought they know how to do evangelism best, because they have a number of large and numerically successful suburban churches. Welby took his big business experience, allied it to his very particular evangelical zeal, and set out to impose it on the rest of us. The churches that subscribed to the Welby formula got central funding, smaller and less evangelical ones didn’t. The problem is: what works in London suburbs doesn’t necessarily translate well to Little Snoring, or indeed inner city Leicester.

Whereas the Church was previously a model of subsidiarity — vicars were little Popes in our own parish, as detractors might say — we are now the little people fronting a burgeoning machine of impenetrable complexity. Work that was once done on the ground is now done in distant committees. Churches used to be like corner shops, all managed locally. We are now in danger of becoming a chain. It is called Vision and Strategy and comes with a whole new grammar of administrative Christianity we are now expected to know by heart.

So much of the local energy — and money — that was once spent on the ground is now taken up responding to the demands of the centre. This is what Welby and his followers call “the work”. And “protecting the work” was the reason for his initial refusal to resign. He knows the next Archbishop may well burn the whole thing down, as well she should.

2. The next Archbishop should be a woman.

Credit where it is due, Justin Welby introduced female bishops as soon as he could. He also nudged forward on gay relationships — telling The Rest is Politics podcast back in October (and I paraphrase) that his own line was now that gay sex within a faithful and committed relationship is not some great moral or spiritual crime, and that same-sex blessings should be permitted in church. But he failed to make any of this church policy. The next Archbishop needs to complete this, and make it clear that the Church does not think gay sex is sinful, indeed that it is every bit a gift from God as straight sex. Conservative evangelicals will leave the Church over this, and so be it. We cannot remain in a twilight zone between condemnation and affirmation: it drains too much energy. We have to decide.

But, arguably even more important, this should be carried out by a female Archbishop of Canterbury. Watching yet another pale, male and stale company man in a purple shirt go on Newsnight to intone the party line is more depressing than I can possibly imagine. These men, their life force drained by time spent in artificially lit offices going through the minutes of the last meeting, have been terrible at communicating the excitement and phenomenal good news of the Gospel. And over the past weeks, they have been excruciatingly inept at dealing with this existential crisis. Many of them will have to go. And we need someone who can relate and be relatable. And also, crucially, someone who is trusted to deal with the safeguarding crisis.

My pick would be Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, currently Bishop of Chelmsford. “I’m not so comfortable with the language of ‘Vision and Strategy’ being deployed in the church,” she confessed to a congregation at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge a few months ago. Too secular in its thinking, too obsessed with growth charts, as if the success of the Church were down to us and not down to God. And way too powerful. In exposing all this before, the Bishop had received what she described a “slap on the wrist from central church” — after which the congregation burst into laughter and applause.

More than this, though, Bishop Guli has a compelling story. Her maiden speech in the House of Lords was described by Patrick Kidd in Politics Home as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several peers wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard”. Iranian born, Bishop Guli comes from high end Anglican stock: her father was a Bishop of Jerusalem, her grandfather a bishop in Iran. The family was forced to leave Iran after the revolution, after which Bishop Guli’s 24-year-old brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. Someone with this kind of background is unlikely to engage in the kind of cheap moral posturing we see all too often in the Church.

And women, especially mothers, must be more trusted to deal with Safeguarding. In 2004, Francis-Dehqani stepped back from full time church ministry to look after her children. This is not what you do if you are an ambitious cleric on the make. But the deep church establishment really doesn’t want her because of her hostility to “the work”. And they will almost certainly try and block her appointment. Unfortunately for them, there is no one else of the right age on the Bishop’s bench with the gravitas and relatability to do the job.

3. No more swanning around the world

Bishops — and Archbishops in particular — are far too busy. They have an impossible job, with a fire hydrant of problems spraying across their desk. Their capacity to deal with issues is thwarted by their penchant for foreign travel. Only this year, the Archbishop made a 12-day tour to Guatemala and Central America. He had just returned from Zanzibar. Between September last year and May this year, he clocked up 48,000 air miles (while regularly preaching about climate change), including two trips to the Middle East, to New York, to Armenia, to Rome (twice). He has also been to the Congo, to Pakistan, to Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, when the crisis was swirling, he was supposed to have been in Tel Aviv with David Lammy. But the Archbishop does not work for the Foreign Office. He should prioritise the needs of the Church of England. The clue is in the name. Too busy being a global statesman, he had no time to follow up the letters he received from survivors of abuse. This is what brought him down.

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Some will argue that the Archbishop is also the head of the Anglican Communion. This is true. Yet the Communion is a broken fellowship, with many thinking that the Church of England is already too liberal on matters of sex, while a third of the Communion don’t recognise his leadership. It is time, in short, for it to become a looser fellowship of Christians, each allowing the other a greater sense of — and I use the word again deliberately — subsidiarity. This was an idea actually invented by the Church, and one whose merits it has foolishly misplaced.

4. Shrink the Big Tent

Just as the theological diversity of the Anglican Communion cannot be held together by a strong centre (and so needs a weaker one), so too the Church of England has its own diversity problem. Traditionally, one of the best things about the Church of England has been its ability to include people from an astonishingly wide spectrum of theological opinion; from (to caricature just a little) deeply conservative evangelicals who take the Bible literally and warn darkly against sexual sin; to happy-clappy charismatics with their enthusiastic welcomes and unspeakable worship bands; to crypto-Catholics with their smoke and lace; to liberals who do social justice more than God. Broadly, we get along — though there are some exceptions. Liberals and conservative evangelicals really don’t get along, with the Church’s version of the culture wars still raging over sexual politics. This saps so much energy and turns the Church’s attention ever inward, which is a terrible look and contrary to the Gospel. While diversity is generally a good thing, this level of diversity is a problem. The next Archbishop must make it crystal clear that the Church of England welcomes gay people. And if you can’t cope with that, well there are other churches.

5. Lean into the weird

One of the most dispiriting things about the Welby era is the prominence it has given to church being normal, everyday, and relatable. Like a trendy schoolteacher desperate to be liked, the Church has been encouraged to think about its relevance — that achingly dull advice that has replaced the glorious other-worldly mysticism of saints and angels, Cranmer’s crystalline poetry, and Stanford in B flat, with crazy golf in the nave of cathedrals and overhead projectors. Jesus has been transformed from the Lord of Heaven and Earth, and the Judge of All, to my best mate, with all the gravitas of a crisps advert. Next year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, where Jesus was proclaimed by the Western Church as both fully human and fully divine. Christianity is by theological definition a tension between the immanent and the transcendent. In recent decades, the pendulum has swung too much in favour of the immanent — Jesus the social activist, Jesus the friendly listening ear, Jesus the comforting presence. We need to reclaim the difficult mysterious Jesus, the otherness of Jesus, the cosmic Jesus. Christianity needs to get just a little bit more weird and badass. More Caravaggio, less pastel. The Church exists to address the great mysteries of life — death, life, forgiveness, fear, passion, hope. Easy listening versions of these don’t make for a properly serious church.

***

I doubt the Church will consider doing any of this. During Welby’s tenure, the establishment has been captured by soft evangelicals, and the committee that decides the next Archbishop now has greater representation from the Anglican Communion. So Archbishop of Canterbury number 106 will be all too like his predecessor. Whatever the ructions of the Welby resignation, I fear the deck is already loaded in favour of a similar appointment: globalist and evangelical. The only way we will get the sort of person we need — and not another dreary “Vision and Strategy” company man — is for the revolution that unseated Welby to keep going. More resignations need to follow.

This, though, is simply my wish list. What I pray for. But it is not my prediction. That is best put by The Who: “New Boss. Same as the old Boss”.