The Core Truth of Pope Francis’ Reforms: Flipping to A Narrative of Encounter & Mercy

In a time shaped by media frenzy, deep divisions, and a relentless pursuit of ideological perfection, Pope Francis has become a figure both praised and criticized. His papacy has often been labelled controversial – not because of scandal or misconduct, but because he chose to speak in ways that unsettled those accustomed to a familiar model or expectation of Catholicism.

Yet, what if the so-called controversies are not departures from tradition, but signs of a deeper commitment – similar to that of St. Matthew’s call to conversion and discipleship at the customs house in Capernaum? Pope Francis frequently pointed to Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew as a visual expression of his own experience of God’s mercy.

Painting: The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio (1571–1610)

What if his life had been less about disruption and more about confrontation – not with doctrine, but with the comfortable ‘deadness’ that often conceals the truth?

A Calling Often Misunderstood

Photo: Pope Francis waves the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica (AP)

From the moment he stepped onto the balcony in 2013 and asked the world to pray for him before he blessed them, Pope Francis began reversing roles – not out of arrogance, but humility. That act foreshadowed a papacy defined not by guarding structures, but by reawakening the Gospel’s call to mercy, connection and shared humanity.

Over the course of his pontificate, he has faced accusations of being overly political, unclear, or progressive – yet, to me, these often arose from a limited and superficial understanding of his mission. Pope Francis did not reject tradition; he breathed life into it. He did not undermine doctrine; he insisted it must become flesh and dwell among us. His gestures of washing the feet of prisoners, embracing the disabled, advocating for the cause of migrants and the environment – were not mere public relations strategies. They are incarnations of the Gospel in a culture that has forgotten how to see Christ in the margins.

A Papacy in the Key of Confrontation

Photo: Pope Francis during a prayer on the third day of a Vatican summit on tackling paedophilia in the clergy. (Keystone)

Pope Francis was frequently termed as a ‘counter-cultural’ Pope, not because he opposes the Church, but because he challenged the ‘technocratic’ culture that has infiltrated both the Church and the world – a culture obsessed with certainty, control, power and a selfish purity that halts missionary discipleship. His critics often come from within the fold of insiders who mistook orthodoxy for rigidity, who saw pastoral care as abandonment of truth, who weaponised tradition against the very people it was meant to liberate into the heart of Christ.

In this context, every perceived controversy – spanning from his empathy to divorced and remarried Catholics, his emphasis on conscience, his calls for synodality, his outreach to nonbelievers and non-Christians is best understood not as doctrinal erosion, but as an act of reclaiming Catholicism’s radical roots. He reframed truth not as a weapon but as a wound – something that heals rather than divides.

Dismantling the Culture of Distance

Pope Francis has not simply spoken about the culture of encounter – he exposed the ‘culture of the counter’ as a reactionary spirit that defines itself by opposition rather than dialoguing and extending compassion. He has prompted the Church to examine its tendency to fortify walls rather than extend hands across divides. As a Jesuit, his message was deeply uncomfortable because it shook us to scrutinize both our convictions and the spirit with which we uphold them.

Painting: Christ Healing The Sick, c. 1752, Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, German, (1712–1774)

Truth, for Pope Francis, was not an abstract proposition. To him, Jesus Christ Himself is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” – a living presence who chose to dwell with the marginalized (the poor), speak in stories that stirred the heart (in parables), challenge the proud (the self-righteous) and embraced rejection and death outside the city gates to eventually rise us to new life. In placing the periphery at the centre, Pope Francis is not abandoning the truth – he instead reframed it in light of the Gospel’s demand that we love without counting the cost.

Conversion as a Sacred Continuum

If Pope Francis is seen as controversial, it's only because he challenges us to a deeper conversion – not of doctrine, but of the heart and inner dispositions. He reminds us that faith does not insulate us from the world’s wounds – it calls us to dwell within them. For him, synodality is not a matter of bureaucracy, but a way of being Church together that is lived of discernment and communion. This inevitably represents an ecclesial conversion in becoming a Church that first listens and accompanies, before it teaches or judges.

In many respects, Pope Francis’s courageous re-centring of ‘truth through encounter’ mirrors the intellectual and spiritual path of Edith Stein – Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – a philosopher who discovered truth not in abstract thought, but in the heart of empathy and suffering. For her, the pursuit of truth was inseparable from love, always tied to the dignity of the human person. In her own words:

“Do not accept anything as truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”

In the end, the controversies surrounding Pope Francis reveal more about us than about him – they challenge us to reflect on the type of Church we desire and the truth we are ready to embody.

Are we drawn to a Church that reinforces our ease – or one that challenges us to embrace compassion, even when it’s uncomfortable?

Photograph by Andrea Bonetti / Greek Prime Minister's Office / Getty

In choosing this course, Pope Francis had not reduced the papacy’s significance but instead reconnected it with Christ’s prophetic mission.