WHAT WILL BE POPE FRANCIS’ LASTING REFORM OF THE REFORM AND PAPAL LEGACY?

If we are blessed to enter our late 80's, biological processes that lead to the end of our earthly lives begin to snowball. You can see it in our faces. Thus we reflect on the last things and what takes place after we are gone. This photo taken this Wednesday morning at the papal weekly audience illustrates what I mean.

I have faith that the next pope will make some serious corrections to the current pope’s magisterium especially has it regards clarity in doctrine and morals as well as a return to the teaching authority of the pope and bishops in union with him without politicizing the magisterium through worldly, political processes and lobbies, euphemistically called synodality. 

But let’s look at Pope Francis’ legacy that needs to continue.

What I am writing should be couched within my opinion that Pope Francis’ liturgical style should not continue and the next pope needs to be more pastoral to “trads” and those who desire the older liturgical forms of the Catholic Mass and Sacraments. Christ has to be first, not a particular form of ecclesiology that has political and social elements concerning who does what, a kind of outdated, politicized DEI!

But this is what I see as good and needing ongoing promotion:

1. Pope Francis’ emphasis on pastoral care of people but with clarity of truth telling and strong medicine and sometimes radical surgery and amputations in the field hospital of the Church—a great metaphor that needs its full impact!

2. Pope Francis’ emphasis on devotions and devotional lives of Catholics, especially devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, which includes adoration and Benediction, devotion the the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Rosary and a whole array of popular devotions of various countries with a inculturated ethos. 

3. Pope Francis’ emphasis on the devil and evil and the temptations of the devil through worldly processes and ideologies