Public opinion inside and outside the Church is split three ways about the kind of leader the Church needs at this defining moment of its history: another Francis (“a continuity candidate”), a pope in the mold of John Paul II or Benedict XVI, or a hybrid, someone between the “progressive” Francis and his “conservative” predecessors.

Well, that covers just about every possibility—except that progressivism and conservatism can be reimagined and realized in different ways. Popes John Paul II and Benedict were prolific writers on many pastoral, philosophical, and theological themes and expanded the Church’s understanding of traditional teaching. That was the kind of progressivism of little use to secularists. When Francis became pope, it was the Church’s well-established teaching on mercy, love, and accompaniment that received a new emphasis, and the Francis papacy is defined by his development of this doctrine in terms of pastoral ministry. It is true there are many who argue that Pope Francis’s intentions were to go beyond that and abandon or erode the Church’s moral teaching. However, whether one wants to credit Francis or the Holy Spirit, the fact remains that the late pope did not change but in fact affirmed the Church’s position regarding what it always saw as right and wrong.

For the past several years, the term “gaslighting” has been thrown about liberally in media reporting. Drawn from a popular mid-20^th-century play that was made into a movie, the term is shorthand for the psychological manipulation of people so that they come to doubt their own senses. This manipulation of perceived reality is largely the cause of the polarization of opinion in today’s society. The fact that reporting has so many disparate organs and updates and reinforces its messages with such viralizing speed leaves many of us embedded in false certainties, closed off to any other way of seeing things. The portrayal of Pope Francis offers a very good example of how gaslighting works.

He was first and foremost a pope of deep and simple piety. Perhaps our most abiding visual memories of him should be his simple gestures of devotion to Mary, bearing floral tributes to her icon in the church where his body now lies, or alone, frail and limping, in a deserted and rainswept St. Peter’s Square as he offered Benediction and the reassurance of faith to the world during the worst days of Covid and gazed with childlike trust at her icon. For many devout Catholics, these images are indeed etched in memory, but they are not the memories being carefully curated and promoted now in the wake of his death. If such simplicity of prayer had been associated with his two immediate predecessors, they may very well have been used as evidence of naïveté and superstition. This aspect of Francis’s ministry was mostly obscured, as the beams of media attention focused elsewhere.

Francis was the pope who removed abortion from the list of reserved sins (sins that require the absolution of a bishop) at a time when societies across the Western world were widening access to abortion. This raised alarm bells among orthodox Catholics, and of course the media spin was that Francis was liberalizing or softening the Church’s position on the sinfulness of abortion. Of course this was not true. On the contrary, Francis denounced the killing of unborn human life in terms far more trenchant than either of his two predecessors. Among other things, he compared it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.” Statements like this from the pope received little attention from the media, however, who had already settled on projecting him in a certain way to advance their own agenda and alienate him from orthodox Catholics. In this they appear to have succeeded.

In the same way, the media distorted the words of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, except in reverse. Anything he said that could be spun as harsh or phobic of another tradition was exploited without regard to context or nuance. His Regensburg University Address is one case in point, where his quotation from a Christian emperor of the 14th century, questioning the use of violence in the Qur’an in the cause of religion, was picked up by the media with alacrity and reported without context across all media outlets. This led to a tumultuous backlash of killings and violent protests, including the burning and bombing of churches, Orthodox and Protestant as well as Catholic, across the global Muslim community. The media continued to blame Pope Benedict and never picked up on how the reaction to his speech might be construed other than as the expression of understandable, if excessive, outrage at his “Islamophobia.”

Returning to Francis, it is indeed true that he drew out the implications of divine mercy and love in a way that challenged those who find it hard to separate the sinner from the sin, stirring anxiety and even anger among many Catholics. Every era has its moral pariahs, and Francis confronted the prejudices of our time. Despite calling gender ideology “the ugliest of dangers,” (another underreported remark), he reached out to transgender people in Rome, including those who worked in prostitution. Some members of that community were invited to his final leave-taking in Santa Maria Maggiore, each one holding a white rose. It was an intensely moving scene and mirrored in a 21^st-century way the surprise of the crowd when Jesus reached out to the morally repugnant of his own time.

Critics of Pope Francis draw attention to his apparent tolerance of sexual abusers within the clerical ranks of the Church. In one case, it appears a known abuser was given an administrative role within the Vatican itself. Time will tell how the secular media will choose to use such stories for their own purposes, and what they will or will not disclose, now that Francis can no longer be exploited as an iconoclast of tradition and doctrine.

Like the popes before him, Francis will leave a twofold legacy. The first belongs in the hearts of those who came to know Christ, however well or tentatively, through the witness of his life. This is the most important part of any pope’s legacy. The second belongs to historians who will no doubt, as the decades pass, revise the record of his life’s work and the words that accompanied it. That, however, will be the small print in a receding rear mirror as the world moves on and engages with his successor, and with the Church under that successor’s leadership. In any case,  we can expect that, whoever is elected, he will in turn be gaslit like his predecessors.

The task now falls to the College of Cardinals, whose focus must be to elect a good and holy man. The three last popes, whatever their differences in style and emphases, were good and holy men. Electing a liberal- or conservative-leaning pope is not the task of the Church, as secular commentators seem to think. Preserving the legacy of Francis is not their task either. The Francis era is now over. The Holy Spirit waits to gift the Church in an entirely new way. The influence of the last pope and his predecessors on those whose lives they touched (and that very much includes the College of Cardinals) is significant and may have a bearing on the cardinals’ choice to succeed him, but the focus of electors must be to find a successor who is marked by faith and character. If that is lacking, neither his “progressivism” or “conservatism” will count for anything.

It was the simple, holy, and prayerful witness of Francis and his immediate predecessors that captured the attention and imagination of people first. That’s what made these popes worth listening to—and therefore worth manipulating and misrepresenting too.