The Washington Examiner‘s Peter Laffin suggested the late Pope Francis did not fit into the American left-right political paradigm after funeral services for Francis were held in Vatican City Saturday.
Francis’s funeral mass gathered world leaders, including President Donald Trump, to St. Peter’s Square to honor the late pontiff commonly referred to as “the people’s Pope.” Laffin joined C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Saturday morning shortly after the funeral mass ended at the Vatican was asked about the Washington Examiner editorial “Pope Francis defied easy political categorization.”
He discussed how while Americans tend to want to “superimpose our political paradigm onto things outside the bounds of our politics, we end up being very confused, especially by Pope Francis.”
“The Catholic world view, and I think this was espoused by Pope Francis, beautifully, like all of our great popes, was not left or right, it was up. Connecting from us to God, from God down to us. And when you try to see the world that way, when you attempt to put together a worldview in that way — not using our ideological constructs — but using the core principles of the faith. Yeah, your worldview can seem a little scattershot, especially to the American viewer,” Laffin said.
He also mentioned how Francis was “not shy about admonishing political leaders on both sides of the American spectrum,” referring to instances he admonished former President Joe Biden and Trump.
When asked about a Politico article calling Francis’s legacy “complex,” Laffin said that Francis did not liberalize the church as much as progressives would have hoped, but he also upset conservatives in the church by attempting to suppress the Latin Mass. He noted the Latin Mass is particularly popular with conservative Catholics in the U.S.
“There’s a pocket of people who maybe attempted to wield that mass as something — some part of a resistance against the Francis papacy and and now, I think was right that that was rebuked, but the suppression of it in the diocese across America, yeah, it caused, it caused a lot of consternation,” Laffin said.
EDITORIAL: POPE FRANCIS DEFIED EASY POLITICAL CATEGORIZATION
When asked about Francis’s accomplishments, Laffin reiterated a common theme in obituaries of the late pope in that he was seen as “a pope of mercy.” He specifically recalled how Francis would call the Catholic parish in Gaza every day since the war between Hamas and Israel began following the terrorist organization’s Oct. 7 massacre against Israel.
“I think those quiet extensions of mercy, something just so quintessentially Catholic and Christ-like about, and I think I think that that’s probably going to be what we remember most as his accomplishment,” Laffin said.