Pope Francis: Salesman or Smiley Face of Liberal Catholicism?

The election in March 2013 of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Catholic pontiff marked the birth of a salesman. What the Catholic Church needed above all else was rebranding. It wasn't doing well in the marketplace.

In its traditionally strongest region, Latin America, the Roman Church was under pincer attack from liberalism and evangelical Protestantism, in Africa from evangelicalism and Islam, in the West from scepticism and science. Everywhere, among thinking people, it was crumbling at the edge as modernity corroded mysticism and fraud. The pitch for the product at the point of sale had to be adjusted. The Curia concluded that a fresh face was needed and that Francis fitted the bill. So far, they can be content that the Francis project remains on track.
Francis has drawn applause from across the spectrum in highlighting the dangers of climate change and the crushing of the human spirit by unfettered capitalism. But climate charge and capitalism are a doddle for the boss-men of Catholicism. Assailing the profit-fuelled onslaught and making a passionate, unspecific plea for change will be enough to do the trick.
Add in a few mumbled sympathetic words about homosexuality and the position of women, and commentators will shower their audience with dizzy dispatches from the heights of delight.
In fact, Francis has said not a syllable to hint at change in Church teaching on gay sex or women’s rights. His reputation in this area is phony. But that hasn’t prevented even the likes of Naomi Klein being taken in. Invited to the Vatican to address an assembly of grandees on climate change, she emerged to gush to the media about the significance of the Church under Francis embracing a secular feminist like herself.
Cardinals will have considered her secular feminism an added attraction, right enough, giving her solid credentials for conferring credibility on an obscurantist organisation. They can’t be a fly- blown bunch of misogynist grumps if they bring Klein into their parlour... But, oh yes, they can.
Klein was bowled over by Francis's use of “mother” and “sister” to refer has been that it venerates Mary as the near-equal of Jesus. (Insofar as the Bible can be taken as the basic text of Christianity, the Protestants are 100 percent right on this one.) 
Klein summed up the “revolutionary” lessons of her Vatican jaunt in The New York Times on July 10th: “By asserting that nature has a value in and of itself, Francis is overturning centuries of theological interpretation that regarded the natural world with outright hostility – as a misery to be transcended and an ‘allurement’ to be resisted.”
Has she never read a word of Augustine? Of Aquinas? Or listened to “The Queen of the May”? It appears that Church doctrine on women would come as a shock to her.
If the Pope and his Church were even minimally serious about women’s rights, they would surely put their own house in order before issuing ringing calls for equality. An organisation which, as a matter of policy, excludes women from even the lower ranks of its officer class, is not entitled to be regarded as anything other than a bigoted, anti- woman outfit.
Francis has already made it clear there'll be no women priests on his watch. There is no reason to believe that he will back off from the ban on contraception. His attitude to the idea that women should have the same right as men to control their own bodies is as hardline as any of his predecessors.
Such things still matter. Catholic pro-lifers form the hardcore of the anti-choice brigade North and South and, despite everything, retain the capacity to hold progress back. Without the right to choose, without women’s agency over their own lives, equal citizenship means little.
Economic development is intimately linked to the position of women. Thus the influence of the Catholic Church, often in alliance with evangelical Protestantism and/or Islam, remains a formidable barrier to justice.
The point of Francis is not to change the Church but to give it a booster-shot of plausibility. The spectacle of self-proclaimed atheists waving their hankies at his cavalcade is both risible and dismaying. But the Vatican big-wigs will considerthe scene a splendid demonstration of the Francis effect. He is far from a force for good in the world.