When Papacy Fails: How Catholics Dealt with Cognitive Dissonance Under Pope Francis
Seven ways the faithful have attempted to resolve their inner conflict over the last 12 years
I first encountered a doomsday sect in October 2000.
The leader of this sect had promised his followers Jesus would return on November 1 at 11 pm. My editor asked me to interview that man Brother Vincent, who told me he and his followers were convinced the Parousia would happen in a month. To prepare for the Second Coming, they had quit their jobs and were praying together night and day in the sect’s chapel.
Jesus did not keep His appointment.
I returned to ask Vincent if he had erred in his predictions. “We didn’t get it wrong,” he insisted. “Jesus returned on November 1. But because some of us had unconfessed sin, He refused to reveal Himself to us in the flesh. Remember, Jesus didn’t specify if He was going to come in the flesh or the spirit. I was right!”
What happens when someone believes something with his whole heart, commits his entire existence to this belief, makes life-and-death decisions based on his conviction … and is suddenly confronted with irrefutable evidence that his belief is wrong? Will he admit he is wrong? No! Rather, he “will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truths than ever before,” write psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter in their groundbreaking book When Prophecy Fails.
Believers, they found, resolve painful cognitive dissonance not by admitting error but by importing a new belief to support their existing belief. Or, they invent justifications that make the conflicting information seem less problematic.
As a Vatican correspondent, understanding this has been a critical tool in processing how many Catholics have dealt with cognitive dissonance during Pope Francis’s reign and how this could affect their response to the new pope.
Seven Methods
Catholics believe the successor of St. Peter is the “rock” of their religion. How do they respond when their belief is discombobulated by a pope whose declarations are like quicksand? Do they admit they are wrong, as Archbishop Peter Kenrick of St. Louis, did by using patristic evidence to challenge the traditional interpretation of Matthew 16:18 at Vatican I? Like the historian Fr. Ignaz von Döllinger, a hyperpapalist in his younger days, do they concede that the papacy is based on “moonshine” and “forgeries and fictions?”
Nope.
Unlike Kenrick and Döllinger, many Catholics during Francis’s pontificate have resorted to at least seven atypical ways of resolving their CD.
Francis Was an “Invalid” Pope
This conspiracy theory takes various mutations. Francis’s papacy was invalid because he wasn’t even a Catholic. Or he was a valid pope, but his espousal of false teaching turned him into a heretic. Heretics can’t be popes. Or, they believe, Pope Benedict XVI resigned his ministry (ministerium), but not the office (munus). Hence, Francis wasn’t the pope, but an imposter.
If this is true, then an invalid pope has appointed more than 80% of the current College of Cardinals. Hence, their appointments also are invalid and the new pope they elect will be invalid as well. The rabbit hole never ends!
Here Come the “Popesplainers”
An industry of popesplainers mushroomed during Francis’s papacy. Their task has been to resolve the CD of those disoriented by the pope’s heterodox declarations, such as blessing same-sex couples. The popesplainer does this by releasing three-hour-long videos on YouTube. He will twist himself into a pretzel, parsing each syllable of the edict, trying to demonstrate that it is orthodox.
Popesplainers often blame sensationalist media for twisting Francis’s words or getting the Italian original wrong. Their exercise, though, only proves that the magisterium, which is supposed to clarify theological difficulties, itself needs extensive clarification from a self-proclaimed expert. Pray, who will clarify the clarification?
Catholics Are Not Hyperpapalists
The “recognize and resist” brand of traditionalists confess they have been “ultramontanists” (hyperpapalists) for too long. In the 2024 book Ultramontanism and Tradition: The Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith, they blame the “ultramontanist papacy” as “the source of our ills.”
The titles of the chapters speak for themselves: “The Hyperinflation of the Papacy,” “Can We Learn Anything from the Critics of Vatican I?” “What Is a False Spirit of Vatican I?” and “Papolatry and Ultramontanism Are Not the Same.” Historian Roberto de Mattei even writes that the pope is always faced with “the abyss of apostasy.”
Such a position screams against the super-hyper-ultra-papalism of Pope Boniface VIII, who declared in his bull Unam Sanctam (A.D. 1302): “We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” So who is right? Layman de Mattei or Pope Bonny?
Appeal to “Prudential Judgment”
When Pope Francis declared in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that the death penalty was “inadmissible,” most shell-shocked Catholics resolved their CD by claiming his abolition was merely a “prudential judgment” and hence not binding on the faithful. They also said that the catechism isn’t “magisterial.”
Francis later inserted his abolition of capital punishment in the magisterial declaration Dignitas Infinita. It was no longer possible to maintain CD on such a major doctrinal U-turn. Catholics also use the “prudential judgment” escape clause to resolve their CD on Francis’s Abu Dhabi declaration, cosigned with Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb.
The problem is that the Catholic Church requires the faithful to show “religious submission of will and intellect in a special way to the authentic Magisterium of the Roman pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra.” There’s no escaping the CD!
Appeal to the Next Pope
My friends who converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism and are mocked for “jumping from the frying pan into the fire” assuage their CD by telling themselves that the next pope will rectify Francis’s wrongs. “Francis is an anomaly. The new pope will cancel his magisterium and declare Francis an antipope. He might even overturn Vatican II,” they dreamily declare.
Paradoxically, the very reason such friends quit Anglicanism for Catholicism was to escape CD. “In the Catholic Church, we have St. Peter’s successor who isn’t a woolly figurehead like the Archbishop of Canterbury,” they trumpeted.
“So what will you do if we get a Francis II?” I ask my friends.
Their CD returns with a vengeance.
Ignore the Pope, as Catholics Did before the Internet
After freaking out over Francis for years, a well-known podcaster is now rebuking Catholics for getting into a tizzy over papal contradictions. “You don’t need to know everything that’s coming from the Vatican,” she says. “Catholics in the Middle Ages, Catholics before the internet, lived their lives as good Catholics. They didn’t know what was going on. Just be like them.”
In other words, ignorance is bliss. Resolve your CD by adopting the ostrich approach. If you’ve read Reformation history, you will know that it happened precisely because folks were well-informed and aware of Rome’s corruption. Also, is this podcaster trying to say the papacy is bad for your health so you should ignore it? If so, what’s the point of the papacy?
Redefine “Schism”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was excommunicated by Pope Francis for schism, best represents this position. It is the post-Vatican II “which rejects the perennial Magisterium of the Pontiffs” that “places itself outside the Catholic Church,” he writes. In other words, Francis is the schismatic, I continue to remain Catholic. Ironically, this is precisely how the Protestant Reformers were reasoning.
A journalist friend in Rome, who attends the Latin Mass, holds to a variation on this theory. “This is the false church,” he says, pointing to St. Peter’s Basilica. The true church, according to him, is the Latin Mass remnant. He’s resolved his CD. The rest are cooked.
What would Jesus, the apostles, and the church fathers say to help resolve such CD? I suspect Jesus would reiterate His parable of the wise man who built his house on the rock and the foolish man who built his house on sand. When the cyclone hit, only one house survived. The rock is Jesus’s teaching, not papal pronouncements.
The Acts of the Apostles commends the Berean Jews, who examined the Scriptures daily to see if Paul was correct in his proclamation of the Messiah. St. Cyprian sums it up: “There is a short way for pious minds both to dethrone error and to find and bring out the truth. For when we return to the source and origin of the divine tradition [the Bible], human error ceases.”
Psalm 1 begins by extolling the person who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night.” He doesn’t suffer CD! Rather, “he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.