Who Is Good? Pope Francis and Our Reckoning with Justice
“Why do you call me good? No one is good — except God alone.” -Jesus
When Pope Francis died, the world responded as you expect: with overwhelming praise, glowing affirmations, and even hagiographic hopes of sainthood. While there were, of course, those who dismissed him as “woke” and compromised, those criticisms paled in comparison to the sea of admiration poured out for him. Francis stood apart as a man who captured the imagination of billions like few have before him. However, there were other voices too, those with more cautious assessments, with unfinished reckonings, and even those with unmitigated denunciations-the voices of those who felt betrayed, ignored, erased, and rejected by Francis and the church he represented. I heard one such voice as it came from a friend I deeply respect, who ended our friendship because my public commentary about Francis’s death was not unequivocally condemning. My impulse to his rejection was to wave it off as extreme, but I caught myself and tried to truly listen.
The death of Pope Francis hasn’t just exposed divisions about his character, but also the deeper fault lines in how we remember- and what we choose to remember- when the powerful and beloved die. Francis was known as a pope who lived simply, spoke boldly, and dared to shift the Church’s moral center of gravity toward mercy, justice, and solidarity with the poor. At the same time, he was a man who too softened the language of exclusion without actually dismantling its structures, who spoke of welcome while reinforcing the barriers that kept far too many locked out.
Francis’s life invites no easy verdict. His papacy carried real courage and costly witness. He stood almost alone among world leaders in denouncing the “economy that kills,” where profit was prized over human life. He condemned unfettered capitalism as “the dung of the devil.” He challenged Western indifference to Palestinian suffering, refusing to let sanitized narratives erase the reality of occupation and loss. In the ecological crisis, he became one of the clearest moral voices on the global stage, framing environmental devastation not simply as a ecological crisis but as a spiritual failure to care for the poor and the Earth itself. For prisoners, refugees, migrants, and those crushed beneath systems of exploitation, Francis offered not only words but meaningful solidarity. He pushed more than most for dignity and love to be extended to queer and trans people. His impact was not abstract. For many it was tangible, visible, even salvific.
And yet, it is also true that for women called to ministry and leadership, for queer and trans people seeking unqualified affirmation over conditional tolerance, and for survivors of abuse still waiting for the Church to confront its sins fully, Francis’s papacy offered more continuity than change. While his famous remark, “Who am I to judge?” in 2013 raised global hopes, his deeper rhetoric soon revealed his firm limits. He ignorantly called gender theory “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” and warned of its spread as an existential threat. More than once he was caught using slurs in reference to queer people, with the expected PR apologies many of us found empty. He repeatedly closed the door to the ordination of women, reaffirming theological structures that placed them forever in second place. His approach to ecclesial abuse, while more serious than his predecessors, still fell short of full transparency and repentance. His mercy, however real, all too often stopped short of justice.
None of this is simple. Francis was not merely a “liberal pope” challenging a conservative Church, nor was he simply a guardian of tradition masking as a reformer. He was a man shaped by the tensions of his time- at once a son of the Catholic hierarchy and a pastor deeply unsettled by the suffering he saw on the margins. At his best, he spoke and acted from a place of prophetic compassion. At his worst, he fell back into the familiar patterns of institutional preservation and systemic supremacy. Too often he chose caution over courage when the cost of change threatened the core structures of power he inherited- a cost that was then passed along to the marginalized.
This complexity is not an excuse for his failures, nor is it a justification to deny the good he did. It is a reminder that goodness is never pure. It is always fractured, always incomplete, always shadowed by the wounds it could not or, more often, would not heal. The temptation is to settle for the narrative that suits us best. For the suffering it often means unequivocal denunciation, a judgment that is at least understandable if at times one-dimensional. For the privileged it means to lavish with praise, tallying the virtues while excusing the failings, because “it could have been so much worse.” But justice demands of us something far more difficult. It demands that we ask both who most benefited and who bore the burden of their choices.
For those for whom the Church’s failures are more distant and abstract, it is easy to praise Francis’s mercy without bearing the sting of its limits or the weight of its harm. It is easy to laud his humility without reckoning with the pain still borne by abuse victims, women, or queer and trans people- those who longed for full inclusion and genuine justice yet were treated not as siblings to be embraced but as liabilities to be managed. It is easy to celebrate progress when the mortal wounds are not yours to carry.
And yet, to those whose lives were lifted by Francis’s solidarity- the displaced, the imprisoned, the abandoned- he was not simply a better pope; he was, at times, a lifeline. For them, his advocacy was not incremental. It meant survival. It mattered. It deserves to be remembered not as a footnote to his failures but as a testament to the possibility of change even within the walls of deeply broken institutions.
If we are to speak truthfully about Francis, we must contend with the full story. We must acknowledge the real good he did without excusing the real harm he left standing. We must refuse the easy comfort of declaring him either saint or villain, not because there is virtue in some sentimental middle way, but because justice demands we see both whose lives were made better and whose were still sacrificed to the slow, grinding machinery of institutional self-preservation and persistent supremacy. And while the latter must become our priority, the former cannot be denied their voice.
Without question those in positions of power and leadership like Pope Francis must be held to account for the actions, not least because of the reach and capacity they have for both harm and good. However, must also recognize our own responsibility to navigate these same complexities in our lives. Every day we must contend with these core questions, to resist the binary impulse of full embrace or absolute rejection. We must ask of ourselves:
Who is good? What does it mean to be good in a world where partial virtue and persistent harm so often walk side by side? Who is allowed the dignity of complexity and the benefit of the doubt, and who is flattened into reductions of progress or failure? Whose suffering are we failing to center when we speak of the slow pace of change, and whose persistent oppression are we willing to allow so as not to disrupt the status quo? I do not want to be an apologist for Pope Francis (or deny that genuine evil does exist in this world). Nor am I willing to silence the voice of those on the margins who legitimately owe him their lives (or deny that change is possible in places we too often believe impossible).
Was Francis good? In the end, perhaps the better question is this: Will we choose the more difficult path that refuses to trade truth for stability, that fights for the liberation of the forgotten, and that dares to believe that the measure is not on a scale of goodness and evil at all, but in the loving embodiment of a vulnerable willingness to change?
It is in this possibility that I find hope.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci is a bisexual author, award-winning advocate, founder of The Rainbow Well, and co-director of Peace & Justice Initiatives. He is also a pastoral leader at Little Flowers Community, a Mennonite church in Winnipeg, MB, where he has served a largely 2SLGBTQIA+ congregation for almost 15 years. Arpin-Ricci has provided community and support to countless 2SLGBTQIA+ people around the world for years.