Courtney McGrailWith Pope Francis visiting the U.S., it's hardly surprising that he's come in for some unusual scrutiny.
At polling aggregation website fivethirtyeight.com, for instance, space is given to a fascinating discussion on how it might be possible to measure the impact of Francis' papacy so far and what its legacy might be.
A rise in Mass attendance, New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer ventures, might offer an obvious metric for measuring the success of the current papacy, but Aleteia's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry counters that before even thinking of metrics, it's necessary to consider what criteria constitute success; pointing out that the Church sees itself as "a machine for producing saints", he says the results from that won't be visible for centuries.
Unfortunately, 538's Leah Libresco observes, canonisation rates are vulnerable to changing attitudes about canonisations – Pope Francis has already canonised more saints than the last 15 popes combined – and it wouldn't exactly be fun to wait centuries for results to come in.
538's Carl Bialik, pointing to how the Pontiff has said "God tells us to seek humility, service and love", says that as a non-Catholic he would love to find metrics for whether people are becoming humbler and more loving, but while Oppenheimer says he's certain Francis will fail on those terms, both Libresco and Gobry are unsure.
Other criteria are raised, but even aside from how it could take a long time before there's real measurable data, the 538 duo both point out that it would be necessary to consider what trends were in place before Francis became Pope.
Another possible way of evaluating the reality of the oft-proclaimed "Francis Effect" might be, America's Sam Sawyer SJ suggests, would be to analyse how "the Church is talked about in public, and how closely it coheres with how the Church talks about itself". He reckons that this looks already to be a real gain, given how often mercy is spoken of nowadays, and both Libresco and Gobry back him on this.
Other possibilities might entail examining confessional figures for those dioceses that might keep records of such things, and perhaps more usefully at the numbers of students taking Catholic service programmes during their free time rather than simply to gain college credits. Applying qualitative criteria, however, can lead to some profound failures, Oppenheimer asserts, ultimately asserting, "I don’t see how you can ever improve on self-identification".
This still leaves the problem of evaluating changes in religiosity, so Libresco says her plan is to look at rates of change in Catholic self-identification from 2010 to 2013 and 2013 to 2016, using America's Episcopalians as a control group "because they’re the closest we could get to Catholics on a number of fronts (the way the liturgy works, structure of churches, etc.)".
Sawyer and Bialik reckon the Pontiff would be worth backing on this front, though the latter stresses that "we know executives shouldn’t get full credit for results under their watch", and though Gobry says he wouldn't take the bet, he's confident that Francis will have a positive impact on the Church, "however we choose to measure it".
The Pope’s dark night
Among the more intriguing pieces on Pope Francis to have appeared in the context off his visit is a CNN.com report entitled ‘The Pope’s dark night of the soul’. It’s an extraordinary investigation into the time Fr Jorge Bergoglio SJ spent in Cordoba between 1990 and 1990, seemingly removed from the Jesuit mainstream as he had become a focus for division in the Argentinian province, and how that exile changed him.
Years later he told a politician who had been forced to resign, “You must live your exile, and when you come back you will be more merciful, kinder, and you will want to serve your people better”. It’s well worth finding out how the future Pope learned that lesson.