After just seeing so many articles of people being sad I really just have to say the pope was an asshole. You don’t even have to do good research to see that this guy and his administration was still hiding pedophiles, hating gay people, and generally being a jerk all while pretending he was better than everyone else. The only thing he did was say he loved everyone and be a nice guy on camera which literally anyone could pretend to do. Meanwhile his administration was just more of the same shit. Just creating some counterpoint to the nonsense narrative I keep seeing.
The pope’s right hand man, for a long time, was a paedophile who for a time fled to the Vatican to stall facing justice. Eventually he went to face trial, and the pope was one of the first to publicly condemn his conviction, after the High Court decided it could ignore a jury’s verdict and declare that he was not guilty.
People make jokes all the time about paedophile priests, but it’s not something that comes out of nowhere or because of “a few bad apples”. It comes from the former pope’s former right hand man who, at the very least, systemically protected priests under his charge, moving them around rather than leave them to potentially face justice when they fiddle with the same child too many times. And who most likely was himself a paedophile. And the pope himself was complicit.
So yeah, he might have been progressive as popes go. But he was still an absolutely horrible man who helped further absolutely heinous actions happening directly under his leadership.