When Pope Francis summoned the Roman Catholic bishops to the Vatican in 2019 to discuss the ordination of married men in remote regions of South America, the meeting raised the expectations concerning the possibility of revolutionizing the single priesthood.
The bishops recommended him to do so, and Francis himself said that he had wanted to change in the church from below.
But Francis finally fell back, deciding that the church was not yet ready to raise a restriction of around 1,000 years. Many of his supporters, who expected him to be a pope of radical change, felt disappointed.
It was a salient example of the way Francis, who died on Monday at 88, was a pope of great expectations often disproportionate. His revolutionary and freewheeling style led Catholics through the spectrum to invest it with their hopes and their most realistic – sometimes unrealistic – sometimes independent of what he said or done.
Some liberal Catholics, forgetting that Francis was the leader of a deeply conservative institution, expected him to do women priests, changing teaching on birth control or throws his weight behind the same -sex unions and gay marriage. Some conservatives, some of whom convinced themselves that the Argentinian pope was a secret communist, feared to fire the doctrine of the church, even if he never touched it.
