Pope Francis' Pharisaic past is key to his present radicalism

In his three and a half years as pontiff, Pope Francis' groundbreaking change of both tone and teaching - his progressive and even radical shift - is both a confirmation of the broader state and direction of the world, especially the Judeo-Christian Western world, and also a harbinger of how a new equilibrium between tradition and progress will be sought.

More specifically, however, it's also a reflection of his own personal history and clerical career, which in itself is something of a microcosm for the kind of adaptation and evolution that a modern believer has had to face in the twilight of the second millennium AD and turning of the third. Few of Francis' critics appear particularly aware of how deeply his past shapes everything he says and does as the successor of Peter, for if they did, they'd probably be less surprised or at times even scandalized.

For starters, the erstwhile Jorge Bergoglio comes from a strictly conservative social and spiritual background. Despite a loose period of life as a typical young adult in Peronist Argentina in the late fifties and into the sixties, his early faith remained grounded in a traditionalist view of liturgy and moral teachings, passed on to him by his middle-class parents, during a formative period in which the Church around him lost much of its flock to far more progressive versions of both, many of which ended up straying badly from important longstanding dogmas.

As such, the pope knows quite intimately what his conservative and traditionalist critics are really made of: like St. Paul when he was originally the zealous Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, Francis wasn't merely conservative or traditionalist himself, but quite an active partisan in his fundamentally reactionary beliefs.

That alacrity was largely why, only a few short years after his ordination to the priesthood in the Society of Jesus at the age of 33, he found himself appointed the national director of the illustrious Jesuit order at the very height of its embrace of so-called "liberation theology" throughout Latin America.

With an emphasis on quasi or even overtly Marxist social justice ideology, liberation theology effectively reduced Jesus to a Che Guevara-like egalitarian crusader, and the Church effectively to a countercultural socialist workers' and peasants' movement that swore an atavistic allegiance to him. This was anathema to established Catholic teaching, and the young Father Bergoglio fought passionately to suppress it both within the Jesuit order and throughout the broader Church in Argentina throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

He found himself naturally aligning with the right-wing military government that seized power and launched a so-called "dirty war" of violent persecution against left-wing political and social dissidents in 1976, which lasted until its fall from power in 1983 and claimed thousands of lives in extrajudicial torture and executions. This exposed him to later charges of complicity in the state-sanctioned suffering of progressive members of the Argentine clergy, especially his own liberal Jesuit order itself.

Disgraced in the wake of the reestablishment of socialist rule in the 1980s, the now middle-aged Father Bergoglio was largely ostracized both within the Jesuit community and the wider Church. He could have withdrawn into a lifelong resentment and bitterness, but instead took the trial as a higher calling for deeper conversion. It was, figuratively speaking, his meeting with the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. The year was 1986, and his change of heart was sealed by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the "Undoer of Knots" - as is well-documented in his own recollection.

To this day, Pope Francis can proudly point to his youthful zealotry in defending Catholic tradition when it was most inconvenient and unpopular to do so, much like Paul could boast of the faith of his Jewish fathers even long after his powerful turn to the superior way of Christ. He has long overcome all self-guilt and shame over his role in purging the Church of those he perceived to be heretics, because in his discovery of the boundless mercy of God, he has recognized that reconciliation - both with oneself and one's enemies - is the very essence of the Gospel.

And so his papacy is all about tearing down walls and building bridges. For an ancient institution that has for so long been defined primarily by its barriers to free entry and movement - by its heavily guarded gates and imposing ramparts - that's bound to rock the boat, and quite dramatically at that.

Ultimately, the Catholicism - indeed, the Christianity - that Francis is evangelizing is about the final dissolution of all that divides and alienates humanity both from itself and from God. Where his opponents and detractors accuse him of tolerating sin and immorality, his radical outlook points to just the opposite: true holiness and virtue are only attainable when the individual soul is stripped of all its natural and even supernatural defenses and safeguards - that is, from its primeval disordered tendency towards fearful self-preservation - and is thus unshackled to embrace the Divine Providence in its rawest and most undiluted form.