After Francis: A church for a messy world

Evangelising the digital world – Fr Joe Borg

When I call Fr Joe Borg and pose the question on what is the greatest challenge facing the church after Francis’ departure, I am surprised by his point-blank reply. But the more he talks the more convincing his answer became.

One of the key realisations the church must come to is that virtual and digital spaces are real spaces, Borg says. He is, after all the archbishop’s delegate for social communication, who was recently appointed by the Vatican to study the church’s mission in digital environments.

These digital spaces have their own languages, codes, and power dynamics, which pose significant challenges for an institution historically rooted in the physical world, he explains.

“You cannot simply reproduce the pulpit on TikTok without understanding that TikTok has a different language than Instagram,” Borg says. “One cannot just adopt the same methods used in physical spaces.”

According to Borg, the challenge of evangelising the vast and ever-expanding digital realm may well be the greatest challenge facing the Catholic Church since the ‘voyages of discovery’ of the 16th century, when navigators crossed the Atlantic and circumnavigated the globe to reach India, China, and the Far East, opening the way for colonial domination and atrocities.

Fr Borg argues that a similar colonisation is now occurring in virtual spaces, which are far from neutral communication platforms but operate within a capitalist political economy dominated by oligarchic tech companies. Therefore, the church’s role is not only to communicate its message using new media but also to use its “prophetic voice” to challenge this dominance and help humanise these digital environments.

“To do so, the church must collaborate with non-Catholics and agnostics who are equally concerned about the monopolisation of the digital sphere,” he says.

Borg warns of the “dictatorship of the algorithm.” Algorithms, he says, are designed to maximise profits by feeding users content that reinforces their existing beliefs and prejudices, pushing them into isolated silos.

“If you are racist, you end up receiving only racist material,” he says. “The algorithm doesn’t encourage communication; it promotes division.”

Still, Borg is not against technology. Rather, he believes the church should be at the forefront of a movement to regulate the sector, wresting control from tech billionaires and ‘humanising’ virtual spaces.

Borg insists that the church must be part of efforts to establish regulatory structures, ensure digital dignity, and provide media education. But this must also come with the realisation that the church has lost its gatekeeping power to control the media narrative, particularly on child abuse scandals.

Engaging with a messy world – Nadia Delicata

Pope Francis’s mysticism in action was not an escape from the world, but a radical entry into its “messiness,” Nadia Delicata, a theologian and the Maltese Church’s episcopal delegate for evangelisation, tells me.

In this sense, Pope Francis identified three of the most complex issues rooted in an increasingly complex world that, in her opinion, the church has no choice but to continue to “discern” about.

The first realisation is that the church is universal, in which the European Church is a minority and an outsider. While the Roman Curia might be tempted to be caught up in its own politics, she warns that “when one looks inward and not outward, one loses touch with reality – and therefore with the people.” The antidote to this is the process of synodality, which is all about “coming to terms with the reality of immense diversity in the Church itself: of its many voices and theologies, and how these can be in harmony instead of inconsistent.”

The second realisation, she adds, is that the whole edifice of western “patriarchal” and male-dominated culture is now in crisis, and therefore the church cannot cling to a hierarchy modelled on the authority of the pater familias who rules over his children with the support of his wife.

“In this period of immense flux, even the church needs to find its footing,” she says. While rejecting the polarities fuelling “infamous culture wars,” she calls on the church to reflect on its historical depiction of the woman as virgin and mother – and even as “virginal mother.” The church also needs to continue reflecting on two thorny issues: “Female power” in the church and “female sexuality” even beyond child-bearing years, since today we live much longer than previous generations.

“The pastoral issue of remarried divorcees and how the church will situate the intimate relationships of LGBTIQ Catholics will require more ‘discernment’ in this wider context,” she adds.

The third issue – one that has faced the church from the beginning – is how to deal with the sinfulness of its members, which contradicts the Church’s claim of being a symbol of ‘holiness.’

“Today the sins are the scourges of abuse – sexual, emotional, spiritual, and most perniciously, the abuse of power, especially that stemming from clericalism,” Delicata says.

This was recognised by Pope Francis in his apostolic letter Estis Lux Mundi, which came with the acknowledgement “that these serious sins must be exposed in order to be fully repented.”

While recognising the difficulties facing the church, Delicata remains convinced of the urgency and relevance of the Catholic message.

“Through the immense power harnessed in a digital culture, the whole planet is up for grabs, and we seem to have no restraint in experimenting because we are in total denial of the horrific consequences,” she says. As Pope Francis warned, she adds, “the dominant technocratic paradigm” is reducing all of reality – from the land to every human – to an “object”; a mere “tool”; something to narcissistically use for personal edification, “essentially annihilating the inherent dignity of everything and everyone.”

The narrative beyond the doctrine – Mario Gerada

One of the great paradoxes of Pope Francis’s papacy was that the paradigmatic shift in the way the church addressed humanity was not reflected in substantial doctrinal change.

I raise this thorny issue with Mario Gerada, co-founder of Drachma, an LGBTIQ Christian organisation, but whose interest in the church goes beyond this particular issue.

One of Pope Francis’s great contributions, which Gerada believes will be hard to reverse irrespective of who is elected as the next Pope, was his pastoral approach.

“Of course, many complex doctrinal issues remain unresolved, but in terms of the pastoral element, there was an enormous change – including that of seeing LGBTQ people as first and foremost human persons,” he tells me.

In fact, Gerada believes his most radical shift was placing the human person at the heart of church discussions. This changed the tone of engagement, framing difficult topics within a discourse of human dignity.

Francis lived “the joy of being human in relation to others,” embracing the poor and marginalised, the Creator, and the whole of creation, Gerada says. This reminded the church “to live the Gospel with joy.”

In this sense, Pope Francis’s greatest contribution was framing a narrative for a church more in sync with its people.

Gerada refers to one of his favourite quotes from Pope Francis: “Only in narrative form do you discern, not in a philosophical or theological explanation, which allows you rather to discuss.”

Crucially, Francis moved away from the idea of the church as an exclusive doctrinal club, towards a diverse community united by the Gospel, capable of accommodating different perspectives. 

In this sense, one core element of the Latin American tradition that influenced Pope Francis is the invitation “to understand and make theology together” through a synodal approach – where people do not live in isolated bubbles but engage meaningfully with one another.

Gerada sees the church’s role today as offering a “space for discernment and public deliberation,” helping society “slow down”, dialogue meaningfully, and find common ground. In a world polarised by culture wars and echo chambers, he insists, the greatest challenge is to talk across differences.

What’s certain is that this task is more urgent than ever, with the “demonic” extermination of an entire people in Gaza, and other theatres of wars, being the extreme manifestation of what theologian René Girard called the escalation to extremes – the spiralling of mimetic violence between rival powers that leads to polarisation, war, and mutual destruction. Stopping this collective descent into destructive madness is for Gerada, the first priority of the church.

Remaining close to the people – Fr Daniel Cardona

Fr Daniel Cardona, currently serving as parish priest of Żurrieq, hails from a generation of younger priests known for their pastoral commitment to the communities they serve, as well as for upholding a more traditionalist outlook.

Not surprisingly, given his own grass root sensibilities, he hails Francis’s “closeness to the people”, when I speak to him. He says this was the quality that enabled the Pope to understand “the everyday struggles people face.”

Significantly, he also believes there is no turning back from Pope Francis’s course.

“His non-dogmatic approach made the church’s stance more compassionate, moving away from rigid black-and-white thinking,” Fr Cardona says.

He regrets that “some resisted the direction Pope Francis set for the Church” but remains confident that the vast majority of people appreciated this direction.

He hopes that the cardinals electing the new Pope “recognise and appreciate that the path Francis charted is the right one for the world we live in today.”

But he also believes that Pope Francis’s baton can be carried forward by a successor who does so in his “own unique way” and does not need to be a replica of his predecessor.

What matters most for Cardona “is that the church continues to root herself in the grassroots, embracing the Ignatian focus on the ‘essential’ and the Franciscan openness to those on the margins.”

He also speaks of the urgency of the moment, when the church is called to be “a shining beacon in a postmodern world – a voice of hope and truth, stronger and more enduring than the many dominant voices that surround us.”

The world, he adds, is also crying out for “good, compassionate and transformational leaders.”