(LifeSiteNews) — One year after Pope Francis’ death, Cardinal Walter Kasper has offered interpretive keys to his pontificate that suggest a hyper‑modernist vision for the future of the Church.

On April 20, Kasper published an article in the journal Communio in German Außergewöhnlich und sympathisch (“Extraordinary and likeable”), in which he recalls the late Pope Francis and explains the key pillars of his pontificate, seeking to present Pope Leo XIV’s work as a continuation of what Bergoglio began.

“[Francis’] pontificate was not only distinctive for the way he exercised the Petrine ministry, but it also set in motion important impulses for the transformation of the Church – impulses that continue to have an impact today,” Kasper wrote.

Kasper candidly recalled that the image of impoverishment of Bergoglio’s pontificate, evident from the very first moments after his election, “did not please everyone, but was rooted in the specifically Argentine direction of Latin American liberation theology.”

Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), the manifesto of his pontificate, sets evangelization as the fundamental theme of the entire agenda. However, Kasper issued a warning: the concept of evangelization used by Francis does not fully overlap with that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

While it is true that evangelization was “the basic melody that John XXIII … had already dedicated to the Second Vatican Council and that his successor Paul VI placed at the center after the Council … with the thesis: ‘The Church exists to evangelize’ … the following popes – John Paul II and Benedict XVI – adopted this program and continued it. For Francis it became a call to a common departure, to a new phase of evangelization.”

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In speaking of evangelization, “Francis did not simply mean a transmission of the faith based on doctrine, but a program of reform.” This so-called reform, to which Francis also referred with the ambiguous expression “spiritual conversion,” that is, a rethinking of the Church in its structure and in its purpose, reinterprets “the unity of the Church as unity in diversity” and finds its directives in both “a salutary decentralization” and a “reorientation of the papacy.”

Although Pope Francis may have disappointed many progressives by not opening the diaconate and the priesthood to women, Kasper suggested remaining calm on the matter. “One can truly understand Pope Francis only if one considers that his aim was to set processes in motion, instead of occupying spaces and positions.”

The masterpiece in this sense lies, according to Kasper, in the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (2016), in truth one of the most tragic and worst documents of the Bergoglian magisterium, because it has broken the sacramental unity of the Church and invited a rethinking not only of the perennial Catholic doctrine on marriage, but also that of the Eucharist and confession.

Kasper, on the contrary, holds that “theologically for [Francis] it was above all important to repeatedly emphasize the importance of personal conscience. He said that the Church can and must inform conscience, but must not put itself in the place of conscience.”

According to him, all this would be consistent with the position of John Henry Newman, recently canonized and proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Leo XIV; but this reading is ideological and instrumental, because the concept of the primacy of conscience as understood by Newman and, before him, by doctors such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, takes on a different meaning.

For St. Thomas, the primacy of conscience means that no one can act against what he believes to be the good, but conscience is always bound to objective truth and to natural law, and the Church has the task of showing consciences what this law is, because sin does not always make it evident to the spiritual eyes of man.

According to Newman, conscience is “the first vicar of Christ” in the soul. This, however, does not at all mean moral independence. The English cardinal explained that the true primacy of conscience does not oppose the Magisterium, but presupposes it, and therefore authentic conscience is formed and enlightened by faith.

The position of Kasper, and of Francis before him, is not a third way of understanding the same concept, but a pastoral reinterpretation that tends to shift the axis from conscience as objective truth (Saint Thomas) and the personal voice of God (Newman) toward a “situated” conscience, that is, one inserted into the history and concrete circumstances of the person. In this way, the norm becomes subordinated to individual experience or situation. This interpretation is one of the cornerstones of modernist thought condemned since the time of Saint Pius X.

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Another milestone document of Francis, according to Kasper “less known, but no less important,” would be the Document on Human Fraternity of Abu Dhabi.

“That the representatives of conservative Catholicism have found nothing better than to condemn the document – especially because of a half sentence, misunderstood but also interpretable correctly, concerning the ‘plurality of religions willed by God’ – is another matter,” Kasper asserted.

However, the German cardinal does not suggest what the “correct interpretation” of the half sentence might be, which instead in itself is very clear and – unfortunately – has a flavor of heresy: “Pluralism and the diversity of religions … are a wise divine will, by which God created human beings. This divine Wisdom is the source from which derives the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different.”

But the “most important legacy of Pope Francis” is another: “The process of becoming a synodal Church.” According to Kasper, therefore, this is the end of the entire Bergoglian undertaking that lasted 12 long years. “Synodality is exactly what God expects of the Church of the third millennium,” commented the German prelate.

This process has by no means ended with the death of Francis; on the contrary: “His successor [Leo XIV] has taken up the task and intends to continue” it.

In 2018, Pope Francis reformed the Synod of Bishops with the Constitution Episcopalis communio, initiating the “process of universal synodality.” After the theological document of the International Theological Commission, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (2018),” the path was inaugurated in 2021 and reached its apex with the 16th Assembly of 2023, characterized by the “equal participation of laity, men and women.”

Finally, Kasper admitted that the way in which Francis understood synodality is not at all the traditional one, thus disavowing the many who in these years have tried to force the magisterium of Bergoglio into the hermeneutic of continuity.

“Many questions still need to receive an answer. We know what a synod is, but synodality is an abstract and new concept that is understood in different ways and needs to be clarified more precisely, both conceptually and institutionally,” Kasper wrote. “The way in which the German Synodal Path can be incorporated into the synodal process of the universal Church will also be established.”

Finally, the cardinal concluded: “In Pope Leo XIV, the legacy of Pope Francis is in good hands. He carries it forward, in his own way and with full naturalness, giving it his own accents.”