April 12, 2026 Essay: Pope Francis and His Jesuit Plan for the Church

Jesuits seem to attract conspiracy theories. One factor, from the earliest days of the Society, is probably our occasional proximity to power: How is that confessor manipulating that king? Another is the quality of our international organization and coordination, with frequent letters between St. Ignatius Loyola in Rome and Jesuits all over the world, making it easy to imagine us plotting something that required careful coordination. Over the centuries that followed, elaborate tales of nefarious Jesuits scheming behind the scenes became a stock element of anti-Catholic propaganda. (Other related tropes about Jesuits as too-clever-by-half moralists who could find an excuse for anything, as in the case of Blaise Pascal, fed into intra-Catholic propaganda as well.)

These days, Jesuits often treat these attacks, tongue-in-cheek, as badges of honor. When I was in theology studies in Boston, our house had a framed facsimile copy of a colonial-era law which banned Jesuits from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because, in its words, of the “secret underminings, and solicitations of those of the Jesuitical Order” which had so disrupted European peace.

Most Jesuits, I think, enjoy our reputation for such skullduggery largely because it is so absurd. When I am asked directly about Jesuit conspiracy theories, my standard response is to point out that most Jesuit communities struggle to agree on how many different kinds of breakfast cereal to buy.

No matter how outlandish they might be, Pope Francis’ election in 2013 as the first Jesuit pope fanned such conspiracist tropes into flame again. Rather than plotting to control governments, however, the speculation was about plans to change the church.

Almost everyone, it seemed, had some church teaching or issue that they were either passionately hoping or fearfully dreading that Pope Francis would change. His moves and comments, especially around the Synod on Synodality, were often parsed to figure out what he was assumed to be orchestrating.

While this approach to understanding Pope Francis is perhaps less absurd than 17th-century Jesuit conspiracy theories, it still obscures significant lessons to be learned from understanding Pope Francis as a Jesuit, because his most important Jesuit characteristic is not how he strategized to do things according to his own plan, but how he tried to cooperate with what God was already doing.

I think the single greatest misunderstanding about Pope Francis is the idea that he was playing, or even attempting to play, some complicated game of three-dimensional chess with the church. Instead, I will stand by something I wrote for The Jesuit Post during the week after his election, that rather than focusing on changing the teaching of the church, Pope Francis, “who believe[d] profoundly in the power of the Gospel to change lives and to make possible a new kind of freedom, a freedom for an encounter with Christ,” was far more interested in how we would be changed ourselves.

Many people who analyzed Pope Francis expecting to decode his grand strategy were frustrated and in that frustration, some came to criticize him as being “confusing.” But looking at Pope Francis as a Jesuit, I saw something different going on: Francis was “discerning the spirits,” as we Jesuits say, with a deep trust that God was already at work in the church and in the world, in the lives of believers and seekers.

In the 15th annotation of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius counsels that the one giving the Exercises ought to be cautious about trying to orchestrate what the retreatant will experience or decide, but instead should “allow the Creator to deal immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator and Lord.”

Pope Francis was at his most Jesuit, I believe, in the fact that he did not have a grand plan. What he had instead was the faith and courage to cooperate with how God is dealing with us, trusting that will be better than any plan we could make on our own.

— Fr. Sam Sawyer, S.J., Editor-in-Chief, America Magazine