Definitely an unpopular opinion!

I just ran into a mini discussion about this very subject.

My conclusion was, and is, that he was decent for a pope. Not the best human, not a great human, just a pope that was an improvement over previous popes. And I stand by that based on the improvements he did make. I suspect he maybe would have gone further if he thought he could do so and make it stick in practice.

But he never would have gone far enough to satisfy me into abandoning the ACAB theory of monotheism. You know, where individuals within the cop/Christian/Catholic group may be decent people, but they’re part of a broken, corrupt, hateful system and aren’t actively working to change that at full force, so they’re still bad anyway.

Which is a long winded way of saying that I disagree with your title, but agree with the contents of your text body, at least with the broad strokes.

But you gotta realize, if you or me are giving lip service on camera, it don’t mean shit. But if the pope pretends to be a nice guy, he can actually change minds in doing so. So I ain’t mad at a pope that’s willing to be on camera and encourage better behavior, even if he’s s dipshit behind the scenes. And he did speak for better treatment of people, and there are actual Catholics that took it to heart and started acting better, so again, I ain’t mad that he was a bit of a dick behind the scenes