My Left-wing Cartoons and Francisco

Pope Francis died in the wee hours of Easter Monday after having greeted Vice President Shady Vance and the throngs who came to celebrate the Resurrection with him the previous morning. I didn't get invited to the funeral at the Vatican today, so instead, I've got a look back over his papacy for this week's Graphical History Tour.

March, 2013

I caught a little bit of flack for this initial response to Cardinal Bergoglio’s election to the papacy in 2013, but I thought it was a light, whimsical cartoon to celebrate Catholicism’s first Latin American Pope. Besides, I happened to be discovering the music of Astor Piazolla just then. 

for Q Syndicate, August, 2013

Taking his papal name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, Bergoglio quickly showed himself to be a very, very different pope than Benedict XVI. The archconservative B-16, breaking with longstanding tradition, had resigned the papacy rather than linger in the position while cruel age slowly robbed him of mind and body. (As critical as I was of Pope Benedict, I credit him with a selfless decision many aging politicians would have done well to emulate.)

for Q Syndicate, September, 2013

Conservative Catholics in America, who had weaponized their faith to impose their beliefs on pro-choice and LGBTQ+ fellow citizens, came to be extremely disappointed in the new pontiff... 

for Q Syndicate January, 2014

...and eagerly searched for another.

Here I suggested that Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt, Catholic League professional umbrage taker Bill Donahue, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, anti-marriage troublemaker Maggie Gallagher, and Senator Rick Santorum would be happy to invest Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson with the scepter of St. Peter.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2015

Rowan County Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who worked her refusal to issue to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses into national fame, subsequently boasted of having a private audience with the Pope. It eventually came to light that her private audience was shared with dozens of other Vatican visitors, and was private only in the sense that she hadn't brought the right-wing media along.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2020

Pope Francis gave his blessing to "civil unions" rather than marriage equality for same-sex couples in the fall of 2020 (although some conservative Catholics disputed the translation in English-speaking media of the papal Latin "convivenia civil"). A majority of the Catholic majority on the McConnell Supreme Court have been itching to overturn the 2014 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling favoring marriage equality in this country.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2021

Franciscan liberality notwithstanding, Catholic orthodoxy continues to condemn homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered."

As with the Anglican, Methodist, fundamentalist, and other denominations, antigay animus is especially dominant among Catholic clergy in much of Africa. Pope Francis's dialogue in this next cartoon is a direct quote, somewhat edited between panels two and three:

February, 2024

Ninety bishops and cardinals published a letter strenuously objecting to that papal pronouncement. They will be speaking up loudly as their conclave meets to elect a successor to this modern-day Pope. 

Don't be surprised to see someone more in the mold of Benedict XVI... if not Innocent IV.

✍

When I scour newspapers and magazines from 100 years ago for these Graphical History Tours, I never come across Pope Pius XI in U.S. editorial cartoons. I suppose that Protestant cartoonists didn't pay much attention to what Pius XI had to say about anything, and any Catholic cartoonists never presumed to differ with him. He did issue encyclicals criticizing capitalistic greed and warning against socialism and communism.

After initially supporting fascism in his native Italy and in Germany, Pius XI would issue an encyclical in 1937, smuggled in to Nazi Germany, lashing out against violations of a concordat between the Nazi state and the Holy See. In Mit brennender Sorge, Pius condemned "pantheistic confusion," "neopaganism," and "the so-called myth of race and blood," which he called a form of idolatry.

I bring that up in regard to modern-day cartoonists such as Michael Ramirez, who apparently believe that papal pronouncements on current politics are something new with Pope Francis.

"You'll Have to Leave That Behind" by Michael Ramirez for Las Vegas Review Journal, April 21, 2025

Pius XI never stood up to Benito Mussolini, although he was scheduled to deliver an address on February 11, 1939 in which he was expected to denounce il Duce's laws aping Nazi Arianism. The Pope died on February 10, however, and Mussolini tried to have all 300 copies of the address destroyed.

Under the next Pope, Pius XII, the Roman Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the atrocities of Mussolini and Hitler. 

Today's Republican Party and its Amen Corner cartoonists, teledemagogues, and duck dynasts would most certainly have approved.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If any of my fellow editorial cartoonists were not taking Easter Sunday off, how many of them do you suppose would have put out cartoons for this morning about Pope Francis schooling Vice President Shady Vance on "the true ordo amoris"?

I was at my drawing board late into the night, but that wasn't what my cartoon was about.

I decided against scanning the reverse of a $10 bill into the background of my cartoon. Otherwise, my cartoon might have looked like this.

Q Toon: But Only One at a Time

 

An interviewer from La Stampa asked Pope Francis about objections raised by conservative cardinals, bishops, and scholars in Africa and the U.S. to his approval of clergy blessing same-sex couples. I've included part of his reply verbatim (very slightly edited at the ellipsis).

Lest one mistake the Pope for Revrunt Marryin' Elvis at Our Lady of the Las Vegas Strip, he explained his reasoning in the interview:

"The Gospel is to sanctify everyone," he said. "Of course, there must be goodwill. And it is necessary to give precise instructions on the Christian life (I emphasize that it is not the union that is blessed, but the persons). But we are all sinners: why should we make a list of sinners who can enter the Church and a list of sinners who cannot be in the Church? This is not the Gospel."

His explanation did not sit well with the bouncers of the Roman Catholic Church. A group of 90 of these conservatives published a hysterically-worded letter this month, bemoaning that with this Pope's stance, "The threat does not become smaller but more serious, since the error comes from the Roman See, and is destined to scandalize all the faithful, and above all the little ones, the simple faithful who have no way of orienting and defending themselves in this confusion."

There is a long tradition of Popes summarily making sudden, unilateral changes to church guidelines. Not frequently, of course — consider how long it took them to realize that an omniscient God ought to be able to understand languages other than centuries-dead Latin. But sudden, significant changes in praxis date all the way back to St. Peter, the OG Pope, abruptly deciding that more people would be attracted to his religion if it ignored all those rules about not eating shellfish and pork.

Official changes to Catholic doctrine is not what blessings are all about, according to Father Chris Ponnet, chaplain to the LGBT ministry of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

"The church continues to maintain that the sacrament of marriage is between a man and a woman for the rest of their life," he says.
Ponnet, who is the archdiocese's chaplain to its gay and lesbian ministry, says he always declines to attend the civil weddings of same-sex couples he knows because he doesn't want there to be any confusion. He says the church is clear that it does not condone or recognize such marriages and that his presence could lead people to think "it's all OK."
What the pope is allowing, he adds, is similar to how priests bless all sorts of things, such as homes, a new school year and pets.
"It's simply saying that we who believe in blessings," Ponnet says, "should be instruments of blessings to others."
And he says it's important to be clear and precise about exactly what priests are blessing and what they are not blessing. "We're not blessing the relationship," he says. "We're blessing the individuals in front of us. And I appreciate the pain that that causes, and I don't know how to get around that." 

It may take more centuries than Fr. Ponnet nor you nor I are likely to witness, but I have faith that someday, even the Roman Catholic Church will figure out how to get around that. 

Q Toon: Holy Matrimony, More or Bless

There must be an appropriate liturgy in the Roman Catholic missal for blessing a same-sex couple; perhaps all it takes is a few Search And Replace edits to the rite for blessing a house or a meal or a football team.

As encouraging as it is to see Pope Francis willing to make this modest accommodation for same-sex couples in the Catholic Church, I'll wait to see what his successor has to say about it before I get my hopes up that his church has entered the 21st Century.

Or that it is willing to hearken back to the medieval and earlier rites of affrèrement or adelphopoiesis, a plighting of troth between unrelated male adults to live together sharing "un pain, un vin, et une bourse" (one bread, one wine, and one purse). No mention of un lit, but different-sex wedding rites seldom mention that, either. 

The priest in today's cartoon might check out the congregational records of the Monastery de San Salvador de Vilanova de Lourenzá for the 1061 church wedding of Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz. I wouldn't be surprised if their union had been sealed with a Holy Kiss.

You couldn't ask for a more traditional wedding.

Q Toon: Qui Tollis Crimina Mundi

 

Pope Francis has been preaching lately against the criminalization of homosexuality, most recently along with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Rt. Rev. Iain Greenshields, the Presbyterian moderator of the Church of Scotland as the three were returning from an ecumenical pilgrimage to South Sudan.

The Pope isn't backing down from Catholic dogma that homosexual acts are a sin, mind you, but in light of antigay laws in 57 countries around the world — 11 of which make it punishable by death — and moves in some of those nations to make being gay or lesbian even more illegal than it already is, I for one appreciate the Pope for speaking out.

For the record, the Anglican Communion worldwide is deeply divided over issues surrounding LGBTQ+ persons, while the Presbyterian Church is officially welcoming.

Now, as for whether wearing white after Labor Day or putting pineapple on pizza is the greater crime, I defer to the experts. Or at least to my Italian-American husband if I know what's good for me. 

Some people consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral. And some people come to the State of the Union in February wearing this:

I suppose it could be worse.

But we were discussing men's fashion today, and — not having seen whether Senator Fetterman was wearing his hoodie Tuesday night — in the halls of the Holy See, not those of Congress.

They don't observe Labor Day in Rome, of course. At least, not in September. Like the rest of the civilized world, they celebrate May Day. If there are fashionistas at the Vatican, the proscription against wearing white would come after the Feast Day of St. Ultan of Ardbraccan this year. 

Although I'm pretty sure that the Pope gets a dispensation either way.

Q Toon: Match Game

There were a lot of plaudits from religious liberals for Pope Francis last week after he gave his blessing for civil unions for same-sex couples.

Subtitles in the documentary "Francesco," premiered at the Rome Film Festival, translate the Pope's comments as: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. What we have to have is a civil union law—that way they are legally covered. I supported that.”

This is a reiteration of his previously offered opinion on the topic, although some conservatives quibble that "civil union" is an inaccurate translation of his phrase, "convivencia civil"; they claim he merely referred to "civil cohabitation," whatever difference that makes in the context of having a law about it.

Here in the United States, marriage equality has been the law of the land since the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, but two, perhaps now three, of the Justices are eager to overturn that ruling. The others in the Court's right-wing majority might have been less inclined to annul over half a million marriages overnight, but they might be amenable to taking Pope Francis's cue by floating the possibility of foisting something less than marriage upon us as a consolation prize. 

My husband and I got married shortly after the ruling in Obergefell came down, having gotten a civil union six years earlier. The two are not the same thing: there is no federal law recognizing civil unions; the IRS has no provision for couples civilly unioned filing jointly. (See, there isn't even a verb for it!) Hospitals, especially those with a faith-based affiliation, are free to interpret HIPAA laws to exclude non-married couples. 

It's no just a question of having to deal with bakers and florists who believe in being assholes for the Lord.

Well, anyway, kudos to Pope Francis for being more enlightened than your immediate predecessor.

I just wish we didn't have Supreme Court justices heading us back to the Dark Ages.

Q Toon: Kim's Private Audience

While I was busy at my drawing board with last week's National Coming Out Day cartoon, a story leaked out that was a gay editorial cartoonist's dream topic. So, with apologies to editors of weeklies who would rather have seen this week's cartoon last week and vice versa:

Liberals who have felt that Pope Francis was one of their own were dismayed when rumors began to emerge that Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis had taken time away from obstructing the duties of her office for a "private audience" with Pope Francis during his visit to the U.S. Could it be that this Pope, with all his talk of climate change, economic justice, and "Who am I to judge?" is but a cafeteria liberal?

First reports made it seem that Kim and Francis had met as the leaders of Roman Catholicism and American Apostolicism for intense discussions of strategic policy. We now know, of course, that Kim Davis's private meeting with Pope Francis was only private insofar as it was conducted indoors without a live broadcast feed. She met with the Pope along with a couple dozen other people who each had enough time to exchange "Hello, I'm so glad to meet you" greetings, arranged by some Vatican functionary in charge of deciding who the Pope gets to shake hands with.

We also know that Pope Francis did meet privately with a gay couple, half of whom was a student of his back home in Argentina -- a meeting which someone hastened to publicize after Davis started advertising her meeting of him. (And presumably, that someone was someone other than the functionary who invited Davis to that subsequent meet-and-greet.)

In the end, Kim Davis would probably have been better off wrangling an invitation to sit down with Robert Mugabe.

Francis at the U.N.

--from Pope Francis's address to the United Nations this morning.

Q Toon: Sistine Canticles

Q Syndicate✒Oct 23, 2014

Last week, I drew a deliberately detail-free cartoon: a rainbow, a Lady Justice, and some calligraphy. Anything further would have distracted from the point of the cartoon. As a result, it didn't take a particularly long time to draw once I started inking it.

This week's cartoon is another story altogether, and at one point I emerged from my basement lair in order to let ink dry before going back and adding background details. Chris asked me if I were finished drawing yet. "No," I told him. "I'm drawing the Sistine Chapel."

"Are you going to finish in time to go on vacation this year?"

Q Toon: Small Minds Rule!

This cartoon could have been one big mess of labels.

I had initially thought that the reporter talking to Pope Francis (I shouldn't need to label him, should I?) ought to have the name of the magazine in which the "small-minded rules" interview appeared. But the magazine's name is American, and having that as the label would be confusing in its own way.

But how to label the cabal in the larger panel of the cartoon? "American Catholic Conservatives"? Admittedly, I have enough room in the panel's pan-handle for that, but it's awfully clunky. It would be clunkier still to label them each individually, although I really can't expect any reader to be able to identify all of them. Two of them have never appeared in my cartoons before.

Here are the answers to the American Catholic Conservative Quiz.

From left to right: Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt. Nienstedt has required Catholic students in his diocese to attend lectures expounding the evils of marriage equality, has issued orders to priests that if they disagree with his antigay stands they should shut the hell up about it, and has declared that condoms are the work of the devil.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Is there any need to explain his virulent antigay streak?

House Speaker John Boehner. He "can't imagine" ever supporting gay marriage. And then there's the allegation by former Congressman Bob Ney that on an overseas junket, Boehner said of a staffer, "Yeah, he's a good guy. I think he's a fag." I needed a Catholic politician currently in office (other than Scalia), and Boehner seemed like the most recognizable of the lot -- enough so that I could put him in the back of the crowd.

Former Senator, 2012 presidential candidate, and frothy mixture Rick Santorum, who famously equated same-sex marriage with "man-on-dog" bestiality.

National Organization for Marriage harridan Maggie Gallagher. I've drawn her often enough now that my caricature of her is actually my caricature of my caricature of her. If she hasn't been in your state lately to man the battlements against marriage equality, her face might not be familiar to you; I've been criticized before for not identifying her.

Catholic League blowhard Bill Donohue. This is my first try at his face, which should be familiar to prime-time cable crosstalk-fests and South Park devotées. Whenever anyone slights the Catholic Church in any way, no matter how justified the slight may be, Bill Donohue is on TV quicker than Gloria Allred to defend its integrity to the death.

Q Toon: Copulabis Impares

Can two celibate men share the Vatican without driving each other crazy?

Q Toon: Clandestine Gay Network

Pope Francis received the long-dreaded report last week about the Vatican's lobby of homosexual priests, bishops, cardinals, and butlers -- a clandestine network so entrenched that they even have their own dating site.

Say, wasn't Clandestine one of those medieval popes?

Casting Call for Pope Francis: The Movie

Can we get Jonathan Pryce?

Toon: Francis I

In honor of the first Argentinian Pope, my first cartoon of Francis I:

I was monitoring the announcement of the new Pope on the Daily Telegraph's web site yesterday afternoon; the ladies' Bible study was meeting across the hall and they wanted to be told who the new Pope was as soon as it was known.

As the world waited, a band had marched out and played a couple very brief snippets of tunes that many in the waiting crowd knew and tried to sing along with. When the band abruptly stopped, the crowd kept singing, but the band didn't rejoin them. This was several minutes before the lights came on in the chamber behind the balcony window, so it wasn't because the announcement was imminent.

The initial announcement was made in Latin -- including Latinizing the man's name -- so for a while, all I knew was that the cardinals had elected Georgium Marium Somebody and he had taken the name Franciscum. If there was any mention of Argentinibus or Bonibus Airibus, I completely missed it. I only took one semester of Latin in college, which was enough to figure out qui vicit quem, but the class never got around to learning New World geography.

Once news sites started reporting the name of The New Guy, I went in and broke the news to the Bible study group. They all were surprised that it wasn't Timothy Dolan (who used to be the archbishop in our area, so the local media had been echoing New York media speculation of Dolan's chances).

For my own part, however, that I had suspected that this Pope would turn out to be either Latin American or Italian.

I had no idea he would turn out to be both.

Habemus Twinkiam!

But will he declare supersized soda pop anathema?

(Screen grab of Google News this afternoon.)