Francis, the Perfect 19th-Century Pope

As The Wall Street Journal recalled Friday, in 2013 he told a group of several hundred nuns that they must be spiritual “mothers” instead of “spinsters,” and he compared a torpid Europe to a grandmother who is “no longer fertile and vibrant.”

He did make an important gesture last month when he said that in the jubilee Year of Mercy, starting in December, priests could absolve women who had had an abortion.

And blessedly, he’s made the Vatican end its two inquisitions into American nuns. But stopping the torment of innocent nuns does not constitute much of a nod to modernity. The church is in arrested development.

Paul Vallely, the author of a respected biography, “Pope Francis: Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism,” calls women the pontiff’s “area of greatest weakness.”

“He understands there is a problem with the role of women in the church and talks frequently about the need for a ‘new profound theology of women,’ but he has no idea how to implement this,” Vallely told me. “In practice, he is a man of a certain age from a macho, Latin American cultural background who has limited understanding of the women in the modern world, despite the fact that he has had a number of close women friends.»

“I have spoken to a couple of them and they have discussed these issues with him, so he is not unaware of them. But he seems to have no idea of how to make a solution to work within the orthodox framework of Catholicism.”

Vallely praised the pope’s message in America as “masterful,” noting he softly but firmly reprimanded the U.S. bishops for hectoring on the culture wars and kept up his “uncompromising” stance on climate change. “Throughout, he challenged without wagging his finger” on social inequality, poverty, welcoming migrants and immigrants, and ending the death penalty — as though he was conscious of “being a guest in someone else’s home.”

But the biographer said that, for him, Francis’ “slow progress on sex abuse” and his lack of forward motion on women are “his huge areas of weakness.”

As the noted religion writer Kenneth Briggs told me: “People here are ardently projecting a lot of things onto this pope, including a liberal new day for the church. But there hasn’t been any change in the moral teachings. It’s to Francis’ credit, I guess, that he gets credit for things he hasn’t done.”

In his speech to Congress, Pope Francis praised Dorothy Day, a social activist who talked about having an abortion, putting her in the company of Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. At the United Nations, Malala Yousafzai looked on approvingly as he spoke about the right of all girls to have an education. And at St. Patrick’s on Thursday night, he thrilled the American nuns present when he thanked them, asking, “What would the church be without you?” and saying, “I love you very much.”

But even as he was spreading the love to nuns, a priest in San Francisco, Father Jack McClure, was being sanctioned for appearing at a conference on women’s ordination in Philadelphia last weekend — a conference he said he attended in the spirit of the pope’s call for dialogue.

According to The National Catholic Reporter, Father McClure got a message from his archbishop in San Francisco, the archconservative Salvatore Cordileone — who supported a pastor who banned altar girls this year — that he could no longer celebrate Mass, starting in October.

“I feel the pain of being silenced,” the priest told the Catholic paper, “and in this silencing, I am beginning to feel the deep pain women feel all over the church.”

If only the pope could apply this Golden Rule: Do unto women as you would have them do unto you.