This idea was hardly absurd in theory; from Roman Empire days through missionary efforts, Christianity had often advanced through inculturation, importing a consistent religious message into varying cultural forms.

But Catholicism’s attempt to do the same with modern culture since the 1960s has largely seemed to fail. The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion.

This failure, and how exactly Catholics should interpret it, helps frame the debates roiling the church in the age of Pope Francis. One theory is that the evidence of the last 50 years suggests that modern culture is inherently anti-religious or anti-Catholic in some abiding way, which means the attempt to adopt its cultural forms and “accompany” its denizens will inevitably end in dissolution for the church itself.

Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).

The other view is that in fact inculturation has not gone far enough, that the church may have changed its liturgy and costumes, but it’s still held back by its abstract dogmas and arid legalisms, and that one final great leap into modernity, a renewed commitment to accompaniment and understanding and adaptation, is necessary for the church to gain what it sought when it began its great demystification project 50 years ago.

As pontiff, Francis has been on both sides of these debates. The radicalism of his economic and ecological vision, often portrayed as simply liberal, actually represents a kind of left-leaning pessimism that arguably points backward to the strenuous critiques of modernity issued by 19th-century popes. And at times this radicalism has been matched by his willingness to join conservative members of his flock in culture war — as recently in the Alfie Evans case in England, where the pope ended up in a public conflict with the more culturally accommodating sort of Catholic over whether to defer to medical professionals and deprive a brain-damaged toddler of oxygen because his life was judged no longer worth sustaining.