An honest assessment from Amy Welborn:
No, ultramontanism is not new at all. But the phenomenon we’ve seen with the past twelve years – which grew out of trends from the previous two papacies, to be honest – a focus on the person of the Pope as the embodiment of the Faith in the world, one whose seemingly every comment on a plane bleeds (for some) into magisterial territory – that’s definitely new.
This did not begin with Pope Francis, of course, but during the course of his papacy, the personal appeal he held for some, along with his own style of theological writing (in which his primary sources were Scripture and his own words), leadership and communication – as well as almost universal ignorance and confusion about various levels of papal authority – only served to heighten, both in the public eye and the reality of Church governance – a sense of the papacy primarily as a space for Francis’ person, preferences and agenda to be centered, rather than an office of one who is, as Benedict XVI wrote, “….not an absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the authentic Tradition and all that traditionally entailed.”
This, it seems to me, is the most significant way that Pope Francis represented his generation that had come of age during and right after the Second Vatican Council. Not his particular disdain for the Traditional Latin Mass or his Häring-shaded moral pronouncements, but in the insistent location of the action of the Holy Spirit in an experience or a “reality” to the practical exclusion of much that has gone before, and even more seriously, a determination that what has gone before is of no value and even an obstacle to encountering God in the present. In short, the hermeneutic of discontinuity, right there.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/04/22/pope-francis-symposium/
What this “new paradigm” is remains ill-defined. But just as the Church after Nicaea had to struggle against the anti-Athanasian Arian remnants, so too now does the Church need to double-down on the ressourcement hermeneutical arguments put forward by popes John Paul and Benedict.