He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.

Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.