With Francis' insights, actions and insistence on the presence of God's infinite mercy and love -- and our obligation as Jesus' followers to share in and extend both mercy and love -- the failure of institutionalized religion becomes more and more apparent.  Your "relic of primitive religion" isn't really a relic; it (in the RCC, at least) has been alive and functioning through Fr. Coyne's "Theology of Fear" since early centuries and peaked with the oppressive counter-Reformation Church of pre-Vat II days, remnants of which linger on in fundamentalist Catholic agendas.  Maybe in a couple of centuries, historians and cultural anthropologists will be able to point to Vat II, John XXIII and Francis (among others) as the point when ordinary people responded to the Spirit in both rejecting Roman primitivism and seeking the essence and essentials of the Gospel. Great numbers of "former Catholics" and "nones" indicate to me religion's failure. Francis' viewpoint is completely valid, IMO.