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| Thomas Cole, Desolation (1836) |
On May 7th, 2025, the world will turn its attention to Rome for the papal conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis. In a certain way of looking at things, it is a reminder that Catholicism, and only Catholicism, can capture the attention of the world when it comes to Christianity. That even her foes watch with great interest is a reminder of this fact. In addition to the importance, everyone loves a good story of intrigue, and conclaves are full of them. Already we are seeing the intrigue afoot.
Between now and the election of the next Pontiff, you will hear (or have heard) stories of various factions forming, with kingmakers (some no longer able to vote) calling shots behind the scenes, as everyone works to secure the vote of everyone else. You will hear stories (often leaked strategically to friendly media) about this candidate being truly feared, or this candidate’s stock having fallen. I do not think one should ignore these stories. They often contain useful information, and when the stakes of this intrigue are the governance of a Church we are all a part of, it is silly to say that this is of importance to Cardinals alone. What I instead want to propose is a challenge to the reader: what if the conclave, for all its potential entertainment, does not matter as much as we think?
Jorge Bergoglio ascended to the throne of Peter in 2013, and with it came an ambitious reform package. The merits of said package can be debated endlessly (it personally feels ghoulish to me to do so with his body only a few days in the ground) but the one thing that is clear is these reforms were intimately tied up in the personal vision of Jorge Bergoglio. He had a vision for how a global Church needs to operate, and he tried to enact it.
The Culture Shift
Since 2013, the secular and religious world has changed in profound ways. In 2013, immigration was at the periphery of Western politics. Now it is at its center, and the Vatican has tried (often in vain) to get states to adopt their ideas on the subject. Modern warfare has returned to Europe, and several countries stand on the brink of insolvency. All of this is mentioned before the megaton nuclear warhead on the political order that is the age of Donald John Trump.
The Church has also undergone a profound shift, often not in the way the Pope envisioned. It is undeniable that the Church in the West gets more conservative the younger it gets. This “conservative” disposition doesn’t necessarily mean pro/anti Francis, or any pontiff. It does mean that among a growing amount of clergy, there is a belief that the discussions that dominated the Church from the 1960s until the 2010s are stale, and the problems facing the Church today are simply different. These discussions aren’t irrelevant, and are useful for lessons learned, but they do not define the problem of today.
A third shift (profoundly influenced by the first two) is the collapse of trust in institutions throughout the West. In the post ww2 era, both Church and State advanced an idea that expertise could create a better society. While the benefits of this are hard to ignore, recent events have not been kind to this vision. In the secular world, the global financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic raised serious questions of how smart our experts really were, and if they really knew what they were doing, or if (in a more sinister sense) they knew what they were doing, and that was the problem.
The Church experienced this decay of trust in a different way. It was less on conspiracies (though those always exist) and more that the average faithful have an immense trust in their local pastor, and rapidly increasing degrees of indifference to borderline contempt the further you go from that local pastor. While theologians argued if the tumult surrounding Vatican II was his or their fault, most of the faithful began to look at these disputes with confusion as their parishes were closed. The abuse crisis took this lack of trust and supercharged it, to where we now live in a Church of broken institutions, for the first time in arguably centuries.
The Demographic Shift
Often independent of the above cultural shift came a demographic shift within the Catholic Church. The center of its energy left Europe and went to the peripheries of Africa. The power brokers in the Western Church were no longer Bishops and Cardinals, but wealthy laity and thinkers loosely attached (if attached at all) to the Church’s theological schools of thought. Those results have been unpredictable and continue to be unpredictable. Once a globalized Church was viewed as a victory for the progressives and liberals. That is, until the Africans marched into Rome and forced the Pope to bend the knee on Fiducia supplicans, after nearly revolting in 2014 at the synod on the family over divorce. Latin America, once the incubator of progressive reform, groaned and found itself rapidly turning Protestant. Thanks to the advent of social media (a communications revolution not seen since the printing press), information began traveling far faster than Rome could respond. On the above mentioned Fiducia supplicans, while Rome was reiterating Bishops were not free to offer their own interpretations, bishops conferences around the world did precisely that, often diametrically opposed to what Rome wanted. While Roman officials were digging their heels in, word had reached them that Rome and Africa came to a deal on the document, and other bishops quickly adopted it, whether or not that was the original intent.
A Papacy of Limits
These external influences can be debated as good or bad things, but they will shape the next pope as much as any ideological current within the Cardinals of the conclave. Whoever the next Pope is, he will have to deal with these issues, or more importantly, learn not to. To tackle these issues, the Church would need institutional competence, trust, and a load of cash to fund this trust. Right now, she has none of these things. In a divided Church, there is a real chance no pope will have a honeymoon with those not amenable to him. Wanting things done “Because I am Pope” will likely be an aspiration, not a realistic goal. Even if Bishops carry them out, it isn’t likely the laity will simply agree. (See the lukewarm reception to Traditionis custodes in the US and Europe, the German Synodal Path, or attempts to bring an eparchy in India under control leading to the pope and his men being burned in effigy by priests and the laity.) The next pope may be successful not by his ideological disposition, but his ability to have a disposition towards reality: he will have to carefully choose his battles and appoint bishops and administrators who are just as aware of what they cannot do as what the pope wants them to do.
While some may look at this and see danger, I see it as an opportunity. Once the Pope realizes that maybe something is not his to solve, the problem is turned over to those who can, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, not of the absolute monarch in Rome, is sought instead.
