Fr. Claude Barthe
May 8, 2025
In the French Academy, we'd call this an “election of a Marshal”: on the second day of the conclave, in the fourth vote, Robert Francis Prevost just won an absolute majority, faster than Cardinal Ratzinger in 2005 and Cardinal Bergoglio in 2013.
Born in Chicago in 1955, a religious of the Augustinian order, a highly competent jurist with long pastoral experience in Peru, where he became Bishop of Chiclayo, he was called by Pope Francis to become Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in 2023.
All commentators will now ask whether he will be a faithful follower of Pope Francis. The answer is both yes and no.
Yes, because he belongs to what Benedict XVI, distinguishing between the two possible interpretations of Vatican II, described as the “hermeneutic of rupture,” or what we would call in political terms, necessarily approximate when it comes to Church matters, the center-left (the “hermeneutic of reform in continuity,” that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, being something like the center-right of the conciliar universe). He is a great friend of Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, who has been making Bergoglian bishops for the past two years, and who was supported before the conclave by the most determined progressives (for example, Andrea Grillo, a fiery anti-traditional liturgy activist, couldn't help but congratulate himself highly on his forthcoming election before the opening of the conclave).
No, because his personality is very different from that of his predecessor. A wise, level-headed man who listens attentively to his interlocutors and collaborators, he presents himself - even in the old-fashioned clothes he donned to appear in the loggia of St. Peter's - as a recenterer, a moderate progressive. Leo XIV will also be different from Francis, whether or not the synodal wind continues to blow, because he will not be able to govern alone. Some of the “heavyweights” in Francis' Sacred College, who were with him at the start of the conclave, such as Cardinal Parolin, Francis' Secretary of State, Cardinal Pizaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Cardinal Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Bishops' Conference, could form with others a kind of strong government that might well be needed to deal with the great turbulence to be expected in the Church and in the world. Admittedly, these men are the very opposite of conservatives, even if Pizaballa is compatible with them, but they are realists.
What is more: the irreversible advance, since Vatican II, of religious freedom applied within the Church has produced a kind of Anglicanization of Catholicism. Now, every Catholic, whether theologian or the rank-and-file faithful, can “tinker” with his or her own Creed and morals. And this fragmentation, inevitable insofar as the rule of faith has been bracketed - to put it briefly, the exercise of the ordinary magisterium has been replaced by that of the pastoral or authentic magisterium - is theorized by those Jesuits, thinkers of a post-Catholicism, who are the Franco-German Christoph Theobald and the influential Italian Antonio Spadaro.
Christoph Theobald, professor emeritus at the Centre Sèvres in Paris, advocates “a polyhedral vision” of the Communion of Churches (for example, in the collective work edited by Angelo Maffeis, Una Chiesa “Esperta in Umanità”. Paolo VI interprete del Vaticano II, Studium, 2019). In the same vein, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, former director of La Civiltà Cattolica, published an article in La Repubblica on May 4 entitled “The real challenge is not unity but diversity,” asserting that “the future Church will be plural.” Since “differences are a characteristic of global society and a structural condition,” the Church, like any other collective reality, can no longer “express itself in a uniform, monochordal way,” as this would mean ignoring this transformation.
Very symptomatically, he replaces the unity of the Church with its cohesion, the price of its integration into the mental universe of modern democracy: “Cohesion cannot be sought in uniformity, but in the capacity to welcome and harmonize multiplicity.” This is one of Matteo Zuppi's favorite themes.
Fr. Spadaro certainly defends the “freedom” of the German Synodal Way, but also, paradoxically, like Cardinal Zuppi, that of the traditionalists! He sees no problem with holding on to the old liturgy and catechism, and points out that Pope Francis has given SSPX priests the faculty of valid confession, just as, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had given Lefebvrist priests the possibility of having a legal Catholic presence in Argentina.
If we assume that the new pontificate will try to steer the ship as best it can amidst an archipelago of islands and reefs -- those of the priesthood of married men, the female diaconate, the demands of LGBT Christians, and also of Catholics who hold to pre-Council doctrine -- we get lost in questions and conjecture.
Alberto Melloni, leader of the Bologna School, who edited a monumental History of Vatican II (in which Cardinal Tagle also participated), likes to say that the Council of Trent has always been present in the background of conclaves since Vatican II.
Like a guilty conscience, we'd say.
In the conclave that has just ended, Trent was more or less represented by the conservative group (20 cardinals?), with little numerical weight after the steamroller that the Francis pontificate represented for this trend, but with a significant moral presence. In particular, Cardinal Müller's statements on the Pope's role in confirming his brothers in the faith remain a landmark. So, too, does the fact that Cardinals Burke and Sarah are known defenders of the traditional liturgy.
It is not hard to imagine that this pontificate, over and above the enthusiasm of the early days -- not least because the Curia and the bishops will be able to breathe and no longer feel the fussy authoritarianism of the previous one weighing on them -- will come up against insurmountable difficulties.
These will be doctrinal difficulties.
It will remain for these episcopal and cardinal witnesses, of whom we can hope in virtue of Christian hope that they will be more and more numerous, to show themselves, Christ and his Mother coming to their aid, equal to these times of dramatic crisis, a crisis which has been heightened by a pontificate that promulgated documents such as the declaration Fiducia supplicans and the exhortation Amoris lætitia (which, in its n. 301 states that in certain cases adulterous spouses who know the moral norm can be in divine grace).
These Successors of the Apostles will have to prophetically oppose the teaching of heterodoxies of all kinds that persist and may emerge. And they will have to urge the Pope to confess the faith and confirm his brothers.
