THE CONCLAVE TO COME — There was a feeling among some Catholics that Pope Francis would, somehow, live forever. The ailing Pontiff had stared down death plenty of times. He had survived a serious respiratory infection as a young man, losing some of his lung in the process. Covid-19, surgeries, sciatica, a hernia, even the most recent hospitalization where his doctors considered ending treatment, none of it had stopped him. When the late Pope delivered the Angelus prayer and rode through St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, greeting the jubilant crowd of believers gathered there, he looked and sounded weak. Diminished, even. But few could have predicted that appearance would be his last and that just hours later, he would leave unfinished his ambitious project of reimagining the world’s largest Christian church and its place in a modern world. Catholicism now stands at a crossroads of Francis’ construction. Uncertain is the direction the Catholic Church will take under a new leader, who will be selected in the coming months. And no ideological faction of the church is at ease. As the late pontiff’s health declined in recent years, the prospect of an imminent conclave had instilled some dread in the hearts of progressives and conservatives alike. Because for all of the discussion of papabile — the feted contenders for the top job in the Catholic Church — conclaves are unpredictable and ultimately Bishops of Rome chart paths that defy the prophecies of even the most seasoned Vatican watchers. Francis was no exception to that phenomenon. The liberal Argentine Jesuit was named a cardinal by the architect of many of the church’s current structures, the more conservative late Pope Saint John Paul II. Francis also emerged from a College of Cardinals largely picked by John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, also a conservative. Francis, who was a liberal contender in the conclave to replace John Paul II, didn’t even show up on some of the media’s lists of contenders for the 2013 selection. Francis’ papacy was dominated with discussion of specific ecclesial issues — same-sex marriage, Church management, the lingering stain of the sex abuse scandal, whether to allow masses to be said in Latin, to name a few. Yet what defined and animated Francis’ papacy wasn’t any one hot-button topic. Instead, it was the struggle Francis demanded within the Catholic Church over what face it should adopt in the midst of a confounding modern era defined by increased irreligiosity, isolation and political polarization, global inequality, the buckling of the international order and the resurgence of armed conflict. Core to that struggle was one question: who should chart the direction of Catholicism? The priests or the laity — the people who sit in the pews, serve Communion, volunteer at the parish and do all the communal functions that keep parishes alive? In Francis’ view, it was the laity who needed to be empowered as a way to tackle the clericalism which created cultures of abuse in the Catholic Church. Core to that mission was the inauguration of the Synod on Synodality, a universal effort by the Church to listen to lay people and enact liturgical, pastoral and theological changes based on their perspectives. It was a project I unwittingly found myself to be a part of at Georgetown University, when I was asked to participate in a working group of students from Jesuit colleges and universities around the Americas as part of the Synod. Over Zoom, another Georgetown student and I presented the findings of our group of Jesuit colleges on the East Coast to Pope Francis directly, who took diligent notes on our comments and responded directly to our points. Francis often found himself bridging the divides in a global church straddling vastly different theological views and perspectives on the modern world. He frustrated European bishops hungry for the Catholic Church to embrace socially liberal causes — chiefly gay marriage — by pursuing incremental changes to church messaging that did not get ahead of more socially conservative church leaders in Africa and Asia. Those same conservatives at times chafed that Francis restricted the use of Latin Mass. Yet nowhere was Francis’ vision more aggressively and publicly resisted than in the United States. There, a crop of bishops cut from the cloth of John Paul II and Benedict actively resisted Francis’ efforts to devolve the church, emboldened by a fast-growing movement of far-right U.S. Catholic adult converts who embrace tradition and a revanchist embrace of Catholic personal values and teachings in response to the perceived failings of modernity. One former bishop closely aligned with that section of the church, Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, went so far as to call Francis “diabolically oriented” as many in that movement challenged Francis’ legitimacy. Francis also criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, condemning what he described as inhumane treatment of migrants, teeing up tensions with an administration which won a majority of votes from U.S. Catholics in the last election. Recent condemnations from Rome got sharp pushback from Vice President JD Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism who is admired by more traditionalist Catholics in the United States. Vance and Francis met briefly on Easter Sunday, hours before Francis died. Francis wasn’t shy about punishing his most vitriolic U.S. detractors. Strickland was removed from his ministry. Raymond Cardinal Burke, an American traditionalist known for his excessive vestments and his petty conflicts with Francis, lost his extravagant Vatican apartment. He also excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States who accused Francis of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse allegations against former Archbishop of Washington Theodore Cardinal McCarrick and rejected the findings of the modernizing Second Vatican Council. But Francis, in a departure from previous pontiffs, tolerated more dissent as part of his Jesuitical focus on discernment and navigating crises through debate and listening. He embraced crisis, so long as it did not stoke his bigger worry: conflict. “When the Church is viewed in terms of conflict — right versus left, progressive versus traditionalist — she becomes fragmented and polarized, distorting and betraying her true nature. She is, on the other hand, a body in continual crisis, precisely because she is alive,” Francis said in a December 2020 address to the Roman Curia, which governs the Vatican. “She must never become a body in conflict, with winners and losers, for in this way she would spread apprehension, become more rigid and less synodal, and impose a uniformity far removed from the richness and plurality that the Spirit has bestowed on his Church.” Whoever prevails in the coming conclave will have to reckon with the crisis of Francis’ making as tensions simmer in the Vatican, with profound implications on the lives of the over one billion Catholics around the world. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at ebazail@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ebazaileimil .
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