The cardinals who traveled to Rome to elect the next Pope in a conclave next week sometimes seem ideologically polarized as many secular voters all over the world.
At first glance, they seem to divide along the types of left-right lines that characterize the political competitions elsewhere. Many conservative managers of the Roman Catholic Church had not agreed with Pope Francis, who was often a lover of liberals all over the world.
But the typical divisions between progressives and conservatives do not correspond so orderly to ideological battles within the Vatican and the wider Church. Although there are some exceptions among the cardinals, the question that has constantly marked Francis as liberal – his fierce defense on behalf of migrants and the poor – does not necessarily distinguish him, because the Catholic Church has made the call of the Gospel to shelter and feed the strangers a fundamental principle.
Ultimately, the choice of cardinals will be equivalent to a referendum on the legacy of inclusiveness and opening of Francis to change. This was “as he gave a sense of highly polarized life,” said Anna Rowlands, a teolica politician of Durham University in England.
Francis understood “what is at stake in polarization”, said Professor Rowlands, and was willing to accept the disagreement as a precursor for dialogue. “The danger is that the Church moves to a time when it could be tempted to choose a pole,” he said, that it could completely close the discussion.
More than each single number, the choice of the next pontiff will be dominated by a philosophical question: who deserves a say in determining the future of the Catholic Church?
Decision making
Francis often argued that regular practicing Catholics – including women and LGBTQ people – should be consulted on the direction of the church. He invited the lay people to sit with the bishops to discuss controversial issues in the Vatican meetings called Synods.
He was contrasted by the most conservative leaders, who could be eager to return to the centralized decision -making process. “I think the conversation will have to go in line with” Can we get away with it? “” Said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research in Cambridge, England.
Another key division is among those who believe that the Church should accommodate everyone – including those whose lives do not correspond to the traditional teachings of the Church – and those who think that only those who commit themselves to cowardly the Catholic doctrine must be admitted in the folding of the Church.
“It is that great vision of the Church that is sometimes the source of tension and apprehension,” said Rev. Agbonkhianmeghe E. OrobatoR, dean of the Jesuit theology school of Santa Clara University. “It is very different when you think of the Church as a perfect society or the closed society in which membership is defined by doctrinal fidelity or orthodoxy.”
Women in church
Two years ago, Francis for the first time allowed women to vote in a significant meeting of bishops. Last year, he focused a decision that women could be ordered as deacons that can preach and preside over weddings, funerals and baptisms.
Francis was clear that he wanted women to be authorized more options than the “altar girls or the president of a charity”, but resisted the idea that they needed to participate in the church hierarchy. In many places with priest deficiencies, women are increasingly carrying out the work of Minister to Congregate.
Conservatories say that allowing women to be deacons would create a path for them to become a priests. They claim that doing it would violate 2000 years of the church doctrine, despite what some experts say are the historical proof that women have acted as deacons in the initial church.
Even if the ordination of women remains controversial among the cardinals, it would be difficult to completely suffocate the debate due to the pressure of female Catholic activists.
Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, Archbishop of Tokyo, said in an interview last month that he had seen “nothing wrong with the order of women as deacons”. But he said: “There are still many problems that must be overcome”.
Married priests
The Church has a lack of priests in many countries. In 2019, a summit of the Roman Catholic bishops recommended Francis to allow married men to serve as priests in the remote Amazonian region, where the deficiency is particularly acute.
A year later, Francis said he needed more time to consider the reference proposal, deciding that the Church was not yet ready to raise his restriction of about 1,000 years that requires that the priests were single and celibate men. Many of his supporters who expected that he was a pope of radical change were felt disappointed.
Divorce
On the issue of divorced and remarried Catholics, Francis urged the priests not to treat them as pariah and welcome them with “wide open doors”.
Francis has opened the debate on the opportunity to allow divorced Catholics and remarried to receive communion even if they had not had their previous marriages canceled by a church court. But in the end, he retired from any change in the law of the Church and simply encouraged the priests to be welcoming for divorced and remarried Catholics.
“People who started a new union after the defeat of their sacramental marriage are not at all excommunicated and must absolutely not be treated that way,” said Francis. “Although their unions are against the sacrament of marriage, the Church, as a mother, seeks the good and salvation of all her children.”
Sexual orientation
Pope Francis inaugurated a new era for LGBTQ Catholics when in 2023 he allowed the priests to bless couples of the same sex. He clarified that the marriage was reserved for relationships between a woman and a man, but his changes have still fueled the anger of conservatives, especially in Africa and North America.
In countries in Africa and in other regions where homosexuality is a crime, Francis has explicitly condemned criminalization, but allowed the bishops to Africa to prohibit priests to bless couples of the same sex due to the danger for them if they had come out. In the cultures that stigmatized gay relationships, the clergy would have been given a “long period of pastoral reflection” to accept the new path that Francis always supported did not contradict the teachings of the Church.
Sexual abuse
Some of the church hierarchy may want to declare the crisis of sexual abuse by the Catholic priests. But abuse survivors and activists warn that practices and mentality in local parishes have not changed enough to prevent future cases or face the pain of the existing ones.
A declaration of the Vatican press office on Friday said that the cardinals were discussing sexual abuse in the Church as an “wound” to be kept “open”, so that awareness of the problem remains alive and can be identified concrete paths for its healing “.
The largest revelations have been concentrated in the United States, Australia and Europe. But in most Asia, Africa and Latin America, “much has not yet come out, so this will continue to row,” said Miles Panden, a historian who studies the Catholic Church at Oxford University.
The global South
The largest areas of growth for the Catholic Church are in Africa and Asia. The cardinals who select the next Pope are certainly discussing whether to choose someone from one of those regions. Anyone who choose will need to deal with the proliferation of cultures and traditions, as well as through spiritual inheritance, among the new followers. Some could come with different expectations on what role the faith plays in their life and how they should welcome its rules.
Regardless of the fact that the new Pope comes from those regions, “must be one who is ready to speak with the injustices that exist in relation between the global north and the global south in international politics”, said Nora Kofgnotra Non Terah, theological ethics at the University of Science and Technology of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. “A pope cannot escape from that in the 21st century.”
While the Church recruits new followers, it will also have to find a way to speak with its younger members. “Young people are no longer interested in taking directives and working with directives,” said dr. Nonetterah. “They want to ask questions and want to be asked questions.”