April 25 2025 - 10:00am
One of Pope Francis’s great anxieties over the course of his pontificate was about not provoking divisions. He once told an ally, when discussing their shared plan to soften the Church’s stance on divorce: “If we speak explicitly […] you do not know what a terrible mess we will make. So we won’t speak plainly.” On another occasion, the liberal priest Fr James Martin pressed Francis towards some course of action, in Fr Martin’s words, “about LGBTQ stuff. And he said: ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. But if I do that, I will provoke a chain reaction.’”
In the end, this subterfuge and caution failed to achieve its intended effect. On those two issues and many more, the Francis era was one of violent division, with cardinals denouncing each other and whole national bishops’ conferences adopting diametrically opposite policies, while the Vatican issued increasingly confusing statements — and occasionally retracted them — in an attempt to keep the lid on.
All of which leads to an obvious question: how might the outcome of the forthcoming papal conclave worsen, or alleviate, those divisions?
Straight out of the blocks comes Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who served as the Vatican’s doctrine chief under Benedict XVI and Francis, but eventually fell out with the latter. According to the Times, Müller has warned that “The Catholic Church risks a schism if it elects another liberal leader like Pope Francis.” The paper doesn’t quote Müller’s actual words on this point: you are left to wonder, for a start, if he predicted a formal schism or just further internal hostilities. Still, it raises a timely point.
Müller’s warning, coming as it does from a fairly conservative voice, might seem rather too convenient. And, in truth, any pope will have to govern — or attempt to govern — a Church whose divisions are beyond any compromise. An example from this week: two days after Francis’s death, the ultra-liberal German bishops published guidelines on “blessing ceremonies” for same-sex relationships, divorced and remarried couples, and others who are outside the bounds of sacramental marriage. Dozens of other bishops’ associations have already said this is flatly incompatible with the Catholic faith; the Vatican, under Francis, also said so, before sort-of retracting the statement and then sort-of retracting the retraction. Expect this one to run and run.
Catholics sometimes complain that the media portrayal of a Church divided between “liberals” and “conservatives” is a caricature; but it isn’t a total caricature. There really are very different understandings, not just of the much-publicised questions around sex and gender, but over the liturgy, the workings of Church authority, and even the fundamental nature of Jesus’ message. And while the world expects the Church to become more liberal on such questions, committed Catholics — especially younger ones — are getting much more conservative. Those differences are becoming more explicit, more intractable, just as the papacy itself is becoming, in practice, a weaker center of unity.
Even so, Cardinal Müller has a point: a more progressive Pope would probably bring the greater risk of further division. That is one lesson of the Francis years. Because the Pope gave the impression of being progressive, he would excite huge expectations of dramatic change. And because liberal Catholics tend to be unclear, even in their own minds, perhaps, about how far they can go, that situation is inherently unstable.
Imagine a progressive Pope says he wants more recognition for women in the Church. Does he mean the Church should address the exploitation of nuns as cheap labor? Does he mean it would be nice to have some more laywomen in the upper reaches of the Vatican bureaucracy? Does he want to create some strictly non-sacramental role of “deaconess”? Or does he want to open the door to ordaining women priests? Or, eventually, to completely revising the institution of the priesthood as hopelessly mired in patriarchy?
In such circumstances, the conservatives feel everything as a threat, the progressives think this is their great chance to push things as far as they can go, nobody trusts what anybody one step to their left is saying, and the result is an almighty brawl.
There is, then, one purely practical advantage to a conservative pope: he can shrug his shoulders and say that the Church’s traditional teaching is clear and it’s not his to meddle with. It doesn’t stop the conflicts. But it does have a way of turning down the temperature.
Dan Hitchens is Senior Editor of First Things and co-author of the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Johnson.
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