Pope Francis leaves at the end of his weekly general audience, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, on March 27, 2019. Given the ways Francis broke with his immediate predecessors, how should we understand continuity in a conclave that will elect a disruptor’s successor?Andrew Medichini/The Associated Press
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor at the University of Toronto.
Viewership of the movie Conclave is up nearly 300 per cent since the death of Pope Francis, according to streaming tracker Luminate. Global media outlets have devoted daily coverage to the goings on around the Vatican. Lavish websites, flashy betting apps and office pools are predicting contenders, called papabile.
Wise and earthy sayings abound: the man who enters the conclave as pope leaves as a cardinal; a fat pope follows a thin one; papal candidates are like peas bubbling in a boiling pot. Meanwhile, Catholics around the world are praying.
Binge-watching the 24-hour news cycle, gamification, aphorisms and Hail Marys. All of this, because 133 men aged 80 and under are about to elect the new leader of their organization. Who says the Catholic Church is irrelevant and out of touch?
The papal conclave begins on May 7. Personally, I pray no new pope is elected that morning: I will arrive around lunchtime to follow the conclave from Rome itself. After deliberating the current state and future direction of the Church in formal consistories and informal side-meetings, and praying both privately and together in sacred liturgies, cardinals from around the world will proceed into the Sistine Chapel.
Remaining there for however long it takes – conclaves have taken days, weeks, and in rare cases, years – the cardinals, who are open to God’s will through the mystical workings of the Holy Spirit, open to the cases made by and about their brothers, and open to the promptings of their own consciences, will select from among themselves the late Pope Francis’s successor. This man will become the 267th person to succeed a first-century Jewish fisherman named Simon, who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ chose and renamed to carry on his mission of love and mercy, justice and salvation: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”
Calling the next pope a successor to Francis and the 267th successor of St. Peter is saying the same thing – sort of. There is no more continuous institution, because there is no more continuous institutional leader in world history than the Catholic Church, with the pope at its helm. As such, there is always a deeper continuity at work in a papal succession. But given the ways Francis broke with his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI – if not in what he affirmed about the core teachings of the church, than certainly in how he went about doing so – how should we understand continuity in a conclave that will elect a disruptor’s successor?
“I want things messy and stirred up in the congregations,” Francis told pilgrims in Brazil early in his pontificate; admirers and detractors agree he led by example. Will the next pope extend Francis’s intentionally “messy” ways? Or will it be a clean-up job?
The conclave will be a referendum on Francis’s papacy, consistent with how any major election is a referendum on the person in power, their rivals, and outside pressures, as we have just learned in Canada. But it won’t be just that. Including and beyond the papacy itself, the Catholic Church has an unmatched global presence both in its self-understanding as God’s chosen vessel throughout human history, and in its size and reach – with 1.4 billion adherents, it administers religious and charitable works, and schools and hospitals around the world, while advocating for justice, peace, truth, beauty and goodness in all cultures and corridors of power.
At the same time, the church has been marred by internal corruption and concealment, sexual abuse by priests, and the historic legacies of its participation in disavowed national practices, like Canada’s residential school system. Further complicating things is the asymmetric secularization and liberalization of the wealthier parts of the world alongside increased Catholic numbers in the poorer and more conservative Global South. These factors, taken together alongside longstanding scandals, the need for more priests and questionable finances, amid many other areas of criticism and challenge, make the church an always-already source and site of reverence and support, growth and decline, suspicion and revilement. Given this irreducible, manifold reality, how limited, and limiting, it would be to frame the next pope as either an extension of Francis or a rejection.
Beyond that too-easy binary, all bets are off about what the next pope may pray, say, and do as the 267th person seeking to achieve a holy balance between being his own man and the church’s, between being the world’s most visible and authoritative religious leader, and the servant of the servants of God.