Hey everybody,
Pope Francis is dead, to begin with.
Yesterday evening in Rome, Cardinal Kevin Farrell oversaw the sealing of the official papal apartments in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
The sealed door of the papal apartment in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
Soon after, Farrell oversaw the sealing of doors at the pope’s suite of rooms in the Santa Marta guesthouse:
Credit: Vatican Media.
Across Rome, and far from the city, bells tolled in church towers.
In the Church’s basilicas, umbrellinos — symbols of the pontiff’s universal leadership — were quietly closed, to signify a vacant papal chair in Rome.
And priests, at the altars of churches in near every country on the planet, had the strange experience of praying the canon without reference to the pope in Rome — for many, ordained in the last decade, it was the first time they’ve prayed that way.
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The pope died almost a month after he was discharged from the Gemelli Hospital, where he spent weeks in intensive care, with the world getting daily updates about how he slept, how he ate, how he breathed.
When he left the hospital, he seemed to be picking up steam, leaving his rooms in a wheelchair to pray in St. Peter’s Basilica, to meet with king and queen and vice president, to greet children and their surprised parents, and then, on Easter Sunday, to be driven for one final lap around St. Peter’s Square, waving feebly to pilgrims.
Perhaps those closest to him knew it was the end, but for many Catholics, it seemed things were getting better for the pope, that he might have months still to live, that his sickness was behind him.
And then he died, on Easter Monday morning — he had a stroke, and then his heart collapsed.
His body now lies in state in the chapel where he prayed:
Credit: Vatican Media.
They’ll bury Pope Francis on Saturday, we’re told, at St. Mary Major Basilica, his favorite Roman Church.
There is not now a clear front runner for pope, as there was in 2005, when the odds-on favorite was elected, and in 2013, when the odds-on favorite went home a cardinal, and Francis took up the papacy.
The College of Cardinals is fragmented, cardinals have told me they know few of their confreres, and that the college will be looking for leadership in the weeks to come.
After the pope is buried, the cardinals will go into days of meetings, there’ll be speeches, and coffee break chats, and friendships formed. By the time they enter the conclave — reportedly on May 5 — there may well be a growing consensus, or it may be still anyone’s election.
Owing to the way the rules work, the conclave will probably be short, and heavily favor the most well-known cardinals, especially those who work in the Vatican.
Ahead of the conclave, prognosticators will tell you the most viable candidates, as they see it — some with informed views, some just wish-casting.
And even at The Pillar, we’ll tell you something about the cardinals we think will be in the discussion in the weeks to come.
Parolin’s name will feature heavily in the media. So will the names Zuppi, Grech, Erdo, Tagle, Pizzaballa. I’ll urge you not to sleep on the lesser-known curial cardinals who could emerge in the conversation, like Cardinal You Heung-sik, or the ecclesial leaders garnering respect far from Rome, like Kinshasha’s Cardinal Ambongo.
Already Cardinal Robert Sarah is trending on social media, having become practically a meme candidate, even while his likelihood of being elected is quite small. Pizzaballa, too, is having a moment as kind of media papabile, though it’s not clear whether he’s especially well-known among the College of Cardinals.
In short, most of us know very little about what will happen in the conclave, and there’s little we can predict. In the weeks to come, we’ll tell you what we’re hearing, and what trends seem to be garnering steam in Rome, and then we’ll all wait to see who emerges as the Roman Pontiff.
During his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that the selection is not infallible — that men pick the pope, and can make good or bad choices. It is true that politics plays a role. It is true that tribal alliances shape conversations. And it is true that the choice of pope matters — that the papacy is an office of real importance for the mission of the Church in the world.
But how we understand and experience the papacy is changing — and has been since the collapse of the papal states — and the selection of the next pope will shape it all the more.
We have seen in recent papacies a tendency to view or frame the pope much like a president, with policy priorities and a platform and pet initiatives — an agenda — rather than principally as a steward of mysteries, whose job is to serve as a point of unity, a safeguard of truth, and a hinge to the traditions of the Church. Recent popes have been said to embody a kind of “imperial papacy,” though Benedict XVI, in his eight years, seemed to push back on that, as much as he could.
As the cardinals gather for conclave, they face real questions about what they think the papacy should be, and what kind of man can deliver that.
They also face the reality of a Church sharply divided after the Francis papacy, with a 12-year period of tumult and deep disagreement, amplified by Francis’ complex personality and his often-dizzying desire to “shake things up,” without always a clear sense of what exactly he was shaking them for.
While Francis spoke often about the peripheries beyond the Church, he left open real questions about the power of marginalization and group think within ecclesial life — unpacking his papacy likely means acknowledging wounds he left behind. And beyond Francis himself, the pandemic and the sexual abuse crisis sowed wells of deep distrust in some corners, and bishops have seemed uncertain about how to respond to that, or even acknowledge it.
Decisions for the cardinals about the Petrine office come amid broader change — what Francis rightly described as a change of era — as instantaneous global communication reshapes human culture, politics, finance, and community.
We don’t know yet what that means for the voice and life of the Church, even as we do know that 1960s reflections on the “Church in the modern world” seem already to address mostly a bygone time, and not the world in which we actually find ourselves.
We also know that the next pope, however he helps the Church navigate the mission of proclaiming the Kingdom, also has immediate responsibilities which will not wait — most especially the Vatican’s compounding deficits, dwindling coffers, and perilous credit rating.
In time, we may see that circumstance as Providential, and the catalyst to great reform and renewal — but in the short term, the acute cash crunch portends difficulty.
So where are we?
Whatever you think of Francis, most Pillar readers will concede that the last 12 years were not easy for the Church.
Some cardinals seem to acknowledge that.
Some see in Francis — they’ll say privately — the last triumph of an accommodationist theology that did not work to effect conversions or deepen faith.
But others seem convinced that Francis was a model for leadership in a changing world, that his “paradigm shifts” were the right one for the Church’s mission, and that the difficulty of the last 12 years came from resistance — to Francis, and to the Holy Spirit.
Other pressing issues loom large. But the cardinals will select a pope in a decision widely seen as a referendum on these questions — Was Francis a good pope? Was his direction the right one? Or is it time for a course correction?
Whatever happens, it’s worth remembering that Christ is risen. He conquered death. He formed the Church as the sacrament of salvation. At altars around the world, he is truly present.
And in eras good and bad for the Church and her mission, he calls us to be saints.
Jesus Christ is risen.
First, you can read, if you’ve not already, our obituary on Pope Francis here.
I think it’s a good snapshot of a complicated figure, and worth sharing with people who want to understand him.
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Soon after the pope’s death was announced, our own Edgar Beltran headed to St. Peter’s Square.
More than an hour before the rosary for the pope’s soul began, Edgar found the mourners who had come were interspersed with the ordinary weekday traffic in the square — tourists taking selfies and sightseers in line for St. Peter’s, not yet realizing what had happened.
Eventually, thousands of people would be there to mourn. But Edgar was there to ask some of the first to arrive what the pope meant to them. One mourner — a Capuchin from Brazil — told The Pillar how he was an influence on his conversion to Catholicism.
“To me, personally, the pope meant everything. I come from a Protestant background, so the pope was the Beast of the Apocalypse, responsible for all the heresies in the world.”
“But I converted six years ago and this feeling changed from a deep hatred towards the figure of the successor of Peter to now a feeling of deep love, affection, and veneration. The rule of my order says that we must always be at the feet of the Holy Roman Church, and that’s the pope, he represents the whole Church,” he added.
Another priest, from Ivory Coast, summed up the mixed feelings that others expressed to Edgar.
“I was ordained one month after his election,” Fr. Alati from Ivory Coast told The Pillar. “So he’s my pope, even if I wasn’t that close to him theologically…”
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Luke Coppen compiled the responses.
And as it happens it was Vladimir Putin, a figure who loomed large in the pope’s life in recent years, who reflected most concretely on what it might mean that the pope’s death came on Easter Monday:
“The fact that the pope passed away during the Easter period — I don’t know how it is among Catholics, but in Orthodox tradition, there is a belief that if the Lord calls a person to himself on the Easter holy days, it is a special sign that the person has not lived his life in vain, he has done a lot, did much good.”
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I saw online yesterday a Notre Dame historian explaining that in his view Francis did more than prior popes to “diminish the monarchical dimensions of the papacy.”
The evidence of this, according to historian John McGreevy, is the late pontiff’s “willingness to carry his own luggage,” and “to live in Santa Marta.”
I was struck by that, because I’ve talked in recent years with numerous Vatican officials who think that Francis’ decision to live in Santa Marta signified precisely the opposite: that Francis would do what he wanted, without regard to traditions, or the good reasons why those traditions have emerged.
That’s what the competing legacies of Francis will be. I recall a few weeks ago, when the pope was sick, that I talked on the same day to a Churchman who told me that Francis had “irreversibly changed the Church” — this man meant “for the better,” — and with another cleric, who told me that he believed Francis was “the worst pope in history.”
I mentioned some Bonifaces and Alexanders of ill repute, but to no effect.
Anyway, it will be decades, at least, before the history books — and the Church — reach a consensus on the legacy of Pope Francis. But in the meantime, Francis is already being remembered in some very different ways — and I wrote an analysis yesterday about the pope’s informal motto — hagan lio — contributed to the messy work of assessing his papacy.
The explainer is already needed, as there has been pushback online, even taken up by some bishops, about the fact that a “general congregation,” a meeting of cardinals, was scheduled today in Rome, and took place this morning.
The objection seems to be that not all cardinals have had the chance to get to Rome yet, and thus, having a general congregation is unfair, and possibly evidence that the entire conclave will be managed by curial insiders to achieve a desired outcome — in other words, that the hastily-scheduled first general congregation could be evidence that the fix is in, or at least that some cardinals are more equal than others.
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that it confuses general congregations with general congregations. Here’s what I mean:
Between now and when we have a pope, the college of cardinals will govern the Church, or at least manage things, until a new Bishop of Rome can be elected and installed.
When they get together to talk about logistics, the meetings are called general congregations. And they do usually begin a day or two after the pope dies, to start planning the details of his funeral and burial, and then the hospitality arrangements through the conclave.
They begin as housekeeping meetings.
But after the pope’s funeral, the general congregations take on more importance. Because at that point, they’re about housekeeping, but they’re also the opportunity at which cardinals — including those too old to enter the conclave — begin discussing what the Church needs, and what they think the conclave should actually do.
In other words, the general congregations become very important, and cardinals generally try to attend them.
But they start out just approving check requests and figuring out what days to give the curia off from work. And they always start very soon after the pope has died.
So why have people reacted like the first meeting today was some kind of conspiracy?
As I see it, four reasons:
- An uninformed media will sow chaos between now and the first day of the conclave, either by ham-fisted ignorance or to generate clicks and controversy. So stick with us instead of them.
- There’s a lot of lingering distrust out there from the synod on synodality, especially from the prelates who believed it was a managed process that didn’t actually hear the voices of participants or honor them, and who believe that Orwellian showrunners were duplicitous throughout.
- There is no less distrust from the handling of the Rupnik case, and the communication failures surrounding it.
- Cardinal Kevin Farrell.
Cardinal Farrell? What do I mean?
