Reading Francis

Who’s next?

I’ve been working on surrendering, the Lenten discipline that I did not ask for, with mixed success. On the one hand, I am learning that the Christian life is largely a series of invitations to surrender – to surrender the illusion that you can control … much of anything; to surrender the idea that you know better than God what you need; to surrender the plans that you have for your life. Surrendering those things makes you freer and more joyful, and the only cost is that you have to trust that God really has all this under control, despite appearances to the contrary.

On the other hand, scenario planning is my love language. My latest vice has been the ESPN NFL Draft Simulator; despite the fact that I don’t watch the NFL and only know that my favorite team lacks everything but a starting quarterback, I have run endless simulations of the 7-round draft, acting as the GM of my team and wheeling and dealing picks while grabbing guys about whom I know very very little. Not unlike the recent Jaguar GMs, to be honest.

Football aside, I am wired to plan for contingencies. Where some people see problems, I see Excel charts waiting to be made. It has served me well, generally, but this fixation with planning is what I know I need to surrender. Because otherwise, I am tempted to believe that, if I plan things out enough, I can be in control.

So before I talk about the scenarios for the next pope, let me confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that if I were good at surrendering, I would not have spent so much time thinking about this, because I would trust that God knows who the Church needs better than I ever could, and that God loves the Church and wants it to succeed in His mission more than I do. “I believe; help my unbelief,” is the best I can do.

I haven’t really kept up with what “insiders” are saying about the papabili, but I know that the general focus is whether the Church follows Francis’ direction or reverses, because we see everything in this culture through a binary “progressive/conservative” lens. 

I don’t think that’s helpful in this case.

Look, Francis handpicked the overwhelming majority of cardinals who will choose his successor, and of the small minority who were made cardinals by his predecessor, at least some of them must have voted for him. Based on what I’ve read, he was chosen because that group of cardinals wanted him to lead the Church toward the vision he outlined in speeches to the group before the conclave, and he did just that. There are some reactionaries left among the cardinals, but I think an “Empire Strikes Back” choice is the least probably option, just based on the math and the politics.

However, Francis’ vision, which you could summarize pithily as radically de-centering the Church, unfolds in at least three dimensions, each of which requires its own skillset.

Clearly, this pope was most successful in the most external of those three dimensions: leading the Church from a stance of institutional preservation by embodying an ethic of welcome, encounter and inclusion. This is the (little e) evangelical vision that for most of the century his predecessors referred to as “The New Evangelization”. Where others spoke about bringing the Gospel to life through social media campaigns and philosophical treatises, Francis just went to the margins and loved the people there. If you’re a non-Catholic or shaky Catholic who misses him, this is probably why.

At the same time, de-centering the Church included a much less sexy but just as fundamental reform of the Roman Curia, the central bureaucracy that runs the Church. In both his messaging and in some serious reforms of Church law, policy and organizational structure, Francis used his papacy to reset the expectations of career Vaticanistas, such that they are to serve and not be served. To take a small but significant example, where his predecessors made the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once known as the Inquisition) at the top of the bureaucratic food chain to enforce doctrinal consistency, Francis elevated the shop devoted to Evangelization to the top. While the reality is that the Curia probably remains bloated and self-centered (as is true of so many headquarters in governments and organizations), Francis made significant reforms on things like financial management that, if implemented, could de-center those at the center of the Church.

In between the Vatican and the periphery, Francis instituted an approach to being church called synodality which, despite its wonky name, sets the stage for a faith community that recognizes the sacrament of baptism, not holy orders, as the main qualification for participation and leadership. A synodal church is one that listens together, discerns together, and moves forward together. The multi-year synod on synodality is the first attempt to move a clericalist culture in a radically new direction.

So who’s next as the Bishop of Rome? 

My guess is that the cardinals will have to discern which of these three layers of de-centering needs the most attention and who best provides the skills to move forward.

If it’s the evangelization piece that Francis did so well, expect another inspiring outsider or someone who took on some of Francis’s evangelical projects.

If it’s the reset in the Curia, look for someone with experience running a Vatican department or two under Francis’ reign.

If it’s pushing forward the vision of a synodal Church, look for someone who can really turbocharge that internal culture change.

Are there candidates that blend all three? Probably. But my guess is that each of the cardinals has their own balance of skills and experiences. There is not a clear heir apparent to Francis, as Cardinal Ratzinger was to St. John Paul II.

Yes, it’s possible that the traditionalists build an alliance with Curia officials in the cardinalate to roll back the tide. The Empire could strike back.

But far, far more likely is a scenario where the conclave finds a pope who might disappoint on one of those three dimensions while showing greater promise on others.

One last note on this before I surrender: just based on the nature of group dynamics, I’ll be surprised if the choice isn’t one of the cardinals who attended the two years of the month-long synod meetings in Rome. A core group of cardinals spent a LOT of time together talking about the future of the Church, building friendships, and seeing how they interacted with each other and with non-clerical participants. I’m guessing a lot of those guys have already identified people they sat at tables with that they either would love to see as pope or would never support.

OK, I’ll surrender now.