If the pope were elected through secular electoral mechanisms, we would already have at least thirty successors to Pope Francis. All according to the principle: political options selected, consent given by centers of financial power, confirmed by public opinion polling agencies, explained by (non)independent media. However, the old Vatican maxim ‘who enters the conclave as pope, leaves it as a cardinal’ particularly applies before the election of the next pope.
History teaches us that it is precisely in intense (geo)political times, like today, that candidates who were a complete surprise or whose pontificates were a true departure from their predecessors emerged from the conclave as popes. After all, the late Pope Francis was one of those surprises: not only as the first pope from Latin America but also as a pope who began to implement a modern version of the Vatican’s ‘Eastern policy’, often closer to Moscow than Washington, who became a sharp critic of the alienation of church elites from the faithful, and who frequently supported contemporary leftist, even neo-Marxist movements, making him a beloved pope among the greatest critics of the Catholic Church and a suspect pope in more conservative Catholic circles.
With his unconventional pontificate, Pope Francis has marked the last decade. And now, in fact, the most intriguing question is whether the new pope will continue in his path and direction. Or will he be a pope of surprises, a doctrinal and political conservative turn? Or perhaps some synthesis.
Important is the temporal distance
In their forecasts, progressive political circles, including church ones, rely on the power of statistics: of 138 cardinals qualified to elect the new pope (who are under eighty years old), 110 were appointed by Pope Francis, mostly from non-European countries, so they should automatically follow his path. But did not Pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI appoint all the cardinals who elected – Pope Francis – during three and a half decades of continuity in Vatican policy? Conservatives count on a similar turn due to resistance to the chaos that, in their opinion, Pope Francis left in the Church. However, recent history of papal elections truly sends the message that none of these predictions hold when the College of Cardinals closes in conclave and that Vatican policies have interestingly followed or led (geo)political cycles in Europe and the world. And their meaning has become clearer with a distance of several decades.
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Conservative believers were appalled when Pope Paul VI systematically implemented the ‘Eastern policy’ of thawing relations with communist regimes in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, when he received Marshal Tito, which was a prelude to receiving other communist leaders. They considered it a betrayal of the cardinals who sacrificed themselves in resistance to communist regimes: Croatian Stepinac, Hungarian Mindszenty, Ukrainian Slipiy, Czech Beran, Polish Wyszyński… This was no less of a shock for European conservative Catholics than Pope Francis’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the shock over the agreement with China regarding the consent of the Chinese Communist Party for the appointment of Catholic bishops. The reception of Marshal Tito in the Vatican was for the Croatian Catholic public a similar shock as Pope Francis’s decision to postpone the canonization of Cardinal Stepinac after the completion of the church process for his sainthood – due to the disagreement of the Serbian Orthodox Church!
Blurred Secular Glasses
There was no greater surprise in recent papal elections than the election of the Polish pope in 1978, John Paul II, after more than two decades of Vatican ‘Eastern policy’. Today we know that Pope John Paul II’s role in the collapse of the communist order in Europe was crucial. However, we rarely ask whether it would have been possible at all if the compromise ‘Eastern policy’ had not opened the doors to a greater presence of the Church in those regimes. Today we wonder why Pope Francis appointed new cardinals, often theologically modest, from distant non-European countries, while at the same time, in the European ‘cradle of Christianity’, major archdioceses like Paris, Milan, Venice, or Cologne no longer have cardinals. But we do not ask how it is that today Pakistani Karachi, where being a Catholic is often dangerous for life, has more practical Catholic believers than Cologne or Paris.
And as so many times before, viewed through secular glasses, from the perspective of the current political reality, we fail to fully understand church elections and processes. Perhaps after the election of the new pope, it will be somewhat clearer where the Church is heading in the next pontificate. But only somewhat.
