Pope Francis leaves behind a church that’s more global—and more divided
The pope transformed senior leadership, exposing growing differences over teachings; ‘confusion and also ambiguity in the doctrines’.
Pope Francis accelerated the transformation of the Catholic Church into an institution that reflects the unruly diversity of its global flock. His successor will have to make it work.
When cardinals from around the world gather in the Sistine Chapel in early May to elect a new pontiff, following Francis’ death on Easter Monday, they will bring with them a greater-than-ever range of views on Catholic teaching and practice.
The Catholic Church has become more culturally heterogeneous than at any point in its 2,000-year history. Nearly half of the voting cardinals will come from the global south, compared with just over one-third at the 2013 conclave that elected Francis.
The church has always defined itself as “universal,” but its power was long centered in Europe. Over the course of his 12-year pontificate, Pope Francis sought to reorient the church toward Asia and the global south, broadening the faith beyond its traditional strongholds in the West.
The Argentine pope transformed the demographics of Roman Catholicism’s senior leadership. He empowered churchmen from the farthest points of the globe, elevating them to cardinals in places such as Mongolia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many of them are now deeply entrenched in church institutions, including Roman Curia or papal administration, and the College of Cardinals that will elect the next pope.
Francis also sought a rapprochement with China, signing an agreement with its Communist leadership to share power over the appointment of local bishops. He expressed admiration for Russia’s imperial era, even after the invasion of Ukraine.
“The papacy was once the chaplain of NATO. It has now become the chaplain of Brics,” said John L. Allen Jr, a longtime Vatican watcher and editor of the Catholic news site Crux, referring to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the group of emerging economies including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. “There’s a sense from the developing world that their moment has come, and they’re tired of being dictated to by the West.”
Francis’ determination to build a truly global church was driven in part by his desire to disrupt the hidebound traditions that had governed the Catholic Church for centuries. When he became pope, the Vatican was engulfed by clerical sexual-abuse scandals as well as scrutiny of its finances—forces that helped trigger the resignation of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.
The tumult in Rome compounded the Vatican’s struggle to resolve contentious debates stemming from the clash between its traditions and rising secularism in the Western world, including its rejection of same-sex unions and its requirement of an all-male, celibate priesthood.
Francis responded by embarking on what his supporters see as an epochal pivot for Roman Catholicism, toward regions such as Africa and Asia, where the faith is growing, and away from Europe, where church attendance is in decline.
Only by engaging fully with its “periphery,” Francis said, could the church find renewal. Clerics and laypeople from around the world, including women, were encouraged to participate in Vatican meetings known as synods to debate the future of the church.
Enduring pillar
For many cardinals voting in the conclave, there is no turning back.
The “de-Europeanization” of the Catholic Church will be an enduring pillar of Francis’ legacy, said Cardinal Michael Czerny, who oversees much of the Vatican’s humanitarian outreach worldwide and worked closely with Francis.
“The fact that Mongolia has a cardinal is a sign of its centrality just as much as the cardinal of Naples or of Turin,” Czerny said.
Francis’ biggest legacy is that “he really opened up Catholicism to a post-European, post-Western form,” said Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University. “This is only possible under a pope who didn’t come from Europe or the Mediterranean world,” Faggioli said.
The emergence of new power centers in the Catholic world has revealed growing differences over some of the church’s core teachings. Liberal bishops from Germany pushed for same-sex couples to receive priestly blessings, triggering a backlash from African prelates who found the practice unacceptable. A synod on ministry in the Amazon sought to tackle a shortage of priests in the region by loosening the rules on priestly celibacy, provoking a furious reaction from conservative prelates in the US.
Cardinal William Goh of Singapore was broadly supportive of Francis’ pontificate, including his quest to bring the church’s hierarchy closer to ordinary believers, and to expand the representation of Asia and Africa. But the growing use of synods to expand dialogue within the church, Goh said in an interview, has given a platform to more liberal European prelates and laypeople to exert “ideological pressure.”
“Once you start opening the door, then there is confusion and also ambiguity in the doctrines,” Goh said. The Singaporean said the next pope should be a moderate who can unify the church by hewing more clearly to its orthodox teachings. “The next pope should be true to the faith of the church,” he said. “True to the word of God, the Magisterium, the tradition.”
Public disagreements between the church’s diverse factions have led to warnings of a schism, or permanent split.
One of the most divisive aspects of Francis’ global expansion drive has been the 2018 power-sharing deal that he cut with China’s Communist regime over the appointment of bishops in the country. Francis aimed to secure greater acceptance of, and future growth for, Catholicism in a largely irreligious land of 1.4 billion people.
The terms of the accord have remained secret, but church officials said it allows Beijing to nominate bishops and the pope to veto them. The selection of bishops has long been one of the papacy’s core powers, creating a bond between bishops and Rome that supersedes their allegiance to national governments.
In the US, bishops and politicians criticized the deal with Beijing as inimical to religious freedom. Cardinal Joseph Zen, a former bishop of Hong Kong, was another critic, arguing that the agreement betrayed Chinese underground Catholics who have long been persecuted for their loyalty to the pope. There were widespread fears that Beijing would use the agreement to assert power over all of China’s estimated 10 million Catholics.
China has begun to test the deal’s limits. The Vatican has accused Beijing of violating the accord by transferring a Vatican-approved bishop to a diocese in China that Rome didn’t recognize. China subsequently installed another bishop without consulting the Vatican.
Goh, the Singaporean cardinal, defended the aim of working together with Beijing, saying that a more confrontational approach was likely to backfire, particularly among Chinese who still chafe over the West’s past colonial domination of the country.
“Instead of getting their cooperation,” he said, “we will erode whatever confidence they might have because they will think: Again, these Western people, they are just trying to impose their ideology on us.”
Divisive issues
Francis’ push to extend the frontiers of Catholicism in the Amazon region exposed more tensions. In 2017, Francis called for a synod to address the struggle to minister to indigenous populations living in remote areas of the Amazonian basin, where priests are in short supply.
A Vatican document setting the meeting’s agenda asked bishops to consider whether married men with families in the region might be admitted to the priesthood to make up for the shortfall. The document also suggested the church should consider allowing women to perform “official ministry,” leaving open what their precise role would be.
The reaction from conservative cardinals was withering. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a German who was once the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer, said the document spread “false teaching.” American Cardinal Raymond Burke and Athanasius Schneider, a bishop in Kazakhstan, called for a 40-day “crusade of prayer and fasting,” warning that heresy might pervert the synod.
Francis ultimately decided not to relax the rules on priestly celibacy or expand the ministry to women. Women in the Amazon, he said, should be given roles that “do not entail holy orders” but allow them to serve “in a way that reflects their womanhood.”
After angering conservatives, the synod ended up frustrating progressives.
Czerny, a Jesuit whom Francis tasked with helping to run the synod before making him a cardinal, said the point of such gatherings isn’t to produce immediate changes. Rather, they’re intended to pry open a space for debate on delicate issues that might yield results decades later.
“What we need to do is launch and encourage processes. This is very difficult,” Czerny said. “In other words, you keep going and you try to bring the extremes to the middle.”
Few issues have exposed the divisions in the global church more than the question of whether it should show more openness to LGBTQ people. Francis made perhaps the best-known comment of his pontificate when, on a flight home from Brazil early in his reign, he was asked about the presence of gay men in the priesthood.
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis said.
In the years that followed, liberal clerics in Germany began flouting Vatican rules against clergy blessing same-sex couples.
In 2023, Francis elevated a fellow Argentine, Victor Manuel Fernández, to the rank of cardinal and placed him at the helm of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, historically known as the Inquisition.
Months later, Fernández’s office published guidelines permitting priests to bless same-sex couples in ceremonies, provided the blessings don’t imply that such unions are the equivalent of heterosexual marriage.
The move stirred outrage in Catholic Africa, a region that is among the church’s fastest-growing and most conservative. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, flew to Rome, demanding an audience with the pontiff.
“Tell him that I have arrived, I am in the house, and I am there only until Thursday evening, and I want to meet him before leaving because that’s what I came for,” Ambongo recalled later in a sermon that recounted his Vatican visit.
Francis met with Ambongo the same day and put him in touch with Fernández, who sat down with the African prelate at the doctrinal office to write out a statement, phoning the pope occasionally for approval of particular passages.
In January 2024, Ambongo issued a statement entitled “No Blessing for Homosexual Couples in the African Churches” that he said carried the imprimatur of Fernández and the pope. The document said same-sex unions were considered “intrinsically corrupt” in Africa.
The document provided Africa with a carve-out from teachings that applied to the rest of the world.
“Until now, Africa was always talked about as a missionary country, one that needs economic aid,” said Father Roberto Regoli, a historian at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. “This was the first time Africa sent a message to the rest of the church.”
Wall Street Journal
Add your comment to this story
US strike on Iran began with a ruse
A feint to the west drew attention, while stealth bombers and submarines maneuvered for the attack.
Trump meets the moment on Iran
The President bombed Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites to spare the world from an intolerable risk.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout