Pope Francis: A Legacy in Profile

There is a time and a place for everything, including speculation on the next pope. This week saw some grist for the mill, with the publication of a sort of voter’s guide for the red hats who will pick Francis’s (and Peter’s) successor.

We’ll get to that.

First, we need to consider what makes the next conclave such a difficult business, and parsing that takes us back to the one that elected Francis.

The election of Pope Francis did not come as a surprise.

His name had already been circulated after the Conclave that elected Benedict XVI in 2005, and it was the first time that the diary of a conclave had launched the name of a strong candidate, as Bergoglio seemed to have been in that Conclave. In general, this type of news does not favor the candidates. Cardinal Giuseppe Siri has the reputation of being the cardinal most rumored as the “second” among the most voted since the Conclave that elected John XXIII, but also in the one that elected Paul VI and even in the one that led to the election of John Paul II. Siri, however, never became Pope.

One might have thought it would have been the same for Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but that’s not how things went in his time, nor did things go differently only because of a series of contingent factors that had changed the course of history.

The first was that we were facing a shocking and completely unexpected moment: the resignation of a Pope. The resignation extended the time of preparation for the end of the pontificate but, at the same time, shortened it. The cardinals had the idea that they had to leave the Sistine Chapel with a name and quickly, so as not to have the eyes of the world upon them—upon the Church—and so as to attenuate the impression of a Church in crisis.

The Church in crisis—the idea of it—was the key to identifying the profile of the new Pope.

He had to be someone who would know how to speak to the media, give the idea of a Church that was less triumphant and closer to the poor, a Pope of the people and popular who would not be afraid to reform.

At that moment, the rumor circulated that “four years of Bergoglio could be enough.”

There was talk of a Pope who should have brought the Church back to the good center of public opinion and started reforms. We found ourselves with a Pope who used power differently from his predecessors, surprising everyone, and who, in the end, tried to bring about a revolution rather than reforms.

Rumors have been circulating for years about cardinals unhappy with their decisions in the 2013 conclave that elected the man who became Pope Francis. One anonymous quote has been circulating since at least 2016, which has it that one voting cardinal “would not have voted for [Bergoglio],” if he had seen data on vocations in the Buenos Aires seminaries on Begoglio’s watch.

This type of indiscretion seems rather artfully mounted to disturb the pontificate (but there is no need to worry: it has happened with all the Popes, not just Francis). It is, nonetheless, the sort of thing as reveals a discomfort, a concern, a fear for the future.

Hence, the question of the next Pope.

However annoying it may be while a Pope is still alive, it is nevertheless the question that all cardinals ask themselves. If you stop and think about it for even a second, you’ll see it is part of their job to think about it. When the reigning Pope reaches the age of 88 and has undergone two major surgical operations, it really becomes a lot of their job.

That is a big part of the reason for a recently launched initiative called the “College of Cardinals Report,” created to make sure cardinals know each other.

Criticized from various fronts because it is an operation for the conclave born while the Pope is alive and well, the site does nothing but outline profiles, points of view, and (hi)stories of the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church. It is a database that allows everyone to know everything about everyone.

And it is easy to understand where the need to operate an initiative of this type arose.

The question arises spontaneously if we consider that Pope Francis, in eleven years of pontificate, has convened ten consistories. That’s one every year, with the exception of the one post-COVID. He has—radically altered the College of Cardinals in terms of its raw membership. He has not created opportunities for the cardinals to get to know each other.

Popes have pretty much always relied on people they trust. Popes have pretty much always given positions of power to people they trust. Popes have pretty much always elevated their trusty friends and advisors to cardinalatial rank, making them close collaborators.

Pope Francis does the opposite.

Pope Francis places his Princes of the Church far from the centers of power. The centers of power end up having either second-rate figures or people personally linked to the Pope himself but without real authority over others.

No method is perfect.

The point is that a report on the cardinals helps answer the question on the mind of all the men who will eventually sit in the Sistine Chapel to elect Peter’s successor: Who sits next to me? And what do they think? And who among them can I trust?

These questions are crucial in a conclave, especially in such a new and varied conclave.

The analysis offered in the new Report is not unalloyed with utopianism, or at perhaps some wishful thinking: Seeing Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco—now in his eighties—as papabile, for example; or including Cardinal Mauro Piacenza and Cardinal Robert Sarah, almost eighty years old, among those who could aspire to the white cassock.

The question, however, is about more than the successor’s profile.

Siri said that some Popes are already Popes and Popes born in the Conclave, but everyone must still learn to be a Pope. The real questions should concern the situation of the Church, and in particular, the situation of the Curia and the Vatican City State. The Pope leaves a legacy of government, which is often overlooked and usually underestimated.

What should a possible “Vatican governance report” look at?

First of all, the health of Vatican justice.

After the controversial ruling in the trial on the management of the funds of the Secretariat of State – which, for the first time in history and by the will of the Pope, brought a cardinal to trial – and the ruling on the management of the funds of the Sistine Chapel, the president of the Vatican Tribunal Giuseppe Pignatone has resigned.

It is the end of a short era in which an attempt was made to make the devil coexist with holy water, that is, Italian law and Vatican jurisprudence, or papal will and royal Justice.

Pignatone leaves behind a law on procurement that was later reformed and a reform of the judicial system that included particularly questionable measures, such as the presence of a single promoter of Justice for the first and second instance or even the return to a system in which the Vatican judges and promoters of Justice were all part-time, with no one fully dedicating themselves to the State.

It was the papal will, but it certainly weakened the Papal State.

It also weakened the Holy See when Pope Francis intervened with four rescripts in the ongoing trial, changing (or making explicit, according to the Vatican Promoter of Justice) the rules of the game and allowing wiretaps and investigative procedures beyond the normal prerogatives.

But how will the Holy See defend itself internationally if the Vatican City State is weakened?

There is the situation of the government of the Curia.

The Pope leaves a Curia reformed on paper but not in culture or even in operation. Key positions are yet to be defined, while key issues have practically disappeared from the radar. There is no actual program on social doctrine or international law, for example, in the new Justice, Peace, and Integral Human Development super-Dicastery, i.e., The Thing That Used To Be Justice and Peace. There are a bunch of new bodies to be set up, either with or against a sort of asymmetric hierarchy of the Pope, which also applies mutatis mutandis to the Vicariate of the Rome diocese.

In the Vicariate, there are no longer auxiliaries but episcopal vicars, and yet there is a new auxiliary, and he is the vicegerent. The Vicar is considered equal to the auxiliaries and, therefore, will be equal to the vicegerent but superior to the others. In short, it is a great confusion.

Then, the financial reforms are characterized by steps forward (based on already traced furrows) and steps back (caused by the inadequacy of some reform proposals).

Finally, there is the ideological part: The basically weaponized notion of synodality is already being invoked to justify the imposition of points of view as matters of policy.

Policy—pragmatic change—is about as far as Francis has been willing to go, but he has ignored the implications of the pragmatic changes he has either allowed or encouraged or suffered while claiming not to have changed doctrine. After all, the doctrine is not changed, but the perception of the doctrine is very much changed, at least in some circles.

Perhaps the question to ask about the next Pope is not what he thinks on a doctrinal level but what capacity he would have to support the weight of the prestige of the Holy See to be rebuilt, of a Vatican City State to be made independent again, of an economic situation that has suddenly become unsustainable to the point of asking the cardinals to support themselves with independent donations, and of an organization that does not even remotely recall the glories of when the Church was truly listened to in the world, despite everything in the world going against the Church?

Not even a detailed profile of the Cardinals can answer these questions.

It will take a deep personal knowledge of the people who—papabili or no—are key players, all of whom will have to bet on who will be the next guy. . That is why it is so dangerous for the cardinals not to know each other.

The Holy Spirit has His work cut out.