When Pope Francis’s grieving period ends, the College of Cardinals will convene in Rome. The Vatican announced that the conclave to elect the new pope will start on May 7. The College of Cardinals is sworn to secrecy during the deliberations and election.
The death of Pope Francis has revealed a stark contrast between conservative and progressive hierarchy. Conservatives want a return to more traditional governance, while the progressives would like to build on what the late Pope accomplished during his Pontificate.
Some in the College want to expand on Francis’ teaching and codify his positions on LGBTQ+, climate change, ecumenical dialogue with non-Christians, and many other issues. The progressives cite the tradition of a new pope building on the work of his predecessors. In the past, popes have footnoted their predecessors in Apostolic Exhortations or Encyclicals. An example is when St. John Paul II cited St. Paul XI’s Encyclical Humanae Vitae when he upheld the ban on contraceptives in his moral Encyclical Veritatis Splendor.
Progressives like to mention that popes usually built their teaching on what their predecessors had taught, but that did not always hold for Francis.
In his controversial Encyclical Amoris Laetitia, he suggested that, for the first time in history, divorced and remarried Catholics without an annulment, along with cohabiting adults outside of marriage, should be able to receive the Eucharist in opposition to the tradition.
Francis also contradicted Pope Benedict XVI’s permission to celebrate the Mass before the 1970 liturgy reform, commonly known as the liturgy celebrated in Latin. Benedict’s ruling aligned with John Paul II, who liberalized the availability of the Mass celebrated before 1970. When asked, Francis said he was concerned about a ‘reaction against the modern, ‘or what he called in Italian ‘indietrismo,’ translated as ‘backwardness.”
Although the Latin Mass is still celebrated, it is substantially hindered. The Latin Mass isn’t the only thing Francis chose to change. In the fourth year of his pontificate, Francis closed and renamed the Vatican Institute on Marriage and Family, originally set up by St. John Paul II to assist families in living a Christian life.
Francis renamed and redirected the institute. The new name, The Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, was intended to take a different approach to studying family life, predominantly reinforcing his teachings in his Encyclical, Amoris Laetitia. He said, “Anthropological-cultural change, that today influences all aspects of life and requires an analytic and diversified approach, does not permit us to limit ourselves to practices in pastoral ministry and mission that reflect forms and models of the past…we must therefore look, with the intellect of love and with wise realism, at the reality of the family today in all its complexity, with its lights and its shadows.”
Francis established a precedent in his papacy. He was not beholden to the past when it interfered with his vision of the Church. Hopefully, our new pope should not feel compelled to expand on Francis’s legacy but rather set a new direction. He should immediately withdraw same-sex blessings and reaffirm that the only way of salvation is through the Church, of which Jesus is the head. He should clarify the tradition of marriage and family, which comes to us from God. He should extricate the Church from being part of the globalist agenda and be the beacon of morality for the world.
He should not be divisive but a unifier, and preach the need to worship Jesus, not the earth or any false religion. Finally, he should have care for the poor, tempered with the reality that time on earth is transitory and our real transition happens in heaven and not on earth.
Pray for the next man who will lead the Church and be faithful to Jesus and the Church’s traditions.
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