Most mornings since the death of Pope Francis, around 180 cardinals have filed into a Vatican City assembly hall, sat down in rows of high-backed wooden chairs, and bickered over the direction of their 1.4-billion-strong world religion.
Under the auspices of a hard-of-hearing 91-year-old cardinal who is said to inadvertently bark out commands when he thinks he’s speaking softly, red-hatted clerics share banal niceties about the late pontiff, concealing deep-seated unease over his controversial 12-year rule.
“Everyone is very respectful, but you have to know the situation to know what’s hidden behind the words,” said one person present at the gatherings, which are called general congregations and are hotbeds of intense lobbying before the conclave, the ancient ritual to select a new pope that kicks off on May 7. “So everyone’s speaking good about Pope Francis, but the way they speak good about him shows they don’t like him.”
“He was a good pope,” they might say. “But we also need to consider the popes before him, we need to see the whole tradition.”
Much has already been made of the fact that the coming conclave is unfolding under the shadow of U.S.-style culture wars that even the Holy Mother Church can’t escape, pitting MAGA-style conservatives against LGBTQ+-tolerant progressives.
But the divisions among the clergy are also about something rather more concrete: The future of ecclesiastical power, and who ought to wield it, in a Church that’s rapidly outgrowing the confines of Rome, its old European stronghold.
Remarriage and same-sex blessings
Throughout his papacy, Francis, who died on April 21, dramatically changed the geographical balance of the Church by appointing 50 cardinals of voting age, almost half the current crop of 133 serving electors, from outside of the traditional Western power bases. Cardinals were drawn from previously overlooked places like Bridgetown in the small Caribbean island of St. Lucia, and Bogor, a city of under a million in Indonesia. Leaders of major dioceses like Los Angeles and San Francisco were snubbed.
On top of that, the pope launched a series of major global consultations called synods that dealt with hot-button issues like same-sex blessings and remarriage for divorcées. The idea was to more closely involve lay people and women, as well as clerics from the far-flung regions of the Church — especially in the fast-growing centers in Africa and Asia — in ecclesiastical decision-making.
But the consultations also gave more latitude to non-European priests, fragmenting the implementation of theology and drawing still more power from the Curia, the Vatican City bureaucracy. To the annoyance of many, one of Francis’ last moves before his death on April 21 was to extend these deliberations for another three years, despite speculation that he was merely using delaying tactics to avoid instituting more radical reforms.
The legacy of that decision, and its implications for where Church power really lies, is now one of the main issues being discussed in pre-conclave lobbying sessions, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. And this ideological struggle, the people said, is coalescing around one man in particular: the Holy See’s secretary of state and Francis’ longest surviving ally, Pietro Parolin.
The Francis clone
This shrewd diplomat has already been a figure of controversy since the pope first grew ill in February. Parolin’s quiet assertion of spiritual leadership during that period, in particular his prominent role in a powerful prayer session outside St. Peter’s in late February, boosted his image, while attracting suspicion from those who saw him as making a bid.
As bookies bet on a Parolin papacy, campaigns were quickly launched to discredit him: Traditionalists in particular cast him as a Francis clone, while drawing attention to his controversial deals with the Chinese government, and his oversight of a key Vatican ministry involved in a €200 million scandal in 2019.
But for those wary of the waning influence of Rome, Parolin is a good option. The cardinal is seen as having resisted the synodal reforms. That has earned him the backing of some of the so-called curial cardinals, Vatican officials who work directly for the Holy See in Vatican City, according to the people cited above.
Those include cardinals over 80 who won’t be able to vote in the conclave but still wield considerable influence over the lobbying beforehand, as well as Italians who might long to see one of their own countrymen on the throne of Peter after 47 years in which the role has gone to non-Europeans, they added.
Inevitably, the push for Parolin has irked the pro-Francis faction, which has warned that he would roll back Francis’ radical efforts to make the Church more inclusive. Some have consequently sought to discredit Parolin as a closet conservative, while pushing the synod’s general secretary, the Maltese cardinal Mario Grech, as a continuity candidate, the people said. “Rome cannot know and cannot understand all the dynamics going on in different continents,” said one of them. “They don’t want the Church directed by the Roman Curia.”
But that camp is splintered and badly coordinated, with few strong candidates to rally around, the people said. It is also full of fresh-faced clerics plucked from “relatively unimportant” positions who might fall prey to the machinations of “hardened Church politicians like the European and North American cardinals,” said Miles Pattenden, a Church historian and lecturer at Oxford University’s history faculty.
To be sure, the push for Parolin is no indication of his chances of success in a contest notorious for punishing frontrunners, and the debate over the Holy See’s primacy is also just one of many rancorous disagreements that are weighing on clerics’ calculations, including tolerance of LGBTQ+ people, the ordination of women, and the Vatican’s steepening financial crisis. Some even indicate that Parolin’s star is already falling after he delivered a disappointingly uncharismatic mass.
But it may be that support for Parolin is less about the man himself than it is about the ideas he represents, and there could well be appetite for a more popeable alternative with a similar view on the balance of power. For some clerics, the idea of a Church without Rome is as unpalatable as, well, a pope who isn’t Catholic.
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