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During the 1963 papal conclave, amid expectant crowds at St. Peter’s Square, The Atlantic published a brief exchange between a woman and a priest. “I want one exactly like John,” the woman declared, referring to Pope John XXIII, who had died recently. “He needn’t be exactly the same,” the priest countered. “The important thing is that he shall be a good pope.”
“No, no,” she retorted. “I want one exactly like John.”
This little back-and-forth underscores the key question that the current papal conclave, like those before it, can only begin to answer: not simply “Who will be the next pope?” but “Who will the next pope be?” How will his mind and faith shape the Catholic Church and the broader world?
The best answers to this question, Paul Elie suggested in a wonderful 2004 Atlantic feature, avoid turning popes-to-be into “careers in human form, résumés with arms and legs.” Yet conclave commentary often focuses on the résumé, with its emphasis on languages spoken and offices held (to say nothing of friendships and rivalries forged at the Vatican). Talk of “front-runners” is also common but tends to overlook the fact that many recent popes—from John XXIII to John Paul II to Francis himself—were not considered papabile at first. Some people speculate that because Francis appointed most members of the College of Cardinals, the next pope will obviously be in his mold. Yet Pope Benedict XVI also appointed the majority of the cardinals who selected Francis 12 years ago, and their pontificates were notably different.
Most of all, papal predictions that rely on borrowed political labels—“left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative”—obscure more than they illuminate. They don’t always age well, for one. John Paul II was initially considered a “liberal,” one who filled “thousands with hope and the prospect of change”; Francis was at first described as “rather inflexible and staunchly conservative.” Yet just two years after their respective conclaves, Kati Marton posited in The Atlantic that “a new conservatism” appeared to be emerging in John Paul II’s papacy, while Ross Douthat concluded that aspects of Francis’s agenda were “clearly in tune with what many progressive Catholics (and progressives, period) in the West have long hoped for from the Church.”
But the bigger problem with using a left-right binary to understand who a pope might be is that none of the previous three popes fit into that framework especially well, at least not as it’s normally understood in American politics. How many Democrats today would both oppose abortion and defend a gender binary based on biological sex, as Francis did? How many Republicans would, like Benedict, oppose the death penalty and highlight the risks of climate change?
Divisions within Catholicism certainly exist—on marriage and inclusion, on the liturgy, on the proper response to autocracies, to name just a few recent examples. How, then, might one better grasp the range of views inside the conclave? Perhaps by recalling the dual identity that John XXIII—the same pope the woman at St. Peter’s Square was so fond of in 1963—used to describe the Church: mater et magistra, mother and teacher.
The Catholic Church has understood, especially since the mid-20th century, that in order to thrive, it must find the right mode of relating to modernity. For some Catholics—drawing especially from Benedict XVI’s thought—that mode should be primarily theological, mirroring a teacher who’s able to relay the truth and “make the substance of the Catholic faith clear” amid “continual change,” as Elie put it in his 2006 Atlantic cover story. For others, the Church’s main mode today ought to be maternal. Prominent during Francis’s papacy, this mode primarily aims not to settle debates but to foster bonds of fraternity; it wagers that embodied acts of mercy, not abstract argumentation, will forge “solidarity stronger than nation, class, or ideology,” as Elie wrote.
Those more hopeful about modernity may see the former view as doctrinaire; those more anxious about it might treat the latter as too freewheeling. But for both groups, the stakes of which mode the next pope will adopt feel high. Those who emphasize the magistra mode of Catholicism likely remember a time—detailed in Marton’s 1980 story—when Church teaching was downplayed or outright ignored, such as when a Dutch diocese voted to make priestly celibacy optional and when a high-profile Catholic theologian essentially questioned Jesus Christ’s divinity. (“What is Catholicism if it doesn’t know what it believes?” they might ask.) Those who stress the mater mode worry that an emphasis on right teaching can overlook other important tenets of the faith: Take, for example, purportedly orthodox Catholics excusing or even endorsing anti-immigrant attitudes, or the specter of a Christian cultural landscape that, as my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig recently put it, privileges “conquest and triumph rather than peace and humility.”
It’s tempting to compare the selection of a pope to a run-of-the-mill succession, where factions form and ambition carries the day. But to do so would be to miss something essential about whoever will soon be blessing the St. Peter’s Square crowds. “It is easy to forget,” Elie observed in 2004, “that the Pope is first and foremost a believing Christian.” Forgetting that is the easiest way to misunderstand the pope—no matter who he ends up being.
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