On the eve of the conclave to elect the next pope, the church can seem dangerously divided, with cardinals lining up on different sides of fundamental questions. A better interpretation, however, is that the cardinals are approaching the same questions from different perspectives and in different orders of priority, leading to very different visions of how to deal with the challenges facing the church.
German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, whose term at the Vatican’s doctrinal office Pope Francis declined to renew in 2017, described the stakes as “not between conservatives and liberals but between orthodoxy and heresy” in an interview with The Times of London published two days after Francis’ death.
America’s Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell followed up on this distinction with him in an interview this week, asking about those who have said that Pope Francis was heretical. Cardinal Müller did not directly answer the question, but instead distinguished between what he described as material heresy, “when a pope says something unclear, ambiguous,” and formal heresy, when a pope “issues a declaration … that explicitly contradicts revealed truth.”
In addition to concerns about clarity or confusion, it is clear that “unity” has become a hot topic in these meetings. In Jason Horowitz’s reporting for The New York Times, Cardinal Müller was championing unity, while Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Jesuit and one of Francis’ close collaborators, was surprisingly blunt in saying that unity “means reversal” and “cannot be a priority issue.” In that article, Cardinal Czerny spoke instead about diversity.
When he spoke to America, Cardinal Czerny explained his view at greater length, explaining that “Unity is a great gift, a very important gift, but it cannot be a strategy. It cannot be a program.”
Like so many institutions, the church is trying to find a path through polarization. But as Cardinal Czerny’s quote above points out, that involves not only the church’s faith and teachings, but also a “program” of some sort for how the church should operate. Some of the church’s leaders, like Cardinal Müller, imagine that program involving a decisive victory for clear and traditional teaching that will reinvigorate the church from within. Others, like Cardinal Czerny, imagine a broader and more open engagement of the church reaching out to the peripheries, renewing the church’s witness to the whole world.
The question, then, is not whether the church should seek unity—it should and it will—but with what methods. And the choice of method, more than any difference in underlying doctrine, is where Pope Francis departed most radically from his predecessors.
On controversial topics, St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI prioritized setting clear boundaries around the understanding of doctrine, often trying to rule out even the discussion of disagreements. They also investigated and disciplined theologians and issued formal warnings about potentially heterodox interpretations of church teaching.
We should not, however, depict these two popes as Grand Inquisitors out of Dostoyevsky. Responding to controversy is not the only thing a pope does, and not necessarily the most important. The harder edge of church discipline was deeply linked, for both of them, to their hope that clarity and robust doctrinal confidence would strengthen the church’s witness. It was coming from the same motives that gave us John Paul II’s refrain of “Be not afraid” and Benedict XVI’s beautiful meditations on Jesus that he described as his “personal search for the face of the Lord.”
Pope Francis’ approach differed not because he believed in different doctrine than his predecessors, but because he asked a different—and characteristically Jesuit—question. He asked how well high walls to defend the church’s teaching were working.
In his 2013 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” often referred to as the “programmatic document” of his papacy, Francis described the church as “unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security” (no. 49). He said that the church needed to go out of itself rather than being shut up in “rules which make us harsh judges,” and that he would prefer a church that is “bruised, hurting and dirty” from doing so. Perhaps one point of agreement among his critics and his champions would be that he delivered on that vision.
For example, Francis’ encouragement of frank discussion in the church demonstrated that decades of attempts to rule certain topics out of bounds had not succeeded in producing substantive agreement on contested theological questions such as women’s ordination or the church’s approach to L.G.B.T. people. Limiting the forums in which those questions could be discussed had not convinced everyone, either within the church’s hierarchy or among the people of God more broadly, of the answers that the church had proposed as already settled.
So now the question that the cardinals will face in conclave is whether the church is healthier, even if more bruised, because of Francis’ efforts at engagement and fostering open dialogue, or whether it needs to retrench for greater internal security at this juncture.
There is evidence in favor of both evaluations. On the one hand there is the outpouring of popular appreciation for Francis’ pastoral touch and his love for the poor; on the other, for example, there is the recent memory of the quick rejection of his framework for blessing people who are divorced and remarried or in same-sex unions by most of the African bishops. Or we could look to the church’s engagement with the secular world, where Francis’ encyclical on climate change emphasized the moral dimensions of that crisis, but where his consistent calls for peace, especially in Ukraine and Gaza, have largely fallen on deaf ears.
I would add one more bit of Jesuit nuance to Francis’ question about what works in the church’s efforts at evangelization: Which approaches work in which contexts? There are people for whom clear doctrinal boundaries and vigorous discipline to maintain them are a summons to holiness and a way God encourages and strengthens them in its pursuit. There are also people who have borne the pain of being excluded or judged as sinners or heretics for whom emphasis on God’s mercy has been the healing balm that allowed them to approach the church again at all.
These two approaches can overlap more than might be expected at first glance. Rather than understanding his predecessors as picking one and Francis the other, it would be accurate to see them as choosing different “first moves” about how to announce the Gospel and help people see it as credible and hopeful. Assuming that the next pope tries to move forward in some continuity with Francis’ approach rather than attempting to roll it back as a mistake, one challenge he will certainly face is reaching Catholics for whom open dialogue feels like a dangerous departure from orthodoxy and reassuring them that he cares about their needs as well as those of people at the margins of the church.
What definitely does not work for the church is for people polarized between these two positions to assume that those on the “other side” lack any concern either for mercy or for clarity. Both positions are seeking something good, and the choice between two goods, or of which good to prioritize, is where discernment is required to understand how the Spirit is moving in the church.
In a Wednesday audience last October, Pope Francis explained that we see “the Spirit work for unity in two ways,” both driving the church outward to embrace all and gathering it inwards to become one. He said in that same audience that unity is difficult because “everyone wants unity, but based on one’s own point of view.”
The consistent challenge for Christians—and in these coming days for the cardinals in conclave especially—is not to seek to advance their own point of view as an agenda for the church. The two points of view we need to adopt instead are first, that of Jesus, praying “that they may all be one,” and second, that of the “least of these” in whom we encounter and serve him.
