Pope Francis’s slow, ongoing recovery after his five-week hospitalization makes for a scenario full of uncertainties about the governance of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. It is indeed a complex picture, as Austen Ivereigh writes in the April issue of Commonweal. It’s also a test for the institutional Church in an age of crisis of institutions, especially institutions of government.
One easily targetable Church institution is the papal conclave. Devised between the eleventh and the thirteen centuries, it’s not just old, but is viewed by many as antiquated as well. Only celibate male cardinals chosen by the pope are allowed to participate, and only those younger than eighty have the right to vote. It’s concentrated into just a few days and is the subject of intense global attention. Its proceedings are secret up until the moment a new bishop of Rome is presented.
As of now, Pope Francis has not reformed the conclave, unlike many of his predecessors, especially John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But as all conclaves, the next will take place in the context of current events. It will also unfold in a unique media environment, being the first conclave to follow the direct institutional response from the Vatican in 2020 regarding the global sex-abuse crisis and the case of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who died on April 4. The fragmentation of social media has supercharged the division of audiences across numerous platforms, channels, and content formats, and traditional media continues to decline. Everyone who is online is potentially influential (or thinks they are), yet some outsized voices really do have an impact and are trying influence the election of the next pope—by speculating on the list of the papabili, casting doubt on some cardinals’ chances, and weighing in on the conclave’s agenda, which takes up other issues besides the main one of choosing the pope.
Given Francis’s health, there have been relatively intense but discreet preparations for a conclave—lists of candidates, issues, potential scenarios—at the unofficial and informal level. But then there are the high-visibility “campaigns” by journalists who maintain online lists of papabili ranked by their positions on a range of issues: the ordination of women deacons, the blessing of same-sex couples, restrictions on the “Vetus Ordo” of the Mass, the agreement between the Holy See and China, synodality, and Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. Other observers would give more weight to their positions on war and peace, Russia and Israel, the role of women in the Church, and addressing the state of Vatican finances.
Yet one issue in particular has arisen like never before: the abuse crisis. According to current conclave watchers, papal candidates should be ranked (or disqualified) according to their record of how they responded to reports of abuse, whether they helped suppress reports, whether they took action to prevent crimes, and whether past personal behavior might lead them to be “credibly accused” of abuse after they are elected. (That last possibility is one of the defining anxieties of the institutional Church today.)
On March 25, SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) announced a database of Catholic cardinals’ records on handling cases of sexual abuse, in a bid, as the Associated Press put it, “to influence the next papal conclave…. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests unveiled ‘Conclave Watch,’ a database on cardinals’ records on clergy sex abuse that it hopes will put the issue at the center of consideration whenever the next pope is chosen.” A couple of days later, SNAP named six top cardinals, all of them in theory papabili, and alleged that they either enabled or concealed cases of clerical sexual abuse and called for the Holy See to immediately launch an investigation. This “influencing” comes very close to surreptitious reinstatement of the ius exclusivae (the right to veto a candidacy and therefore the election of a particular cardinal), last used in the 1903 conclave by the emperor of Austria to block the election of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro (secretary of state to Leo XIII). The ius exclusivae was prohibited by Pius X in the apostolic constitution Commissum Nobis of 20 January 1904, and has been reinforced in laws reforming the conclave since then.
But there’s a potentially bigger problem that the prohibition of the ius exclusivae does not address: the emergence of new forms of vigilantism and harassment enabled by social media, fueled by the erosion of trust in society and institutions, and exacerbated by economic disparity and anger. Examples include the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson; the rise of a violent pedophile-hunters who take justice into their own hands; phone apps like Citizen that enable ordinary people to “to protect the world”; vigilantism against migrants and minorities; and vigilantism on college campuses, where students can post anonymously about other students or faculty. In the United States, there is even an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” A long run-up to the next conclave, coupled with the fragmentation of mainstream and Catholic media (an environment in which the traditional gatekeepers no longer control the narrative) and simmering political and cultural animosities, could make for a volatile situation.
History is filled with examples of corruption scandals leading to political collapse. Contemporary Catholicism has been shaped by the abuse scandal, opening internal divisions over clericalism, LGBTQ Catholics, the role of women in the Church, and more. In the United States, the abuse crisis has led to the collapse of an ecclesial order while also contributing to the decline of a Vatican II ecclesial system and ushering in uncertainty about the future. Other national Catholic churches have gone through this to some degree, but there’s a more violent quality to it in the United States, where it’s tied up in debates about the soul of the nation amid the demise of democracy and the rise of Trumpism.
In other words, the abuse crisis has had political consequences. It is at least partially responsible for the government’s hostility toward the charitable initiatives and programs of the U.S. Catholic Church, because it called into question the Church’s legitimacy and moral authority as an institution. The reaction to the abuse crisis has generated an ecclesial populism that developed in parallel to the political populism embodied by Donald Trump.
As for the phenomenon of Catholic Trumpism, it’s a political problem of a particular kind. It’s not the same “integrism and right-wing mentality” that Yves Congar identified in 1950 in True and False Reform in the Church—the affinity of traditionalist Catholicism for the political right, grounded in restoring a monarchical or authoritarian order. Catholic Trumpism is a mix of old-style “law-and-order” ideology in the name of traditional morality, and of a mindset that wishes institutions (including Catholic organizations that serve people on the margins) to be dismantled.
Pope Francis’s pontificate embodies the turn to a more prophetic papacy. But a post–Vatican II overemphasis on making the Church more prophetic has had significant consequences for how we think about religious and political institutions. The phenomenon isn’t limited to the progressive or liberal left. Catholic Trumpism is, among other things, an embodiment of the illusion that we don’t need institutions at all. It’s something of a role reversal: the resistance against Trumpism requires a defense of institutions (of all kinds)—something that not long ago was a bedrock conservative principle.
The sexual-abuse crisis should have taught American right-wing Catholicism something, namely, that those who fight for justice for the victims of abuse need a constitutional system: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary. But along with the indifference of many of them to the destruction of our constitutional system, they seem to express only anger and mistrust, including against Catholic institutions. This anti-institutional rage is part of the general collapse of norms in our Church, our politics, and our approach to international relations—which the Catholic Church helped create. This is changing the Church at all levels, including the highest one. Twelve years of systematic attempts to delegitimize Pope Francis are an expression not just of personal animus, but also of a political and religious ideology that has now spread into a government with Catholics in the highest positions of power. The start of the second Trump presidency brings a marked change in the relationship between church and state. Meanwhile, the lack of a unified, public, and coherent response from the Catholic Church to all this is remarkable. Yet one wonders whether some bishops who have been consistently indulgent toward Trump and Trumpism are now having buyers’ remorse.
The purpose of the conclave in these last eight centuries has always been modest but essential, or, as Alberto Melloni put it: “To produce an uncontested and incontestable election of the bishop of Rome.” But given the way politics has changed in the past several years—especially in the United States since January 6, 2021, and the start of the second Trump presidency—even a papal conclave may present a special test.
