These contentious issues could determine who becomes the next pope

Boston Globe

03-05-2025

Advertisement
Ultimately, the cardinals' choice will amount to a referendum on whether to extend Francis' legacy of inclusivity and openness to change. That was 'how he made sense of living in a highly polarized age,' said Anna Rowlands, a political theologian at Durham University in England.
Francis understood 'what's at stake in the polarization,' said Rowlands, and was willing to accept disagreement as a precursor to dialogue. 'The danger is the church moves into a moment when it might be tempted to choose a pole,' she said, which could close off discussion altogether.
More than any single issue, the choice of the next pontiff will be dominated by a philosophical question: Who deserves a say in determining the Catholic Church's future?
Advertisement
Decision-making
Francis often argued that regular practicing Catholics -- including women and LGBTQ+ people -- should be consulted about the direction of the church. He invited laypeople to sit with bishops to discuss controversial issues in Vatican meetings called synods.
He was opposed by conservative leaders, who may be keen to return to centralized decision-making. 'I think the conversation will have to go along the lines of 'Can we get away with doing away with it?'' said Miriam Duignan, executive director of the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research in Cambridge, England.
Another key split is between those who believe the church should welcome everyone -- including those whose lives don't match traditional church teachings -- and those who think that only those committed to unwavering Catholic doctrine should be admitted into the church's fold.
'It's that big-tent vision of the church that is sometimes the source of tension and apprehension,' said the Rev. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, dean of the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University. 'It's very different when you think of church as a perfect society or closed society where membership is defined by doctrinal allegiance or orthodoxy.'
Women in the church
Two years ago, Francis for the first time allowed women to vote at a significant meeting of bishops. Last year, he deferred on a decision about whether women could be ordained as deacons, clergy members who can preach and preside over weddings, funerals, and baptisms.
Francis was clear that he wanted women to be permitted more options than 'altar girls or the president of a charity' but resisted the notion that they needed to participate in the church hierarchy. In many places with priest shortages, women increasingly do the work of ministering to congregants.
Advertisement
Conservatives say that allowing women to be deacons would create a pathway for them eventually to become priests. They argue that doing so would violate 2,000 years of church doctrine, despite what some experts say is historical evidence that women acted as deacons in the early church.
Married priests
The church has a dearth of priests in many countries. In 2019, a summit of Roman Catholic bishops recommended that Francis allow married men to serve as priests in the remote Amazon region, where the shortage is particularly acute.
A year later, Francis said he needed more time to consider the landmark proposal, deciding that the church wasn't yet ready to lift its roughly 1,000-year-old restriction requiring priests to be single, celibate men. Many supporters who expected him to be a pope of radical change felt let down.
Divorce
On the question of divorced and remarried Catholics, Francis urged priests not to treat them like pariahs, and to welcome them with 'doors wide open.'
Francis opened up the debate over whether to allow these Catholics to receive Communion even if they had not had their previous marriages annulled by a church tribunal. But in the end, he backed off from any change in church law and simply encouraged priests to be welcoming to divorced and remarried Catholics.
'People who started a new union after the defeat of their sacramental marriage are not at all excommunicated, and they absolutely must not be treated that way,' Francis said. 'Though their unions are contrary to the sacrament of marriage, the church, as a mother, seeks the good and salvation of all her children.'
Sexual Orientation
Francis ushered in a new era for LGBTQ+ Catholics when in 2023 he permitted priests to bless same-sex couples. He made it clear that marriage was reserved for relationships between a woman and a man, but his changes still stoked the anger of conservatives, especially in Africa and North America.
Advertisement
In countries in Africa and other regions where homosexuality is a crime, Francis explicitly condemned the criminalization but allowed bishops in Africa to forbid priests to bless same-sex couples because of the danger to them if they were outed. In cultures that stigmatized gay relationships, clergy would be given an 'extended period of pastoral reflection' to accept the new path that Francis always argued did not contradict church teachings.
Sexual abuse
Some among the church hierarchy might like to declare the crisis of sexual abuse by Catholic priests over. But abuse survivors and activists warn that practices and the mentality in local parishes have not changed enough to prevent future cases or address the pain of existing ones.
A statement from the Vatican press office Friday said the cardinals were discussing sexual abuse in the church as a ''wound' to be kept 'open,' so that awareness of the problem remains alive and concrete paths for its healing can be identified.'
The biggest revelations have been concentrated in the United States, Australia, and Europe. But in most of Asia, Africa and Latin America, 'a lot has yet to come out, so this will continue to rumble on,' said Miles Pattenden, a historian who studies the Catholic Church at Oxford University.
This article originally appeared in