07-05-2025
Remember the Church's beginnings when electing the pope
From catacombs to cathedrals, the temptations of empire remain May 07, 2025
A church in West Sussex is home to a scale replica of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling
Francis is no longer with us. The cardinals are meeting again under the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But what's really at stake isn't just continuity or change. It's whether the Church dares to follow the path Francis spent a decade pointing toward — or turns back.
The question is not just who will lead. It's what kind of Church they will inherit — and what kind they intend to become.
The earliest Christian community was an underground movement. The first pope, Peter, led from the shadows, not the throne.
The Church in its infancy was fragile, decentralized and deeply rooted in solidarity with the poor. It had no cathedrals, no state alliances, and no political capital. Its strength came from its witness — its radical commitment to love, mercy, and shared life.
But when Constantine converted in the fourth century, everything changed. The persecuted became privileged. Christianity became the official religion of empire, and with that came new temptations: prestige, wealth, hierarchy.
Over time, the Church began to mirror imperial structures. What had started in the catacombs now occupied marble halls.
The consequences were lasting. The Church's long descent into power came with no shortage of scandal: the Crusades waged in the name of Christ, the Inquisition burning those who questioned, indulgences sold as tickets to heaven, and the Renaissance — an era where beauty and corruption lived side by side.
Even St. Peter's Basilica, magnificent as it is, was funded in part through those indulgences. That abuse didn't just stain the Church. It helped spark the all responses led to schism. Not everyone broke away. Ignatius of Loyola stayed and reimagined the Church from the inside. Francis of Assisi stepped outside it, barefoot and broke, trusting that the Gospel was enough. His call still haunts us: 'Go, repair my Church, which as you see is falling into ruin.'Pope Francis, elected in 2013, took that summons to the very beginning, he signaled a different kind of papacy. He refused the trappings of empire — choosing simpler vestments, paying his own hotel bill, riding in a modest car. But these gestures were not cosmetic. They were a Church long burdened by hierarchy, he emphasized mercy over judgment, dialogue over dogma, and proximity to the poor over protection of privilege.
He named the global peripheries — not Rome — as the Church's new center. He challenged a clerical culture that had often concealed abuse and silenced dissent. While his critics accused him of ambiguity or populism, his true project was clear: to bring the Church closer to the Gospel, and the Gospel closer to the people.
Yet not all welcomed this return.
In the US, a group of conservative bishops pushed back hard. For them, Francis went too far. Raymond Burke, Carlo Maria Viganò, Joseph Strickland, and Robert Barron, all made it clear — this wasn't the kind of pope they wanted. They spoke as if the Church had lost its footing, when it was their grip on control that was slipping.
At its core, their vision is not a return to roots, but to robes.
History teaches that the Church loses its moral clarity whenever it grows too comfortable with temporal power. It becomes a mirror of empire, not a mirror of Christ.
The next pope will face pressure to retreat into tradition, reassert dogma, and mollify political allies. But if the Church is to remain credible, it must once again choose witness over control.
It must remember that its authority never came from pageantry, but from proximity to the suffering.
Pope Francis did not fix everything — he couldn't — but he reoriented the Church toward its origins. He reminded us that faith is not performance — it's presence.
As the conclave decides the Church's next leader, the most crucial question is not how Catholicism will govern itself in Rome, but how it will live out its mission on the margins.
The Church was born in catacombs, not in palaces. And its future — if it is to remain faithful — lies not in reclaiming its throne, but in remembering where it
