These Contentious Issues Could Determine Who Becomes the Next Pope

The cardinals who have traveled to Rome to elect the next pope at a conclave next week sometimes look as ideologically polarized as many secular voters around the globe.

At first glance, they appear to split along the kinds of left-right lines that characterize political contests elsewhere. Many conservative Roman Catholic Church leaders disagreed with Pope Francis, who was often a darling of liberals around the world.

But the typical divisions between progressives and conservatives don’t correspond so neatly with the ideological battles within the Vatican and the broader church. Although there are some exceptions among the cardinals, the issue that most consistently marked Francis as a liberal — his fierce advocacy on behalf of migrants and the poor — does not necessarily set him apart, because the Catholic Church has made the gospel’s call to shelter and feed strangers a fundamental tenet.

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 Professor 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?

Decision-Making

Francis often argued that regular practicing Catholics — including women and L.G.B.T.Q. people — should be consulted about the direction of the church. He invited lay people to sit with bishops to discuss controversial issues in Vatican meetings called synods.

He was opposed by more 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, the 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 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 punted on a decision about whether women could be ordained as deacons 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.

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.

Even if the ordination of women remains contentious among the cardinals, it would be difficult to stifle the debate altogether because of pressure from female Catholic activists.

Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the archbishop of Tokyo, said in an interview last month that he saw “nothing wrong with ordaining women as deacons.” But he said, “there are still many problems that need to be overcome.”

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 of his 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 divorced and remarried 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

Pope Francis ushered in a new era for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics when in 2023 he permitted priests to bless same-sex couples. He made clear that marriage was reserved for relationships between a woman and a man, but his changes still stoked the ire of conservatives, especially in Africa and North America.

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 on 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.

The Global South

The biggest growth areas for the Catholic Church are in Africa and Asia. The cardinals selecting the next pope are surely discussing whether to choose someone from one of those regions. Whoever they elect will need to reckon with the proliferation of cultures and traditions, as well as spiritual heritages, among new followers. Some may come with different expectations of what role the faith plays in their lives and how they should accommodate its rules.

Whether or not the new pope comes from those regions, he “must be one who is ready to speak to the injustices that exist in relationship between the global north and the global south in international politics,” said Nora Kofognotera Nonterah, a theological ethicist at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. “A pope cannot run away from that in the 21st century.”

As the church recruits new followers, it will also need to find a way to speak to its youngest members. “Young people are no longer interested in taking directives and working with directives,” Dr. Nonterah said. “They want to ask questions and they want to be asked questions.”