VATICAN CITY – Throughout his 12-year papacy, Pope Francis achieved significant milestones but also left behind numerous unresolved issues and many hurdles for the next pope to address. These include the Vatican’s troubled finances, ongoing conflicts across various continents, and traditionalist dissatisfaction with his restrictions on the old Latin Mass.
As the conclave’s cardinals complete their voting beneath Michelangelo’s frescoed Sistine Chapel ceilings, the 267th pope will face the choice of either maintaining, modifying, or completely abandoning Francis’ initiatives. The new pope will need to determine whether to focus on priorities such as migrants, environmental issues, and the social justice causes Francis supported, or shift attention to different concerns.
Among the challenges facing the new pope:
The role of women
Pope Francis notably advanced the inclusion of women in leadership roles within the Vatican more than any of his predecessors. The incoming pope will need to decide whether to uphold and further this progress or to revise and take a different path.
The issue isn’t minor. Catholic women do much of the church’s work in schools and hospitals and are usually responsible for passing the faith to the next generation. But they have long complained of second-class status in an institution that reserves the priesthood for men.
Some are voting with their feet.
Nuns are leaving in droves, either through attrition or simply quitting, leading to questions about the future of female religious orders.
The Vatican says the number of nuns globally has been hemorrhaging about 10,000 per year for over a decade, with their numbers at 599,229 at the end of 2022, the last year for which there are statistics. In 2012, there were 702,529 nuns globally.
The new pope will have to address women’s expectations for not only a greater say in church governance, but greater recognition.
“We are the great majority of the people of God,” said Maria Lia Zerbino, an Argentine named by Francis to advise the Vatican on bishop nominations, a first for a woman. “It’s a matter of justice. It’s not an achievement of feminism, it’s in the church’s interest.”
Women’s Ordination Conference, which advocates for female priests, goes further. “The exclusion of women from the conclave, and from ordained ministry, is a sin and a scandal,” it said.
Gervase Ndyanabo, a prominent lay leader in Uganda, said there should be more participation of the laity and women in the administration of parishes and decision-making at all levels. Progress, he said, has come “at a snail’s speed.”
Polarization of progressives and traditionalists
An anonymous letter circulated among Vatican officials in 2022, highlighting what it called Francis’ “disastrous” pontificate and what a new pope must do correct the “catastrophe” he had wrought. Its author was Australian Cardinal George Pell, but that fact emerged only after his death in 2023. Once a close adviser to Francis but always conservative, Pell grew increasingly disillusioned with his papacy, signing the letter with the pen name, “Demos” — the common people.
Last year, a screed by another anonymous cardinal circulated, signed by “Demos II.” It resumed where Pell left off, denouncing what it called Francis’ “autocratic, at times seemingly vindictive style of governance; a carelessness in matters of law; an intolerance for even respectful disagreement; and – most seriously – a pattern of ambiguity in matters of faith and morals causing confusion among the faithful.”
It blamed polarization in the church on the confusion Francis had sown and urged the next pope to focus on “recovery and reestablishment of truths that have been slowly obscured or lost among many Christians.”
Those letters underscored the age-old divisions between traditionalists and progressives in the Catholic Church that were exacerbated during Francis’ pontificate. He emphasized inclusion and “synodality,” or listening to the faithful, and cracked down on traditionalists by restricting their celebration of the old Latin Mass. While the conservatives may not have enough votes to elect one of their own, a new pope will have to try to restore unity.
The polarization is keenly felt in the United States, where anyone using social media can challenge the Vatican or even the local church’s perspective, said professor Steven Millies of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
Such forms of communications “can have a narrative of what Catholicism is that doesn’t come from any ordained minister, from any bishop, and can, night after night, the world over, suggest that the pope is wrong,” he said.
Clergy sexual abuse
While many church leaders would like to think clergy sexual abuse scandals are in the past, survivors and their advocates want the new pope to address it as a top priority.
Francis and Pope Benedict XVI took steps to end decades of abuse and cover-ups, changing church laws to punish abusers and their clerical superiors who hid their wrongdoing.
But a culture of impunity still reigns, and church authorities have barely begun to deal with other forms of spiritual and psychological abuse that have traumatized generations of faithful. Twenty years after the sex abuse scandal first erupted in the U.S., there is still no transparency from the Vatican about the depth of the problem or how cases have been handled.
The new pope must deal with not only the existing caseload but continued outrage from rank-and-file Catholics and ongoing revelations in parts of the world where the scandal hasn’t yet emerged.
Ahead of the conclave, groups of survivors and their advocates held news conferences in Rome to publicize the problem. They created online databases to call out cardinals who botched cases and demanded the Vatican finally adopt a zero-tolerance policy to bar any abuser from priestly ministry.
Peter Isely of the U.S. group SNAP said it was “crazy and bizarre” that the church doesn’t apply the same rigor to abusers that it does to establishing criteria for ordination.
“You can’t be a married man and a priest,” he said. “You can’t be a woman and a priest. … But you can be a child molester and a priest.”
LGBTQ+ outreach
Francis famously said, “Who am I to judge?” when asked in 2013 about a purportedly gay monsignor at the Vatican. Francis sought to assure gay people that God loves them as they are, that “being homosexual is not a crime,” and that everyone is welcome in the church.
His successor must decide whether to follow in that outreach or pull back. There’s plenty of support for rolling it back. In 2024, African bishops issued a continent-wide dissent from Francis’ decision allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, and bishops from around the world attending his synod on the church’s future backed off language explicitly accepting LGBTQ+ people.
“We want a united Catholic Church, but we must stay with the fundamentals,” said Ndyanabo, the Ugandan lay leader. “The gospel should not change at all because of our own human weakness.”
The Rev. James Martin, who seeks to build bridges with LGBTQ+ Catholics, knows the degree of opposition but remains hopeful.
“The challenge for the new pope is to continue Francis’ legacy of reaching out to a group who has felt excluded from their own church,” Martin said. “Based on the synod, I would say that many cardinals feel that there needs to be welcome of LGBTQ+ people because they know their dioceses. But how far that goes is up in the air.”
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Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, and Giovanna Dell’Orto in Vatican City contributed.
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