Opinion | The New Pope Might Be Something Like the Old Pope

With the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the College of Cardinals sent a clear message of continuity with the reformist agenda of his predecessor, Pope Francis. But despite Leo’s reputation as having a quieter, more disciplined personality than that of Francis, the conservative ire that has roiled Catholicism during the previous pontificate is likely to continue with this first American pope.

Traditionalist Catholics, especially in the United States — where much of the opposition to Francis was based — had yearned for a new pope who would rein in or even reverse changes that Francis made to foster a more inclusive church, where authority was shared and everyone could be heard.

Francis’ favorite vehicle for those reforms goes by a bit of church jargon: synodality. It’s a term much bandied about but little understood. It refers to the gathering of church leaders and members to discuss and debate urgent issues. For Francis it meant bringing together bishops and lay people, women and young people — and yes, the pope — to speak openly and as equals about issues that would have been barred from discussion, much less consideration of solutions, in the past. Many conservatives read into how Francis conceived of synodality a veritable heresy that sowed confusion and ambiguity among the faithful. It was a manipulative way of changing the church, his critics believed.

Conservatives ramped up their oratory in the days leading up to the conclave. They made it clear that if the cardinals did not produce a pope more to their liking — demands couched in euphemistic terms like a need for “unity” and “clarity” — a schism in the church could be the result. But the cardinals made it clear they would not give in to a heckler’s veto.

When Leo emerged onto the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica immediately after his election on Thursday, he told the roaring crowd in his characteristically deliberate manner that, “We want to be a synodal church.” You could almost hear the air going out of the opposition’s sails. Leo will very likely be more understated than Francis, and make every effort to reconcile with those who may disagree with him. But by all accounts he is very determined. If he does walk through the door of reform that Francis opened, then it’s anyone’s guess how long any reconciliation with traditionalists that he is able to establish will last.

Leo has generally kept a low profile but has made it clear that reforms are at the heart of his vision of the church.

“We must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today,” he said in an interview with Vatican Media. “The authority we have is to serve, to accompany priests, to be pastors and teachers.”

He has also been active on social media, sharing an article on X with the title: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” And he took the name of Leo XIII, the pope whose teachings in the late-19th century helped establish modern Catholic teaching on social justice.

The fundamental issue that lies at the heart of these tensions and has inflamed Catholic debates for the better part of the last century is change: What can change in the church, how can it change and will change destroy the deposit of faith, tearing apart the sprawling flock of nearly 1.4 billion members.

Whether it is a question of who can be ordained, who can preach, who can be blessed and who can receive communion, change — or “development,” as the church prefers to call it — underlies almost every controversy. The reality is that the church has always changed, and is always changing. Sometimes change in church positions comes to matters like slavery or religious freedom or usury. Other times it is church practices like allowing women and girls as altar servers and readers — once forbidden, now commonly practiced.

But the Catholic Church puts such a premium on appearing always unchanging that it prefers to practice what the French-German church historian Michael Seewald calls the “concealment of innovation.” Or, as Church wags like to say, when the Vatican begins a proclamation saying “as the church has always taught,” then you know they are about to announce a change. Paradoxically, change is in fact part of continuity. “Sometimes change is required precisely in order to remain faithful to the tradition,” the Jesuit church historian John O’Malley wrote. “It has in that way been operative in the church from the beginning.”

What Francis did was not so much change the church himself — indeed, many progressives were disappointed that his promotion of women and his welcome to gays and lesbians, among other things, did not go further. Rather, he simply acknowledged that the church has already changed and that the tensions and debates already exist. He launched the process of synodality to reconcile the reality in the parishes with the teachings set out in church documents.

That process is fraught with controversy and faces many hurdles. But it is designed to outlast any single pope. The 69-year-old Leo is likely to have a fairly lengthy papacy that can further institutionalize the processes that Francis started. The Catholic right could face a long war.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Well-respected orthodox thinkers like Pope Benedict XVI have spoken in detail about how the church changes and reforms: through “continuity and discontinuity at different levels,” as he put it in a 2005 address to the Roman bureaucracy. Conservatives need to learn the value of disagreement and even dissent. Under previous popes more to their liking, the Catholic right demanded that Catholics toe the line on papal pronouncements or be considered “bad” Catholics. But now that they find themselves in a church led by popes they disagree with, they are stuck. They defined dissent as wrong, so it must be the pope who is the bad Catholic. It’s an awful mess.

The other lesson that conservatives can learn as they face the road ahead is the value of diversity. It’s a loaded term in today’s political climate but in the context of a global church of extraordinary variety and complexity, embracing it is the only way that the church can grow and remain one. “The unity of the church is willed by Christ; a unity that does not mean uniformity but a firm and profound communion in diversity,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, hardly a progressive, put it this week in his homily during the Mass before the cardinals entered the Sistine Chapel to vote.

That is the way, and it always has been. “Test everything, hold fast what is good,” St. Paul told the Thessalonians. It worked for the early church, and there could be no greater witness in today’s tribal and polarized world than a global church more diverse than ever in its various expressions but still united in heart and mind.

David Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and has covered the Vatican as a journalist for four decades.

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