Second, there’s a view that Francis’ capricious governing style has alienated even many churchmen who are not especially conservative and created little appetite for a sequel or “Francis II” successor. This is the theme of a sweeping assessment by Damian Thompson, an English Catholic journalist, in the online magazine UnHerd, which argues that while Francis’ maladministration and continuing scandals (including the protection of favored clerics accused of sexual abuse) have often been ignored by the secular press, they have made a strongly negative impression on the cardinals who will elect his successor.
Finally there’s the belief that there has been no “Francis effect” in the pews or wider culture that would justify continuing his project — no big return of lapsed or disaffected Catholics, no revitalization of Catholic institutions, no wave of Francis-inspired vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Instead, under his liberalizing leadership, the church’s decline in the developed world has arguably accelerated — making it easy for conservative forms of Catholic faith to regard themselves once again as the only bulwark against secularization, and thus the only Catholic future.
Interestingly, a similar analysis showed up last week in The Associated Press, in the form of a feature on how American Catholicism is likely to turn more traditionalist as the baby boomers pass away. “‘A step back in time’: America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways” ran the headline, over a story that focused, in part, on intergenerational tensions: younger Catholics trying to restore incense and Gregorian chant; older progressive Catholics feeling alienated from the traditionalism of their younger pastors; a liberal priest remarking, of the conservatives, “they’re just waiting for us to die.”
The A.P. story, perhaps inevitably, collapsed certain crucial distinctions, portraying conservative Catholicism as a monolith when in fact there are significant differences between a typical John Paul II Catholic, conservative but comfortable in the post-Vatican II dispensation, and traditionalists trying to restore the church’s ancient Latin liturgy. (The latter group is more zealous and countercultural; the former group is vastly larger.)
But the general trend the story describes is real enough, and the Francis era has not changed the dynamics it depicts. The age of “priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and ’70s,” is indeed seemingly on its way out; the rising generation of American priests are often politically moderate, but their theology is orthodox and their liturgical impulses are conservative. The most modernized forms of American Catholicism, whether self-consciously liberal or just suburban and assimilated, are not usually where you see the most energy and growth. Full pre-Vatican II traditionalism is likely to remain an eccentric and somewhat elite phenomenon, but what I’ve termed the “neo-traditional” big tent will probably become steadily more influential, even dominant, as the church adapts to its own relative diminishment.