For Elijah Smith, who grew Lutheran and the southern Baptist, the teachings of Pope Francis focused on social justice and the recognition of the marginalized helped to influence his decision to convert to Catholicism a year ago.
“He led with the example,” said Smith, 22, a university student from Rockwell, North Carolina, “and was very accepting. Accepting the LGBTQ community, accepting immigrants and a very understanding of different cultures.”
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But with Francis’s death on Monday at age 88, the Catholic Church is located at a crossroads: after 12 years of his leadership, does he continue along a progressive path to vigorize the new followers with a message of inclusion, or return to traditional roots at a time when some have yearn for the church doctrine linked by conservative customs and liturgy?
Megan Mlincik, who was a Catholic raised, said he hopes to “maintain the tradition that has happened for hundreds of years” as a worshipe in a Latin mass in the Pittsburgh area.
For centuries, the traditional mass of the Church was said in Latin and required that the priests faced the altar with their backs to the congregation, until the second council of the Vatican in the 1960s sought to modernize the rituals. The changes included that the mass is made in local and lay languages in integral essence of the services readings.
But in 2007, Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, relaxed restrictions, allowing the celebration of the Latin Mass to return.
Francis, however, established his own limits in the traditional mass, saying in 2023 that it was “being used ideologically to go back.”
Mlincik, 41, attends Latin mass services with her husband and six children in a church that has only grown after the pandemic, she said. Women use veils, commonly called mantillas, as a sign of respect. MLINARCIK also moderates a group of Latin mass moms on Facebook with 3,000 members.
“As traditional Catholics, we pray for the Pope, and we want a Pope who accepts the Latin mass and our traditional practices,” he added. “Of course, we want our religion to grow, but there must be a place for us.”
The next leader of the approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world faces a difficult task: to unite a religion that has decreased in some countries with significant Catholic populations, including the United States, and an explosive increase in others.
Although the loss of followers has leveled in recent years in the United States, where it is estimated that there are 53 million adult Catholics, according to the PEW Research Center, the greatest growth of religion continues to be in Africa, said the Vatican in the statistics published this year.
Africa and Asia also saw significant increases in the new priests, according to the Vatican.
Mathew Schmalz, founding editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism, said Francis, the first Latin American Pope, made a significant decision to appoint new cardinals from developing countries and other non -traditional places.
“The western world is no longer the center of the Catholic world,” said Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at the College of Santa Cruz in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Francis made the difficult situation of migrants a focal point of his papacy, and two months ago he criticized the efforts of the Trump administration to carry out mass deportations in a letter to the US bishops. It occurred after the then presidential candidate Donald Trump reprimanded during autumn for his plan to deport migrants, while condemning the position of Vice President Kamala Harris that supports the rights of abortion.
Who cardinals choose as the next Pope in a secret meeting known as conclave must deal with the very specific needs of Catholics where religion is thriving and has a viable future.
While matrimonial equality and abortion are often in the center to polarize religious debates in the West, Schmalz said: “Those are not necessarily the main problems for people in the global south, which have to deal, often, poverty, inequality of wealth, social justice problems and the relationship of religion with Islam.”
He said that cardinals can choose to select a Pope who can continue with Francis’s reforms, roll them up or simply “take a break, let the reforms sink and allow the Catholic Church to recover breath.”
“They will probably choose someone who has a pastoral style as Pope Francis did, but who will not boost the reforms even more or necessarily backed them down,” Schmalz added.
Stephen White, Executive Director of the Catholic Project, a research initiative of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, said that a Pope must be “the rock” that can guarantee the unity and integrity of the Church, instead of microgesting each diocese.
“I think it is unlikely that the cardinals who choose the next Pope will only seek to double the Pontificate of Francis, but they will not seek to repudiate him,” he said.
“Pope Francis often spoke of the need to” make a disaster, “shake things,” White said, referring to a speech that the Pope made to a group of South American children. “He certainly did that. I hope the next Pope seeks to consolidate things a little and maybe doing some order.”
Possible leaders to happen to Francis represent both traditional leadership features when it comes to family, marriage, homosexual rights and immigration, while others have defended pressing social problems in their nations of origin.
In the United States, surveys have shown that younger Catholics have become more conservative than their older counterparts, while younger priests are also more conservative and politically moderate. Voters identified as Catholics voted overwhelmingly by Republicans in the 2024 elections.
“There is no doubt that most American bishops are conservative and back to Trump, and there is a big political neckline in the Catholic Church,” said Andrew Chesnut, president of Catholic Studies of the Virginia Commonwealth University.
He said he hopes that conservative Catholics in Western countries express opposition if another Pope like Francisco is chosen.
“We could see a significant dropout, particularly if we have two consecutive reformist potatoes,” Chesnut added.
Schmalz agreed that whoever becomes Francis’s successor can be found with some resistance in the United States, “simply because the Catholic community is so divided.”
“We live in divisive times,” he said. “It will be an open question if the next Pope will try to heal those divisions or deepen them involuntarily.”
