For Elijah Smith, who grew up Lutheran and Southern Baptist, Pope Francis‘ teachings centering on social justice and recognition of the marginalized helped to influence his decision to convert to Catholicism a year ago.
“He led by example,” said Smith, 22, a college student from Rockwell, North Carolina, “and he was very accepting. Accepting of the LGBTQ community, accepting of immigrants and very understanding of different cultures.”
But with Francis’ death Monday at 88, the Catholic Church is at a crossroads: After 12 years of his leadership, does it continue on a progressive path to invigorate new followers with a message of inclusivity, or return to traditional roots at a time when some have yearned for church doctrine bound by conservative customs and liturgy?
Megan Mlinarcik, who was raised Catholic, said she hopes to “keep the tradition that’s happened for hundreds of years” as a worshipper at a Latin Mass in the Pittsburgh area.
Pope Francis during an audience with children from middle schools across Italy on June 2, 2017, at the Vatican.L’Osservatore Romano via AFP – Getty Images
For centuries, the church’s traditional Mass was said in Latin and required priests to face the altar with their backs to the congregation, until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s sought to modernize rituals. Changes included Mass being conducted in local languages and laypeople becoming integral to the services’ readings.
But in 2007, Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, relaxed restrictions, allowing the celebration of Latin Mass to return.
Francis, however, set his own limits on the traditional Mass, saying in 2023 that it was “being used in an ideological way, to go backward.”
Mlinarcik, 41, attends Latin Mass services with her husband and six children in a church that has only grown post-pandemic, she said. Women wear veils, commonly called mantillas, as a sign of respect. Mlinarcik also moderates a Latin Mass Moms group on Facebook with 3,000 members.
“As traditional Catholics, we pray for the pope, and we want a pope who’s accepting of the Latin Mass and our traditional practices,” she added. “Of course, we want to see our religion grow, but there has to be a place for us.”
The next leader of the world’s roughly 1.4 billion Catholics faces a tall order — to unite a religion that has declined in some countries with significant Catholic populations, including the United States, and an explosive rise in others.
While the loss of followers has leveled off in recent years in the U.S., where there are an estimated 53 million adult Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center, the largest growth of the religion continues to be in Africa, the Vatican said in statistics released this year.
Africa and Asia also saw significant increases in new priests, according to the Vatican.
Mathew Schmalz, the founding editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism, said Francis — the first Latin American pope — made a significant choice to appoint new cardinals from developing countries and other nontraditional places.
“The Western world is no longer the center of the Catholic world,” said Schmalz, a religious studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Francis made the plight of migrants a focal point of his papacy, and two months ago criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass deportations in a letter to American bishops. It came after he rebuked then-presidential candidate Donald Trump during the fall for his plan to deport migrants, while also condemning then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance supporting abortion rights.
Whomever the cardinals elect as the next pope in a secretive gathering known as a conclave must grapple with the very specific needs of Catholics where the religion is thriving and has a viable future.
While marriage equality and abortion are often at the center of polarizing religious debates in the West, Schmalz said, “those aren’t necessarily the primary issues for people in the global south, who have to deal with, oftentimes, poverty, wealth inequality, social justice issues and the religion’s relationship with Islam.”
He said the cardinals may choose to select a pope who can continue Francis’ reforms, roll them back or simply “take a breather, let the reforms sink in, and allow the Catholic Church to catch its breath.”
“They’ll probably choose someone who has a pastoral style the way Pope Francis did, but who is not going to push reforms even further or necessarily roll them back,” Schmalz added.
Stephen White, the executive director of The Catholic Project, a research initiative at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said a pope must be “the rock” who can guarantee unity and the church’s integrity, rather than micromanage each diocese.
“I think it is unlikely that the cardinals choosing the next pope will be looking simply to double down on Francis’ pontificate, but neither will they be looking to repudiate it,” he said.
“Pope Francis spoke often of the need to ‘make a mess,’ to shake things up,” White said, referring to a speech the pope made to a group of South American children. “He certainly did that. I expect the next pope to look to consolidate things a bit and perhaps do a little tidying up.”
Potential front-runners to succeed Francis represent both traditional factions of leadership when it comes to family, marriage, gay rights and immigration, while others have championed pressing social issues in their home nations.
In the U.S., surveys have shown younger Catholics have become more theologically conservative than their older counterparts, while younger priests are also more theologically conservative and politically moderate. Voters identifying as Catholic overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in the 2024 election.
“There’s no doubt that the majority of American bishops are conservative and back Trump, and there’s a great political cleavage in the Catholic Church,” said Andrew Chesnut, the Catholic studies chair at Virginia Commonwealth University.
He said he expects conservative Catholics in Western countries to voice opposition if another pope like Francis is chosen.
“We might see some significant defection, particularly if we have two reformist popes back to back,” Chesnut added.
Schmalz agreed that whoever becomes Francis’ successor may be met with some resistance in the U.S., “simply because the Catholic community is so divided.”
“We live in divisive times,” he said. “It’s going to be an open question whether the next pope will try to heal those divisions or unintentionally deepen them.”
