VATICAN CITY — Unlike US President Donald Trump, who has lost no opportunity to demolish his predecessor’s policies, the new Catholic pontiff will not summarily slash and burn Pope Francis’ legacy, even if he is a conservative, experts and Church officials say.
“It’s not like the US government where the president comes in and replaces the entire cabinet,” said Rev. Thomas Reese, commentator for Religion News Service and author of Inside the Vatican, a benchmark book on the Church organisation.
“There is a built-in inertia of the institution.”
The new pope will be elected at a conclave that starts next week, and will take immediate charge of the Vatican, one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies.
But change comes slowly in the 2,000-year-old Church and, at least at first, will be more of style than substance.
All Vatican senior officials, appointed for five-year terms, serve at the pleasure of the reigning pope and, when he dies, almost all of them have to “cease to exercise” their roles. However, a new pontiff usually rolls over existing mandates.
It took Pope John Paul II, who was elected in 1978, about seven years to replace all the top officials at the Vatican, also known as the Roman Curia.
Perhaps more important in the early phases of the papacy are the signals the new pope may send through gestures, phrases or off-the-cuff remarks, who he decides to meet, or not meet, and which groups he decides to address first.
While Pope Francis did not change Church doctrine on homosexuality — the Church teaches that same-sex acts are sinful but same-sex attraction is not — his famous remark “who am I to judge?”, made less than five months into his papacy, set the tone for a more welcoming Church.
It also sparked a conservative backlash that lasted throughout his 12-year reign.
Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, a conservative whom Francis fired as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department and who will take part in the conclave, said he believed Francis overstretched himself and tried to be too many things to too many people, creating confusion among the faithful.
“What is important is that the [next] pope be the universal pastor of the Church and not everybody’s personal parish priest,” Mueller told Reuters.
He said the next pope should quickly send signals that he was ready to “reject the great agenda of the LGBT and globalist lobby to destroy matrimony and the family as we know it”.
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Not so fast
Cardinal Lars Anders Arborelius, a progressive prelate from Sweden who will also take part in the conclave, acknowledged that “not everyone is so open and so welcoming” as Francis was.
If the next pope is conservative, Arborelius told Reuters, “he will not be able to change Francis’ documents, but issue his own writings on various social issues that can differ in interpretation” of Church law. That takes time.
The most important way a new pope can change the Church is through the appointment of bishops, spread out across the world. But those changes also often need years.
Popes do not fire bishops unless they have committed a serious offence. They must wait until someone dies or reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75 for a chance to appoint a successor. It is similar to a US president having to wait sometimes years for a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
After his election in 1978, John Paul II started changing the theological make-up of the world’s bishops, which he thought had moved in too liberal a direction since the end of the reforming Second Vatican Council in 1965.
His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, continued that trend.
Francis moved the pendulum the other way, and also appointed more than 80 per cent of the cardinals who will choose his successor. But it was a gradual process.
The number of cardinal electors under the age of 80 who will enter the conclave next week to elect the new pope stands at 133. Two others are eligible but will not participate for health reasons.
The total of 135 cardinal electors is already 15 over the traditional maximum of 120, a limit which each pope since John Paul has breached.
It will take at least a year for the number to fall back to or below 120. It is unknown if the new pope will respect the limit, but previous pontiffs have moved slowly in naming new cardinals.
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