VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Religion Dispatches [Somerville, MA]
April 25, 2025
By Mary E. Hunt
The death of Pope Francis, after a very public diminishment, closes a signal chapter in Catholic history with absolutely no certainty about who or what comes next. Rather than reflexively corralling the cardinals into a Conclave to elect his successor, I propose a wholesale institutional reset to maximize the Roman Catholic Church’s usefulness.
Francis’ agenda to end war, save the planet, support migrants, and eliminate starvation is crucial. But Catholicism must face its own internal contradictions in order to be credible and accomplish it.
Francis’ legacy reflects his priority on the most needy and marginalized people and parts of the world. Support for prisoners, transgender people, and immigrants, for example, are hallmarks of his generous and rich ministry. His daily pastoral calls to a Catholic parish in Gaza continued until the very last days of his life. The Pope’s good humor and his simple lifestyle (a fuel-efficient car and modest digs) conveyed his authenticity as a spiritual leader. He stood in sharp contrast to other world figures, who will remain nameless, as a reliable champion of what greed and power leave in their wake. Still, contradictions abound, the resolving of which will result in Catholicism as a stronger force for good.
Francis proved that the most important role for a pope is as a symbol of unity, not a figure of authority. The Pope is not the Church. During the five weeks that Francis was in the hospital, the wheels of the Vatican continued to turn. Local churches continued to function. And, disgracefully, many Catholic women, LGBTQIA+ people, and those abused by clergy continued to be marginalized.
Church policy — against women’s equality, in opposition to same-sex love and transgender identity, and unenforced on clergy perpetrators — contradicts basic values of equity and justice by excluding and alienating millions of Catholics. No wonder Francis’ agenda remains unfinished with so many who would help now shunted aside.
As the funeral and Conclave unfold under the bright lights of the media, Catholic women in ministry and leadership are all but absent. Remarkably, in 2025, Roman Catholic women still cannot be validly and licitly ordained. This accounts for their absence in the endless processions of colorfully dressed princes on display at the papal funeral.
Women are second class citizens on a good day in our own church. Most press attention to women is to nuns in veils and/or women mourning the death of a popular Pope. The expert commentators, majority men, tend to sport Roman collars. Not even the Swiss Guard, founded in 1506, includes women yet though there is talk of it. To be clear, I am not supporting the hoopla. I believe that less is more in spirituality. But women can rock the dresses and the power they convey. Nor do I support hierarchy, but if it must exist let it at least be equal opportunity.
Francis is praised for having put a few, a very few, women in positions of power in the Church’s bureaucracy as officials. He explicitly barred women from the diaconate and priesthood. Women who were ordained validly but not licitly, like those in the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement were automatically excommunicated on his watch.
Women were, by all measures, a concept about which he was woefully behind on the learning curve. He understood that women managers could be very efficient. After all, they have to be extremely good to make any headway in the still almost all-male scene in Rome. He failed to understand that women were just as capable as men, if not more so in some instances, in ministry and decision-making. He labored under old macho tropes, famously referring to women theologians as the “strawberries on the cake.”
For that we did doctorates?
One busy woman during the interregnum, the period between popes, is Sister Raffaella Petrini, secretary general of the Governorate of Vatican City State, essentially the CEO of Vatican City, the highest-ranking woman in the smallest country in the world. Imagine her command of logistics, protocol, security, and garbage collection this busy season. Somehow, I think she could probably function as a parish priest if given the chance. God knows lesser lights have. It is a far easier lift than managing Vatican City during a papal transition with hundreds of thousands of people paying their respects and leaving their lunch bags behind. Not to mention the security nightmare with dozens of heads of state on site.
Another is Sister Simona Brambilla, the first woman appointed to run an important Vatican department. As the prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, she oversees members of canonical religious congregations and similar organizations. However, her appointment came with an asterisk. Francis also appointed Cardinal Angel Fernandez Artime as pro-prefect or co-director instead of simply naming him as her deputy. God forbid a woman, who cannot be ordained, would have sole authority on anything so significant.
But wait, insult to injury followed. Crux reports that Sister Brambilla was invited, as all Cardinal heads of departments were, to participate in the Cardinals’ conversations leading up to the Conclave. “The invitation to Brambilla, sent by the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, was addressed to ‘Il prefetto Simona Brambilla,’ using the masculine article in reference to her position rather than the feminine. While clearly a mistake, the invitation to Brambilla carries a certain irony given that for much of his papacy, Pope Francis sought to create more space for women in meaningful positions of leadership and governance.”
I assume she was too diplomatic to show up and present her invitation (though I would have been tempted). Apparently, some Vatican officials have no capacity for shame. It was their error, so they should have simply welcomed her with open arms and apologized for the pronoun error. After all, one hasn’t always had to be ordained to be a cardinal, and such conversations would be improved, in my view, by including more than clergy. Such are the contradictions of sexism in the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican’s homosocial scene is on full display in Rome during the funeral and Conclave. I will leave the homosexual aspect of it to another writing. Both gender identity and sexual orientation are irrelevant to fitness for ministry, much less decision-making. But cohorts of ordained men in long dress-like robes as far as the eye can see is a favorite visual for the institutional Church. It could be seen as simply anachronistic, sort of like medieval reenactors who dress in costumes and joust, if they were not also the people who make decisions for the whole, diverse, global community that is Catholic. The scene is cartoonishly outdated.
The pressing needs of a world at war with itself, people dying in famines, and a planet in trouble require largescale movements of lots of different kinds of people crying foul on injustice. I worry that the unnuanced media coverage of the papal transition ‘normalizes’ hierarchy for viewers, leaves uncritiqued the scandal of male-only leadership, and covers a wildly inadequate structure with a veneer of holiness.
These images contradict any claims about being a synodal church, one in which “Todos, todos, todos,” as Francis claimed, everyone is involved.
Putting Cardinals in exclusive charge of the Conclave is proof positive that the much-touted Synodal process failed. Had it taken root at all, none of its most ardent adherents, those who want to “walk together” and discern until the cows come home would participate in a process that allows only a very select few men, allegedly cis and celibate at that, to decide on the next leader. The synodal process would suggest shared leadership and representative participation, thus necessitating a reset not the Conclave that the eponymous movie depicted.
Victims/survivors of clergy sexual abuse will take no solace in the smells and bells of Rome this spring. In fact, I think that trigger warnings are in order given the toxicity of this ecclesial hierarchy. As long as many perpetrators remain nameless, and in many cases blameless, it is hideous for victims to watch the papal spectacle unfold as if nothing untoward happened to them.
Some recent popes, including Francis (though he later saw the error of his ways), did not believe many survivors. Instead, they greased the skids for abusers to continue their heinous crimes. Theirs was a global chessboard on which criminals were moved around. The institution has spent billions of dollars contributed by ordinary Catholics to begin to compensate thousands of victims. The Vatican needs to update its theologies of sexuality, embrace professional ethics such that the sheep are off limits to the shepherd, and revamp pastoral practices to create safe places. Ordained men also need to be divested of clericalism, the hideous system of privilege and duplicity in which abuse festers. These require a reset not a tweaking of existing modes.
Continuity is the way in any large corporation with a succession plan firmly in place. In this instance, the playbook for how to certify the papal death, celebrate the pope’s funeral, and bury his body is the “Ordo exsequiarum Romani pontificis” published in 2000 and updated to 2024 to reflect Francis’s desire for greater simplicity. But the basic outline is centuries old. A Conclave is simply taken for granted as how a new leader is elected.
The lack of imagination, the failure to implement synodal changes when it matters in the public forum, assure that the status quo will endure for generations to come.
The world sees an ancient rite and is led to believe that it is fine and dandy to exclude women and out gay men from leadership, and to perpetuate a system in which sexual predators are granted positions of power and access. I invite fair-minded observers to watch the proceedings through the eyes of progressive Catholic women, LGBTQIA+ Catholics, and survivors of clergy sexual abusers. Progress that these people have achieved and any that Francis participated in are obscured in the bright lights. The overwhelming Vatican-engineered image is of a static, stable, unchangeable church, beautiful buildings, all a bulwark in a turbulent world. Did I mention a worthy place to donate money? No wonder Catholic progress is measured in centuries not nanoseconds.
Conclave was a popular movie with an odd ending that got audiences worldwide interested in this largely occult process. But an actual Conclave is a bad idea at this juncture. The Roman Catholic Church needs a wholesale reset, not a new Pope.
My guess is that the winner is already chosen, that the horse trading (we can call it theo-politicking) is in full swing. My sense is that the Conclave as such is a largely ceremonial confirmation of a decision long made. I could be wrong, but prove it!
Clearly the institution has a lot at stake for keeping the mythos alive that the Holy Spirit guides the proceedings. Some have joked that when one particularly problematic pope (name redacted) was elected, a pile of white feathers was found outside the locked door of the Sistine Chapel. The explanation was that the Holy Spirit had flapped her wings so hard that the feathers flew off but she never got inside. Stranger things have happened in Catholic history!
In any case, after a decent interval, white smoke will waft and the Senior Cardinal Deacon will intone “Habemus papam.” Another man will assume the mantle of leadership. The much-touted Synod on Synodality, now somewhere between a yawn and a controversial episode in church history, will have changed sweet nothing when it comes to direction-setting decisions.
At the end of his life, Francis approved a three-year period of implementation of the synodal work which will culminate in another in-person event in Rome in October 2028. But if the Church were to really implement the Synod process, there would be no need for another Cardinals-only Conclave, ever. At a minimum, a very mixed group of men, women, and non-binary people, lay and ordained, religious and secular, would be deputized to pick a pope. At a maximum, the Synod would conclude that the current pope is the last one needed and that future leadership would take a quite different, communal form.
I do not expect to see such a reset, but visions precede reality most of the time.
Meanwhile, the successor to Francis, in addition to continuing ministry focused on those who are marginalized, could demonstrate his papal bona fides as a unifier. He could begin by thanking and embracing ordained women priests, apologizing for their ex-communication, and asking them if he might concelebrate the Eucharist with them as a sign of a new moment of shared leadership. He could apologize to and welcome LGBTQIA+ Catholics as full church members with access to all sacraments including marriage and ordination. He could embrace divorced and remarried people, commending them on their choice to remain part of a large and diverse communion. He could abolish tombstones to the unborn at Catholic parishes. He could assure people who chose abortions that their choices are their own and that they are free to make them in good conscience.
The reset necessary is thorough-going and structural. If it sounds like a dream, it is. But that’s how change happens.
Without an overhaul of structures from a hierarchical to an egalitarian church, dreams of synodality cannot come true. As the Synod’s Final Document demonstrated, the hard issues that face an institution poisoned by prejudice and riven by sexual abuse need more changes than were embraced by Francis at the Synod. But it was a start.
Millions of people prayed for Pope Francis in his last month, making him a unifying symbol not as a pope but as a person dealing with life’s inevitable end. I admire that he did it his way. He seemed to set aside his doctors’ orders of two months of complete repose in favor of one last Holy Thursday visit to prisoners, public blessings through labored breathing, and a final tour around Saint Peter’s Square in the Popemobile to greet his people.
I suspect that Francis knew that his days were numbered—all of ours are—and made his own choices. In that sense, he was much like women who want to be priests, or people who choose to have abortions, or those who love people of the same sex, or immigrants choosing another country. To be human is to choose. I haven’t heard anyone critique his choices. Let it be a lesson to the judgmental as we reset our communal moral compass.
Pluses and minuses notwithstanding, Francis exited the earthly orbit at a time when moral leadership is at a premium. In his February 10, 2025 letter to the United States Catholic Bishops supporting immigrants and refugees, he insisted on “the dignity of every human being, without exception.” A massive Catholic reset would hasten that day.