Even before Pope Francis was buried in a basilica of Rome on Saturday, the conservative cardinals who felt his pontificate was a division disaster that endangered the traditions of the Church had started politicians to influence the conclave by electing the next Pope.
They have a seductive slogan: unit.
It is difficult to imagine a less offensive cry of rally, but in the ears of Francis' most busy supporters, it sounds like a word of code to rest the most inclusive vision of the Catholic Church of Francis.
Concerns are a clear sign of the maneuvers by the ideological fields that are already taking place among the cardinals while their shared mourning gives way to the looming task of voting for Francis's successor in the conclave, which should begin the first week of May.
The discussions that lead to the elections will probably touch whether a successor of Francis should push forward, or restore, its opening to the system potentially women such as deacons or to make a clergy of married men or offer communion to divorced and remarried Catholics, among other deeply contested issues.
The cardinals have already gathered in the daily meetings behind the walls of the Vatican. By giving way to the sandals he wore with black socks after one of these meetings last week in his aligned study, a conservative cardinal, Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, said he had spent the morning to make the case of the unit.
The cardinals had to “seek the unification of the Church,” said Cardinal Müller, who Francis externalized from the best doctrinal position of the Church in 2017. It was necessary to speak of the division of the Church today, “he said.
Some progressives within the church fear that the dozens of new cardinals that Francis have chosen all over the world will be less experienced in the Vatican and can be taken by the sweetness of the siren of the unit.
“It looks really good,” said Cardinal Michael Czernny in Canada, who was one of Francis' closest councilors, but “means inversion”. For those who have opposed Francis, many of them appointed by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, unit means a “new introversion” with the promise of “units that solves all our problems,” he said.
“If you ask me:” How would you name the wrong track for the Conclave? “I would say the idea that unity is the priority,” said Cardinal Czernny, who under Francis guided the office to promote full human development. “Unit cannot be a priority problem.”
The two cardinals sit on opposite ends of the ideological division. Those like Cardinal Czernny have put the priority on another word: diversity.
“They are the two keywords, diversity and unity, and there is a lot of on play on the balance between them,” said Rev. Antonio Spadaro, under secretary for the Vatican Office for culture and education, which was close to Francis.
He, like Francis, believes that the future of the Church is in diversity. Francis chose dozens of new cardinals who were modeled outside Rome and authorized local churches. The trick, said Father Spadaro, was avoiding a “freezing of the Church” to maintain the unit, while leaving a dispersion and a “split” in search of diversity or progress for which the Church was not ready.
“Francis has maintained this balance very delicate and moved the church,” he said. The next Pope, he said, too “he needed to keep the two together”.
And that's why Cardinal Müller said: “We have to speak now”.
It is not a new theme for conservatives. The church would be seriously weakened, the deeply conservative cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea said in a 2024 symposium in Kenya, “if they don't fight for unity”.
During the Pontificate of Francis, Cardinal Sarah emerged as a central critic and Francis stripped him of his official influence on the liturgy of the Church. “If we introduce breakage and revolutions, we destroy the unity that governs the Holy Church over the centuries,” said Cardinal in 2019.
But the unit was also central to the vision of the church of Francis. He just saw it differently. In 2021, Francis repressed the celebration of the Latin mass, adored by Cardinal Sarah and other traditionalists, because he claimed that he was used by the Catholics ideologically motivated to undermine the unity of the Church.
That decision encouraged only conservative criticisms of Francis as authoritarian. “This is his style, to divide,” said Cardinal Müller on Thursday in his apartment. “All dictators are dividing themselves.”
While Francis entered the subsequent phase of his pontificate, his progressive supporters expected that he was starting to make concrete changes. Instead, the concerns about the unity of the Church seemed to push him to aim.
When the bishops from remote areas in South America arrived in the Vatican in 2019 for an important meeting desired by Francis, they recommended that, to face a deficiency of clergy, the Pope should allow older married Catholic men in order to become a priest.
Francis gave every indication that this practical solution was what he wanted, but in that period Cardinal Sarah co -author of a book with the retired Benedict who reaffirmed the celibacy priestly.
The Pope said that he needed more time to think about it, because the problem “had become ideologically polarizing and able to divide the church,” said Father Spadaro. He said that Francis had not been influenced by Benedict, but the conservatives got a victory for the unit.
On other issues with the potential to divide the Church, including whether to allow women to be ordered as deacons, a ministerial role, Francis has allowed a long taboo debate, but in the end he did not make any decision, stating that the question needed more studies. The crowd of Unity again issued a sigh of relief.
And when Francis made a great change, permitting and even promoting priestly blessings for pairs of the same sex, he was applauded by liberals in Europe and North America. But a huge expression of dissent by the Church managers in Africa, the place that many see as the future of faith, forced him to take a step back. For reasons of unity, Francis exempted Africans for an unspecified moment to obtain the program, essentially allowing them to give up.
Father Spadaro claimed that the African Carve-Out was “a more revolutionary gesture” of the true measure of gay blessings, “because it legitimized a pastoral plurality”. It was Francis' way, he said, to recognize cultural diversity and differences within a united Church.
Cardinal Müller, on the other hand, considered Francis' controversy and efforts to convince the bishops and the lay people to gather to make decisions, to be distractions from the true mission of the Church to defend his doctrine and reveal his truth to the world without taking into account it with popular or politics competitions.
“This agenda with homosexual blessings and so on and priesthood of women,” he said, “are not the big questions for humanity”.
For other cardinals who will vote in the conclave, the unit also counts, but means something different.
For Cardinal Lazzaro Tu Heung-Sik, the South Korean who led the Vatican Department responsible for the clergy, units “means, for me, to open the heart,” he said. He said that Francis “taught me that I have to open my heart to love others”.
And after one of the meetings of the General Assembly this week, Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, who served under Francis as a prefect of the Office for Eastern Churches, said he was too early to discuss real problems. “We have to decide what to put on the table and then discuss it,” he said.
For Cardinal Guretotti, an Italian who is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor of Francis, or as a director in the conclave, “the lack of unity is always a disaster”.
But, he said, that “it doesn't mean everyone must say the same thing.” He added: “There may be a difference. Not opposition, because it is destructive”.