Pope Francis and Conclave 2025: Still waiting for a Third-Millennium Pope

The Roman Catholic Church is still waiting for a genuinely third-millennium pope. All three of the last popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis—were men very much shaped by the 20th rather than the 21st century.

When Benedict XVI died, I reflected that both JPII and Benedict were members of what we in America refer to as “The Greatest Generation”—those who survived the horrors of totalitarianism and the Second World War. That gave them a similar worldview. Their perspective on European history involved concerns about the impact of the French Revolution and the rise of totalitarianism of the Left and the Right. Living under both Fascist and Communist regimes, they looked at America as a liberator and a refuge for those who sought freedom from oppressive regimes. They had a positive view of political liberalism, for example, and admired America’s religious liberty regime, or what Benedict XVI referred to as the “free church” system.

At the same time, I suggested that Pope Francis, being a Latin American rather than a European and from a slightly younger generation, did not have this same perspective on American political culture.

But there are, nevertheless, other similarities between these last three popes. Together they constitute a real anomaly in the long history of the papacy going back 2,000 years. The Polish pope, the German pope, and the Argentinian pope broke the long tradition of the Italian hold on the papacy in the universal Catholic Church. European cardinals are still the largest number in the future conclave; and of these, the number of Italian cardinals is the largest.

Moreover, although Pope Francis is notably the first New World pope, he, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI, was very much shaped by the world of the 20th century. He grew up in Latin America during the Cold War, when radical left-wing guerilla forces, often backed by Communist money from the Soviet Union, clashed with right-wing military regimes. He came to his vocation to the priesthood in the late 1960s, in the midst of the confusion and fallout after the Second Vatican Council. 

He joined the Jesuits at a time of the rise of “liberation theology” in Jesuit ranks—a toxic mixture of Marxism with historical-biblical criticism that often reduced the emphasis on individual sin, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the redemption of immortal souls in eternity, portraying Jesus as a merely human social revolutionary aiming to bring about the kingdom of God on earth like some socialist utopia. His early ministry developed in the context of a silent internal schism in the Church caused by dissent on the teaching of Humanae Vitae on human sexuality and marriage, which emphasized the need for every marriage to be for life and open to life and condemning contraception as subversive of the very ends of human sexuality, both unitive and procreative.

So, in many ways, the papacy of Pope Francis was not the expected follow-up to John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s work of stabilizing the hermeneutic of continuity regarding the Second Vatican Council and deepening the Church’s catechesis on human sexuality in the direction of the “Theology of the Body.” Pope Francis’ papacy often felt like a throwback to the 1970s. The John Paul II Generation Church put the 1970s firmly behind them. They moved beyond 1970s progressive theology and hippy guitar masses. Pope Francis’ papacy often felt like a throwback to the 1970s.Tweet This

The John Paul II Generation Church put the 1970s firmly behind them. They moved beyond 1970s progressive theology and hippy guitar masses. They discovered the beauty of the liturgical tradition as something new and fresh—something very close to Benedict XVI’s heart. They revitalized the culture of marriage and family and appreciation for genuine femininity and masculinity—something central to John Paul II’s apostolate even when he was a young priest. They came out of the 1970s and moved forward into a vibrant witness to the ways in which the Catholic Church offers medicine for the many ills plaguing modern social life.

The Roman Catholic Church has not yet had—and may not have for several generations—a pope who is “of” the John Paul II Generation, who will amplify that generation’s full-throated, unapologetic embrace of the Church’s liturgy, tradition, and moral and social teaching on the centrality of the family as the primary unit of society. So many of the cardinals who are in the conclave or who are considered papabile are in their 70s and are not really “of” this new and rapidly growing post-John Paul II Church. 

The tendency to couch every issue hesitantly in liberal terminology for fear of media backlash shows an obliviousness to the ways in which the 21st-century Internet revolution has liberated the young from the stranglehold of the mainstream media. The tendency to think that respecting women in the Church requires including them in traditionally male roles in the clergy or Roman Curia instead of openly celebrating the feminine roles—whose loss has led to the disintegration of the family and society at large—ignores the tendency among the young, even in non-Catholic circles, to rediscover these values in the face of an aggressive push to the asexuality, gender neutrality, but hyper-sexuality of the LGBTQ+ movement.

Will the cardinals of the conclave “run home to mamma” and simply choose a safe, Italian candidate who will work with the Roman Curia instead of running roughshod over the way the Italian-dominated Church functions as a universal institution with a substantial bureaucratic structure? The choice of an Italian pope could signal a “return to normalcy” after three popes and half a century of non-Italian popes.

Will the cardinals of the conclave look for a pope who “gets” the corner that was turned at the beginning of the millennium, a pope of the younger generation for whom 1970s progressivism is not new but pathetically outdated? The Catholic Church is not, as the 1970s progressives thought, dying under the weight of ancient tradition and liturgy; it is growing in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and even in the United States and Europe among young converts to the Faith attracted by the John Paul II Generation’s evangelization efforts in the new media.

We are 25 years—a quarter of a century—into the third millennium. In terms of the long view of history required to think about the history of the Catholic Faith, that is a mere blink of an eye. It may take another 25 years before we see the full effects of the John Paul II revolution in the life of the universal Church. But the signs of a new spring of Catholicism are there to see at the local level for anyone who has eyes to see.