The Papal Conclave Is A Battle For Western Civilization

The papal conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis will soon be underway in Rome. Cardinals from all over the world, 135 of whom are eligible to cast a vote, are now traveling to the Vatican. There they will meet behind the sealed doors of the Sistine Chapel, cut off from the outside world for as many sessions as it takes to elect a new pope.

Corporate and Catholic media alike are rife with predictions about who that might be. Lists of “papable” cardinals are popping up all over social media, but of course no one really knows what will happen in the coming days and weeks. While it’s true that Pope Francis himself has appointed 80 percent of the cardinal electors, they’re not all liberals cut from the same ideological cloth as Francis. What they’ll do is anyone’s guess.

What’s certain, however, is that the conclave will be a contest between two competing visions of Catholicism. On one side are the aging liberal boomers, who came up in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and whose vision for the church is decidedly modern. They think everything that came before Vatican II is bad and that ripping out the altar rails, selling off the icons, and banning Gregorian chant and polyphony in favor of tambourines and guitars was a great improvement. They believe in erasing the differences between the laity and clergy, ignoring or destroying Sacred Tradition, and deemphasizing or outright denying the reality of sin. Francis was one of them, and there are many others in the College of Cardinals. They have done their work with zeal, and much has been lost.

Such men thought, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were forging a new future for the post-conciliar Catholic Church. They believed they were blazing the trail into a bright modernist future for Catholicism. But now they are old men in their 70s and 80s, and their revolution is dying with them. Almost no one in the Catholic Church wants to continue their religious modernization project. When they look behind them to the younger generations in search of Catholics to whom they can pass the baton of their revolution, they find almost no one. In America, theirs is the weak and sclerotic “cultural Catholicism” of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and John Kerry — boomers whose worldview is inherently anti-Catholic and whose politics are an affront to Catholic morality.

On the other side is a cohort of more traditional, theologically orthodox and culturally conservative prelates who reject the liberalism of “the spirit of Vatican II.” They understand that Catholicism is attracting new, increasingly young converts worldwide precisely because it stands against the chaos and confusion of modernity. They know the way forward is the way back, drawing on the rich traditions of the faith to speak light and truth to a weary modern world. These men represent the great majority of faithful practicing Catholics in America and globally. Among them are Cardinals Raymond Burke of America and Robert Sarah of Guinea — titans of the faith who for many years have spoken forcefully and eloquently of the unchanging truth of Catholic doctrine and Sacred Tradition, and warning against the modernism of the West. Theirs is the Catholic faith of adult converts like Vice President J.D. Vance, who was received into the Catholic Church in 2019.

In this sense, as Catholic theologian Chad Pecknold noted, the recent meeting between Vance and Francis the day before Francis died was iconic. “Was it a reconciliation? Or was it a recognition that one world was passing away, and another beginning anew?” wrote Pecknold. “Perhaps it was both of those things, and that both worlds are Catholic. It was most certainly an image of a pope and a ruler — and that is a classic image of western civilizational order.”

It remains to be seen whether the meeting represented a reconciliation. There’s no doubt, however, that the liberalism of Francis is passing away. In almost every way, Francis during his 12-year pontificate became the living representative of post-Vatican II Catholicism. He was decidedly more concerned with globalist liberal priorities like climate change and mass migration than with defending the hard lines of the Catholic faith against a world that would like nothing more than to blur or erase them altogether. Indeed, he himself often blurred those lines with imprecise or reckless comments — about gay marriage, about the moral standing of Catholic politicians who promote abortion, about Catholic tradition and teaching itself. His vehement attacks on the Traditional Latin Mass and the young, conservative-minded Catholics who are drawn to it set Francis against what is obviously the future of the church.

Vance of course represents a rejection of Francis’ liberalism. He and others like him — including myself; I was received into the Catholic Church the year before Vance, in 2018 — are not becoming Catholics because of men like Francis but in spite of them. They seek something solid and unchanging and true amid the uncertainty and falsity of modern life. In America, somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 adults were baptized into the Catholic Church at Easter this year. Record numbers were baptized in France. In England, Catholics now outnumber Anglicans. These converts are coming not because of hazy liberal nostrums about “accompaniment” or “synodality” but because they’re drawn to what they believe is the solid and unchanging truth of the Catholic faith. Many of them were inspired by the Traditional Latin Mass that Francis so despised. They are the future of the Catholic Church.

The conclave, then, is the battleground where this contest between the recent past and the emerging future of the Catholic Church will take place. In some ways, that battle is part of a broader contest playing out in the West, between an aging liberal elite and the younger generations whose civilization they have ruined.

So the conclave in Rome will be both a battle for the future of the Catholic Church and for the future of the West at large. It might prove to be a turning point, after which we return to some kind of fellowship under Christendom or become something else entirely, neopagan and anti-Christian. All eyes now turn to Rome precisely because the fate of the West has always been and will always be bound together with the Vicar of Christ and the Holy See.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.