While not directly defense related, the Catholic Church plays an outsized role in world affairs and merits serious attention.

In my two pieces below, and likely more to come, I will look at what to expect in the next weeks and months as the Church chooses a new leader for the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and its impact on international politics.

I will also delve into how the next pope will impact US Catholic Church, which is becoming increasingly conservative even as the papacy under Francis went somewhat liberal or ‘woke.’

Electing A New Pope — Who And What Comes Next?

And why does it matter? “Conclave,” the 2024 Oscar-winning film that follows a group of cardinals who are summoned to Rome for a papal conclave tasked with finding the new pope now appears semi-prophetic with the death of the “progressive” Pope Francis.

The event, steeped in tradition, centers around an elaborate and highly secretive ballot process.

While “Conclave,” which is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, takes the real-life process of how the Catholic Church chooses a new pope and embellishes it, being a typically liberal Hollywood production, totally misses the conservative vibe shift in the Church.

Still, it provides timely insights into how the Church will elect the next pastor of the world’s largest Christian flock.

And in a chaotic and dangerous world in what often appears to be perpetual decay, it matters. The pope determines the spiritual, moral and ideological direction the church will take for years and even decades to come.

The passing of the pope now sets in motion a series of centuries-old processes, including a nine-day mourning period, an elaborate burial and the election of a new pope.

But first let’s note that reform-minded Pope Francis broke tradition even in death by foregoing the century-old practice of being interred in the Vatican Grottoes beneath St. Peter’s, when he chose to be laid to rest inside the west wing of the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, one of the city’s four major papal basilicas and a site deeply significant to him throughout his papacy.

In his last testament, dated June 29, 2022, the liberal-leaning Francis asked for his tomb to be located “in the niche of the side nave between the Pauline Chapel (Chapel of the Salus Populi Romani) and the Sforza Chapel.”

This makes him the first pope in over a century to be buried outside the Vatican. His funeral will take place on Saturday, April 26.

Pope Francis also recently approved plans to make the whole traditional papal funeral procedure less complex. Again, breaking with long-standing tradition, Francis has chosen a simpler path for his burial. Unlike his predecessors, who were laid to rest in three nested coffins, Francis will be buried in a plain wooden coffin lined with zinc.

He has also done away with the custom of placing the Pope’s body on a raised platform, or catafalque, in St. Peter’s Basilica for public viewing. Instead, mourners will have the chance to pay their respects while his body lies in an open coffin, without the traditional display.

At the end of the funeral process, a new leader of the Catholic church will be selected in a high-stakes election dramatized in “Conclave,” with progressive and conservative cardinals vying for control of an institution with 1.4 billion followers globally.

Papal conclave, coming from a Latin noun dating back to ancient Rome and meaning a locked room, are notoriously difficult to predict because the election process is shrouded in total secrecy. Of the 252 members of College of Cardinals, 135 are under the age of 80, which makes them eligible to vote.

Voting takes place in the Sistine Chapel, which is thoroughly swept for surveillance devices beforehand, then locked and sealed once the cardinals are inside.

In each voting round, electors write their chosen candidate’s name on a slip of paper and place it into a silver urn, declaring “before God” that they have followed their conscience. The votes are then counted and read aloud, revealing the leading contenders and the extent of their support.

This process continues until one candidate receives a two-third’s majority. After every round, the ballots are burned – black smoke from the chimney signals no decision has been reached, while white smoke announces the election of a new pope.

At times the smoke accidentally comes out looking sort of gray, confusing everyone. But in the end a new pope emerges.

After 12 years of liberal and often controversial moves by Francis, experts say there is no single frontrunner to be the next Pope, but several names have been cited as indications of which direction the Church might take.

Guesses about who the next pope will be often prove inaccurate. Before the selection of Pope Francis in 2013, many bookmakers had not even counted him among the frontrunners.

This time, predictions are further complicated because Francis made many appointments in a relatively short amount of time during his tenure (some said he packed the College of Cardinals to continue his legacy) making it harder to identify movements and factions within the group.

Still, as Time reports, “experts suggest it’ll be as difficult to predict as Francis’ own election was.”

Time adds:

“The history of the papacy of many hundreds of years suggests it’s very difficult for a Pope to control the election that follows his own death,” Miles Pattenden, a historian of the Catholic Church at Oxford University tells TIME. Cardinals are “their own men,” and even those picked by Francis may have their own opinions.

“It’s very simplistic to say cardinals just vote along ideological lines as though they’re part of political parties,” Pattenden says. “That’s not how the Vatican works.”

Pattenden also points to an Italian proverb: “After a fat Pope comes a thin one.”

“The idea of that is essentially that the cardinals very often focus on what they didn’t like about the previous Pope, all the things they thought were his faults and flaws, and they look for someone who remedies those.” The first question on cardinals’ minds will be whether they want change or continuity.

But another expert quoted by Time reinforces my concern that the next pope will be as liberal or more so than Francis:

Carlos Eire, a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, however, thinks it’s likely that those Francis appointed will indeed lean ideologically left, noting that Francis did not appoint many conservative bishops to the College of Cardinals and that, while geographic diversity was a priority of his, theological diversity was not. Francis, for example, appointed American Robert McElroy in 2022, who is known for his advocacy on immigration and the environment and inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics, while reportedly bypassing more conservative archbishops. “When it comes to religious issues,” says Eire, “it is also highly likely that they will lean away from traditionalism.”

However, there remains hope that a more traditional and conservative pontiff may be elected to balance out some of Francis’ more liberal moves. More to come.

Time for an Anti-Francis’ MAGA Pope

Or will another liberal modernist push the increasingly conservative US Catholic Church move away from Rome?

I don’t know. We could get one, or we could get another liberal ‘reformer.’ Pope Francis was often criticized from within the church as being “too woke” for his progressive stances on climate change, illegal migration, LGBT inclusion and other major issues.

Francis was also harsh with his conservative critics, especially those in the US.

In 2023, he complained of a “very strong, organized reactionary attitude” against him in the US Church, adding: “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless.”

After the conservative US cardinal Raymond Burke attacked him over his 2016 apostolic exhortation softening views on divorced and remarried Catholics, Francis threatened to evict him from his Vatican apartment.

He also dismissed the Texan bishop Joseph Strickland, another vocal critic in the US church, from his diocese.

During the pope’s recent illness, Strickland told Newsmax, “Certainly, we pray for him,” “but we need the new Pope to be someone who is much clearer—really, frankly, stronger in the tradition of our Catholic faith.”

This, and many other divisions, brought him in conflict with a more traditional US Catholic Church, especially in a time of Trump.

The concern for conservative US Catholics like me is that things will only get worse with another Francis-like pope.

In an earlier piece I delved into the Conclave that will elect our next pope. Of note, Pope Francis tried to pack the College of Cardinals with fellow liberals that will make up the Conclave.

For example, of the 10 US cardinals eligible to cast ballots in the Conclave, six were elevated to their positions by Francis and are mostly in line with his liberal vision for the church.

Overall, of the 135 cardinals eligible to take part in choosing his successor, the late pontiff appointed about 110 of them, including some conservatives.

Francis hoped that by packing the College he would be followed by a like-minded ‘modernist’ successor. And it could work. As the Guardian reported:

The appointments make it “difficult for an ‘anti-Francis’ pope to emerge”, said Iacopo Scaramuzzi, a Vatican journalist with La Repubblica newspaper and author of the book Tango Vaticano. La Chiesa al Tempo di Francesco (Vatican Tango. The Church in the Time of Francis).

“But it doesn’t mean this group is unanimous and cohesive, or that they have the same ideas. Almost all the cardinals he has chosen are pastors from great dioceses around the world.” There were conservatives as well as progressives among them, Scaramuzzi added.

A prominent cardinal called for the Roman Catholic Church to return to conservative traditions as candidates began to jockey for position before the election that will choose Pope Francis’s successor.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is the prominent archbishop of New York and an outspoken conservative, has just called for the Roman Catholic Church to return to conservative traditions, saying that the next pontiff should embody “more clarity in teaching” and “more refinement of the Church’s tradition.”

“I’d love to see someone with the vigour and conviction and the fortitude of John Paul II, I would love to see somebody with the intellectual wattage of a Pope Benedict, I’d love to see somebody with the heart of a Pope Francis. How we can blend them all … we are not in some sort of laboratory doing genetic mutations … but that’s probably what we would look for,” he told NBC News.

And that does sound like an excellent role model.

So, the questions remain. Will his efforts ensure that the recently deceased pope’s leftwing ideological imprint and direction will continue and deepen with a new pope? Or will enough traditionalists and conservative Cardinals reverse the liberal swing and elect an ‘anti-Francis’ more MAGA pope? Or something in between?

Many Catholics, and others worldwide, are certainly hoping and praying for the latter, especially in the US. Due to President Donald Trump’s pro-Christian, pro-life and anti-transgender policies, 58 percent of US Catholics voted Republican in November, a stunning number.

Trump himself, aided by close Catholic advisors and allies, including his vice president, recent Catholic convert, JD Vance, has worked hard to align his conservative MAGA movement with the church.

Most recently, he created a taskforce to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” throughout the federal government, and beyond.

More directly, before the death of Pope Francis, Trump appointed Brian Burch as US ambassador to the Vatican, an outspoken critic of Francis and key leader in the effort that mobilized Catholic voters for the GOP last year.

Francis, in turn, appointed a liberal cardinal, Robert McElroy, as the Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, Francis regularly expressed his distaste for Trump’s policies, writing in a letter to American bishops in February that deportations of illegal aliens violated the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”

That has not gone over well with most Trump voters and many US Catholics.

Coincidentally, or divinely, on Easter Sunday, hours before his death, an ailing Pope Francis managed to share a brief meeting at the Vatican with his most senior US Catholic critic, JD Vance.

For Francis, this would be a final encounter with the conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive while the broader Church faces a bit of an identity crisis.

But, as many have noted, the conservative change in the US church is bigger than Trump and Vance. It is the culmination of long-term trends in a church that is shifting right. Even as many of the leaders are progressive, the younger priests and many lay members are increasingly traditional.

The Financial Times reported that: “According to a survey published in 2023 by the Catholic Project, a research group at the Catholic University of America, more than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 described themselves as theologically ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox’.”

The researchers added that while “progressive” and “very progressive” priests made up 68 percent of priests in the years 1965-69, that number had today “dwindled almost to zero.” This is a massive shift.

The cultural vibe is also shifting right.

A Catholic podcaster in Phoenix, Arizona posted on X:

Anyone who’s soft on abortion, who has Marxist tendencies, who’s pro-homosexual – we’ve got to get rid of them. There are bishops who have marched on Pride parades … they’ve got to be fired.

And, yes, along with electing a traditionalist pope, purging modernist leftist bishops would be a great thing for the Church. But what if that doesn’t happen, and instead we get more of the same liberal modernist nonsense we have been seeing in Rome for the past decade?

How will the American Catholic Church deal with this?

Well, the Wall Street Journal reported:

The appointment of a liberal successor, Faggioli warned, risked further estrangement [between the US Catholic Church and Rome]. One possibility he cited was a “liquid schism” in which the two parties don’t suffer a formal rupture but increasingly look past one another. “The fear is that it basically could become a Catholic Church that is independent from the Vatican,” Faggioli said.

Stephen P. White, the executive director of the Catholic Project, a research initiative at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., likened that possibility to an “Anglicization” of Catholicism—or a fracturing of the Church on national lines. “That is a problem,” White said. “The faith is supposed to be one.”

Let’s hope and pray that this never happens. But electing a true Catholic pope, with a renewed emphasis on traditional Church values, may be the only way to avoid it.

Either way, I’m ready to Make Catholicism Great Again!

STAY TUNED FOR MORE.

Paul Crespo is the President of the Center for American Defense Studies, Managing Editor of American Liberty Defense News, and Managing Partner of SPECTRE Global Risk. As a Marine Corps officer, he led Marines, served aboard ships in the Pacific and jumped from helicopters and airplanes.

He was also a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at U.S. embassies worldwide.

He later ran for congress, taught political science, wrote for a major newspaper and co-hosted his own radio show. A graduate of Georgetown, London and Cambridge universities, he brings decades of experience and insight to the issues that most threaten our American liberty – at home and abroad.