Pope Francis’s Funeral Exposes Catholic Rift
The tale of two Catholic churches will continue when cardinals choose successor
Pope Francis’s funeral offered glimpses of glory.
On Saturday, a quarter of a million Catholics packed St. Peter’s Square and stretched all the way down the Via della Conciliazione to the Tiber River. The magic of Latin Gregorian chant mingled with the mysticism of Byzantine Greek cantillation.
World leaders Pope Francis both hated and loved — from Donald Trump to Javier Milei and from Joe Biden to Volodymyr Zelenskyy — were carefully positioned in diplomatically orchestrated seating that proved to be a nightmare to the Vatican funeral planners.
A palette of colors that would have inebriated Renoir or Monet splashed across the piazza within the confines of its Bernini colonnades — the red chasubles of 250 cardinals blending with the purple vestments of 400 bishops, the gold crowns and copes of Eastern patriarchs outshining the white mitres of Latin prelates, and the white albs of at least 4,000 priests with red stoles.
There were, of course, reminders that this wasn’t exactly Heaven on Earth. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was conspicuously absent, given that Pope Francis had repeatedly snubbed the Jewish nation while keeping Gaza on speed dial until the final week of his life; meanwhile, some in the crowd provocatively raised Palestinian flags during the proceedings.
Triumphalist Catholicism?
Surely this was the moment for triumphalist Catholics to trumpet out the truth of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church — and that it was to be found in the bosom of Rome and nowhere else. Surely these Catholics from every tribe and tongue and people and nation had gathered as one to pay homage to their beloved shepherd, Holy Father, and Pontiff Maximus.
I must confess that in a period of childlike naiveté I would have been sorely tempted to add the sound of my trombone in harmony with my triumphalist Catholic trumpeters. After all, as a priest of the Church of England for 25 years, I had been promised unity in the Church of Rome.
But attending Pope Francis’s funeral confirmed that the narrative of Catholic unity around the putative successor of St. Peter is a great ideal but nonetheless a grand fiction. Instead, it validated the reality of a monstrously divided church.
A curious onlooker would need only a few hours of internet excavation to discover that the Catholic Church is fatally fractured — from the extremes of Latin Mass traditionalists trashing the New Rite of the Eucharist to the sedevacantist sirens blaring to alert fellow Catholics to their truth that there has been no valid pope since Pius XII died in 1958.
I won’t even mention liberal Catholics, conservative Catholics, Catholics who believe Benedict XVI was really the pope after his resignation and communicated this Dan Brownesque secret through a Latin code while Francis was an impostor, and the overwhelming majority of Catholics who haven’t given a fig about Catholic teaching on sexuality since the invention of the birth control pill. But they are all certainly different factions of the whole.
Megachurch vs. Microchurch
I saw a simpler but far deeper division in the Catholic Church at Francis’s funeral. As Rudyard Kipling observed, “East is east and West is west and ne’er the twain shall meet”: I saw two Catholic Churches existing alongside like dust and diamonds. And both claim to be the one, true Church.
One despises Pope Francis, the other adores him. The Francis-hating microchurch consists of a tiny minority of Catholics from the U.S. and Europe. The Francis-loving megachurch is made up of most Catholics who live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where Catholicism is thriving. And everyone I talk to in Italy, both Catholics and non-churchgoers, adore him.
Francis’s funeral was attended by megachurch Catholics — from both East and West, poor and rich, black and white; straight, gay, and transgender. With more than a little help from the mainstream media and the political elite, that crowd had beatified Francis as a saint-in-the-making even before he went to meet his Maker last week.
The funeral was Francis’s canonization. Bursts of spontaneous applause rippled repeatedly through the hundreds of thousands of people at the funeral like the roll of a timpani in a Mahler symphony.
If you have seen the musical Evita, Saturday’s funeral was the “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” moment on the balcony of the Casa Rosada.
Francis-hating Catholics watching it from a basement in Texas would love this to be hyperbole. It isn’t.
Full Schism Ahead?
I have spent five years covering Francis’s every uttered word, written document, and public act. Much of this reporting has been from the conservative trenches where Francis-hating Catholics have relentlessly attacked him for what they see as his sexual liberalism and theological heresies.
Author Steve Skojec is one of the haters. He admits the pope was “my archnemesis for nearly a decade.” Today, Skojec is no longer a Catholic but an agnostic. Francis, he writes, destroyed his faith.
Francis-hating Catholics created a whole cottage industry around him. They recruited a handful of bishops, a dozen priests, a few marginal media outlets and busload of internet influencers who worked themselves into a frenzied bout of self-harm like the priests of Baal.
For the first time in decades (there have been other splits since the Reformation) the microchurch — well-funded, loud, and influential — has threatened a schism within Catholicism, while megachurch Catholics flung their garments on the road for Francis to drive on in his unassuming Fiat.
Jorge Bergoglio, Superstar
Indeed, in the eulogy Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re’s eulogy delivered at the funeral (rather than the homily Francis had ordered) revealed why the megachurch hailed the pope as Jorge Bergoglio Superstar. Re trotted out the pope’s achievements — loved as “pastoral” and “prophetic” by the Catholic megachurch and despised as treacherous and heretical by the microchurch.
Re climaxed his lofty eulogy by canonizing Francis and assuring the crowds that he was already in Heaven. “Pope Francis used to conclude his speeches and meetings by saying, ‘Do not forget to pray for me.’ Dear Pope Francis, we now ask you to pray for us,” he said.
Cardinals from both factions are already meeting in general congregations to decide who the next pope should be. They will go into conclave on May 7 to cast their votes. A sliver of them belong to the microchurch that hated Francis; the rest were appointed by Francis himself.
Microchurch media have been running lengthy articles on contenders for the next papacy and sending out early warnings that they will reject as invalid the election of several of those currently in the running, like one of the top candidates, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
God’s Word for Turbulent Times
Cardinal Gerhard Miller, whom Francis fired from Catholicism’s top doctrinal post in 2017, told The New York Times it is “necessary to speak about the division of the church today.”
Cardinal Walter Kasper, a megachurch prelate, has already declared that the outpouring of support for Francis makes the Church’s future direction clear. “The people of God have already voted at the funeral and called for continuity with Francis,” he told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
A Pope Francis II would turn the Church’s de facto division into de jure schism. The megachurch would cheer, the microchurch would jeer — and the level of cognitive dissonance afflicting confused Catholics would soar.
At such a critical juncture, we would heed well the prophet Isaiah’s exhortation to seek refuge and anchorage in the unchanging Word of God: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (40:8).
Or as Martin Luther wrote in his great hymn (ironically now sung in many mega-Catholic churches all over the world):
That Word above all earthly powers
no thanks to them abideth;
the Spirit and the gifts are ours
through him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also;
the body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still;
his kingdom is forever!
Popes may come and popes may go, but God’s word will stand, unchanging, forever.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.