Stewarding the Church
February 27, 2025
3
min
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Pope Francis’s most recent illness has kept him hospitalized for almost two full weeks now, and he and his advisors have been clear along the way that his condition is critical. He’s asked for our faithful prayers, and we continue to entrust him to the Lord’s provident and merciful care, with gratitude and affection for all the ways he has labored on behalf of the universal Church for more than a decade now as Pope.
His condition raises questions of what comes next, for his office. And in a heavily politicized world like ours, such questions of succession often have a tendency to inspire a mix of emotions: optimism and hope, at times; fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and alarm, at others.
But it’s worth remembering that the office of Pope doesn’t belong in the same category as the office of president, prime minister, or head of state. Recent elections have lots of people amped up about the absolute tragedy or triumph a political figure’s coming into power seems to be, whether it’s President Trump in the U.S. or emphatically conservative figures in recent European elections, like France and Germany’s. So much seems to depend on them, when it comes to the future of a nation and the tone and texture of its life, that election discourse can raise to even an apocalyptic pitch, at times: a candidate is either the perfectly ideal person for the job, the one who will make every dream a reality and bring all things into unity and peace; or he or she is the worst one could imagine for the job, the one who will bring all to ruin.
This isn’t at all the way we should think about the leader of the Catholic Church. What it means to be Pope is not the same as what it means to be a head politician. The Pope is not meant to be an original person, with ideas and policy plans for the future. He’s the custodian of a tradition, and his concern is to be a faithful caretaker of what’s been passed on to him. That means different things, of course, in different ages, requiring the right levels of dynamism and stability according to the signs of the times. And so naturally we pray for a holy, wise, prudent, and courageous leader, and the same qualities on the part of those choosing him; but fear or anxiety are out of place when it comes to his election. The Church is a human and divine institution, after all, populated by an earthly and heavenly company and belonging, ultimately, to Christ and his sovereignty. And so we’re concerned about who the Pope may be, of course; but never in an ultimate way, and never with the expectation that he’ll be the source of our common salvation or devastation.
We’ve been blessed with a long line of just these kinds of wise and courageous stewards, and we ask the Lord Jesus once more to confirm and multiply the fruit Pope Francis’s outpouring of himself on behalf of the Church has inspired. And we ask him, too, to be in the midst of our own hearts at this moment as well, quelling any fear, any disordered or exaggerated concern, any faulty hope or worry or expectation that this juncture, this time of gratitude for past labors and hope for future ones, may bring.
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