Cardinals will go into Conclave to Elect a New Pope…like unto Francis

A Pope Francis II would turn the Church’s de facto division into de jure schism.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

May 1, 2025

On May 7, some 135 cardinals will assemble behind closed doors, with no communication with the outside world, and there they will elect a new pope.  At some point white smoke will ascend unto heaven and we will know who it is. Hold the drum roll.

By all accounts the dice are loaded. More than two-thirds of the cardinals are Francis’s picked men. They are red birettas with a progressive outlook on the church and the world. They are, as Malcolm Muggeridge once said of Church of England vicars, “moderate men of all shades of opinion.”

These will be men, some of whom will be practicing homosexuals; another segment pro-homosexual, and a group of heterosexual cardinals too afraid to go against the prevailing zeitgeist. They will allow divorced and remarried persons to take communion, they will swallow the line that all paths lead to God, and they will carry Francis’s banner “to build bridges not walls.” The winner will rail against Trump and show himself to be compassionate “to the least of these”. He will rail against Israel, praise Palestinian resistance and show himself to be Islam friendly.

The MSM will love him as he will display all the virtues of a 21st century post-modern Pope accessible to all. It doesn't necessarily have to be a Francis mark II, a Francis impersonator, but it probably will be.

He will go one step further than Francis and make sure the Latin Mass is never said anywhere again, and sideline any orthodox bishop, archbishop or Cardinal who dares to get in the way of his utopian worldview.

If that is not a recipe for schism, I don’t know what is.

The brilliant Vatican watcher, Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes said it well when he wrote that Francis’s funeral 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.”

Pope Francis’ funeral told the tale of two Catholic churches. “I saw two Catholic Churches existing alongside like dust and diamonds. And both claim to be the one, true Church,” writes Gomes.

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, says Gomes. He has it exactly right.

In the eulogy, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re delivered at the funeral (rather than the homily Francis had ordered) he 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.

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, writes Gomes.

Popes may come and popes may go, but 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).

END