America Magazine: Five Years of Francis: The Keys to His Papacy

The sheer surprise of Francis’ election was also a factor. John Paul II had been pope for 26 years at the time of his death, and his doctrinal wingman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected to succeed him in 2005 as Benedict XVI. The combined pontificates represented 35 years of a traditional reorientation in the church, and those two popes had named all of the 113 cardinals who went into the 2013 conclave. [...]

But the hallmark of Francis’ papacy, and the source of the gravitational draw of his personality, is not about some tectonic shift in the church. Rather, it is a commitment to reforming the church first in order to serve the flock truly and bear genuine and convincing witness to Christ’s teachings. [...]

Benedict XVI was wiser about the need for the church to renew itself. But he insisted that all the tools and traditions were already at hand. He had neither the energy nor the administrative skill to open the church to reform and instead sought to highlight tradition and beauty and liturgy as the irresistible draw that would outshine the church’s obvious flaws. Both John Paul and Benedict, in other words, saw themselves as pastors who went out in order to bring others back to their fold, through their own gate. [...]

Prosaic as it sounds, part of the answer lies in the numbers. By the end of 2017, Francis had named just under half of the 120 cardinals who could cast a ballot in the next papal election. A two-thirds supermajority is needed to elect a pope, so it is not as though he has “packed” the College of Cardinals. To be sure, many of the cardinals appointed by Benedict and John Paul are happy about the direction in which Francis is taking the church. But others are dismayed, to say the least, and still others are perhaps unnerved by the tumult that has been stirred by Francis’ critics and may want a compromise candidate as his successor, someone less prone to stirring the pot. On the other hand, a principal dynamic at work in the 2013 conclave—an effort by a large majority of the cardinals, whatever their orientation, to rebalance the power equation between the Vatican and local dioceses—endures and could play a central role again.

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