Did you realize this was the most “diverse” conclave in history? Did you know that various enthusiastic people (for which read: childlike peasant types) have waited “all day in the sun” to hear the news? “They certainly know how to do drama, don’t they?” said one supercilious git, apparently unaware that British people might be Roman Catholic too. He banged on: “This place — Rome, Europe! — needs to be challenged by the realities of the developing world; it needs to be shaken out of its complacency.” Only belatedly did he remember to ascribe the sentiment to the late Pope Francis — also described as “a bit of a rockstar” — and not himself.

I tried to ignore the obvious political bias; for it was the satanists who first taught me to drown out irritating worldly intrusions into strictly sacred matters. As a child, my family and I attended a Catholic church on an RAF base leased to the US Navy, set in the foothills of the Grampian mountains. The only available building was a Utilitarian-looking prefab which had to be shared with every other kind of religion there. Shelves at the back of the room contained a dizzying selection of reading material, from pamphlets about lives of the saints, to scientology books by L. Ron Hubbard. Once a month, the devil-worshippers apparently got their turn at the altar. “They are very friendly and polite”, a gently ironical priest from New York once told my father.

Still, our congregation managed to suppress any troubling thoughts of previous occupants for an hour or two every Sunday, as the space was remade into a holy one by the unfolding of the familiar rites. As I remember it, Catholicism is quite at home with the delicate dance between the sacred and the profane. And indeed, as the papal conclave made its way towards its dramatic decision yesterday, a similar sense of focus was probably required.

From one perspective, conclaves are so obviously worldly: full of human flaws, compromise, and opportunism. According to a story circulating this week, newbies to the role watched the new Hollywood film in order to know what to expect. Factions form, votes get switched, and gradually the main contenders start to emerge. In between, there are huddles over dinner, corridor conversations, and whispers in the breakfast queue.

Though it sounds glamorous, in reality I imagine it’s more like some tortuously long academic conference; exhausted introverts continually forced to be sociable, overstimulated by too much caffeine, and unable to hide behind their confiscated smartphones. Apparently they even wear name badges. With all that distraction and pressure, the rhythms of rituals inherited from centuries of conclaves must feel like solid ground.

Back in the Eighties, as I crossed the threshold of my occasional church, the sense of mysterious transformation was compounded by the fact I was also entering a little piece of America, appearing like a crazy hallucination: cursive script on the noticeboards, friendly soccer-mom Sunday School teachers, root beer in the vending machines. It was all very unlike the Scottish world that lay just beyond the gates. And here, too, there was negotiation between the relatively permanent and the ephemeral. Along with the exotic frosted donuts after Mass, the words and gestures of the liturgy were the only real constant.

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The base’s mission was to keep track of long-range nuclear missiles. Rotating tours of duty meant some family in the congregation was always arriving, or leaving with a celebratory cake. Every now and again a new naval chaplain with an Irish or an Italian name would pitch up in the tiny rural location, fresh off a gunship or out of a warzone. His subsequent inevitable collapse into bored alcoholism would be studiously ignored by his flock. This church also gave me my first glimpse of that fascinating indeterminate object, a priest in a cassock puffing furiously on a fag.

My early religiosity didn’t last. Relative outsider to the faith as I now am, trying to guess who might become pope was like trying to pick a Grand National winner, based only on horses’ names and the colors of jockey silks. Would it be the powerbroker Parolin; the keffiyeh-sporting Pizzaballa; the austere conservative Erdő, or jolly-looking progressive Tagle? In the end, it was 69-year-old moderate Robert Prevost, an American with a French name who has spent most of his ecclesiastical mission in Peru, and who once argued on X about ordo amoris with J.D. Vance. Symbolically straddling various global currents, this too looked like a canny move. Or as the BBC woman put it: “Let’s be honest; he ticks a lot of boxes.”

But despite the self-interest and unpredictability of group dynamics, for believers, a conclave is directed by God not man. According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, divine will is revealed by a “resonance”: “[I]t can come from a phrase or prayer… a conversation over a meal, a sense that something’s going on here, and it’s those things that count as much as predetermined positions or perspectives.” The sequestration is supposed to enhance openness to God’s will, without any distraction; as is the elaborate formality of solemnly counting, then burning the ballots. In essence, observant Catholics must treat the high drama as directed by a single auteur, while still acknowledging that the actors have a lot of room for improv.

And the same apparently goes for canonization. A fascinating piece in The Economist details the ongoing campaign to make deceased Italian teenager Carlos Acuti the first millennial saint, by fitting him into the requisite mold of “heroic virtue”. Wishing to connect with younger worshippers, the Vatican is apparently in the market for a relatable saint who wore sneakers and looked like he was in a boy band. And so awkward recollections of schoolmates are downplayed; stories of his great piety pushed to the fore; posthumous miracles conveniently found and authenticated.

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As Kenneth Woodward writes in his book Making Saints: “Each time a new saint is officially recognized by the Church of Rome, it does so in the wider interest of inquiring into the nature of holiness itself.” The same is presumably true of choosing a pope. But still, those in charge believe theirs is a genuine inquiry. They are discovering the right answer as dictated by God, rather than finessing history to fit the desired narrative. Whether aspects of Leo XIV’s back story require some finessing remains to be seen.

A few decades ago, pointing out the apparently earthbound, arbitrary element of religious procedures would be offered by triumphant rationalists as proof of hollowness. I’m sure I once took it that way too. Seeing what tawdry motivations lay behind the curtain seemed like an effective antidote to faith. In a defensive response to all the scrutiny and mockery, many Christian institutions dialed down the mysticism and got rid of tradition and formality, selling off the family pews and bringing us the cringe of the acoustic guitar, the Alpha course, and the rave in the nave instead. But now, Catholic churches are filling up again, and particularly with young people — even in the absence of relatable millennial saints. They don’t appear to be put off by the Tridentine Mass, women wearing mantillas, or the burning of palms for Ash Wednesday. In fact, they seem to rather like these things.

Of course, this might too be a passing fashion: a pendulum swing away from decades of mirthless, flat-voiced rationalism. It is perhaps compounded by being buffeted about aimlessly in the vortex of hyper-liberal values, eventually giving rise to a desire for firmer footing. But from the perspective of the believer, even fads for Christianity don’t happen on their own. The universe’s most successful influencer is also involved in their co-production. Between nature, God, and man, the background causal metaphysics may be murky, but no weirder than thinking that Mother Earth is hurting, or that sexed bodies get changed with words.

Life is coming at us fast these days, and we need all the help we can get. I’m glad that the words of the liturgy create a space to appreciate the sacred, even when uttered by inebriated naval chaplains in competition for space with satanists. And it is beautiful that the papal conclave still unfolds with meditative, ritualized solemnity, even as backroom deals get made, BBC commentators sneer, and shy clerics long for their smartphones.

Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936 in Flores, a working-class district of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest son of Mario and Regina, immigrants from Piedmont. There were five children in all, one of whom, his sister Maria Elena, survives him, but his relations with his family after he joined the Jesuits remained opaque. He was educated at a Catholic college run by the Salesians, and had several jobs after leaving school. That included being a nightclub bouncer, and an assistant in a laboratory, but at the age of 21 he decided to join the Jesuits, the premier Catholic religious order in those days.

Bergoglio went through the usual course of studies and was ordained a priest in 1969. Soon after he was made novice master, and put in charge of the training of entrants to the order. After that, in 1973, he was appointed provincial, the superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. It was clear that Bergoglio was recognized as a man of great talents and energy, and his promotion had come early, yet his time as provincial was far from happy. He completed his six-year term, before becoming the rector of a theological faculty. After that, he went to Germany for further studies. By 1992, relations between Bergoglio and the Jesuits had completely broken down; on visits to Rome, he never once stayed in the Jesuit house.

That something had gone wrong was clear — and Bergoglio himself has talked of a period of “great interior crisis” and a dark night of the soul occasioned by his broken relationship with the order. Despite the best efforts of biographers, both friendly and hostile, the reason for this estrangement has never been satisfactorily explained. It was perhaps partly personal, partly political. At this time, Argentina was being roiled by the Dirty War, and the Church was divided over its support for the dictatorship.

It still remains unclear where Bergoglio stood on both questions. To his many enemies in the Catholic Church, he was a Marxist and a revolutionary, though there is plenty of evidence that he was actually rather conservative in his religious beliefs and pious tastes. One example is his enthusiasm for folk religion, seen in his deep love for the figure of the Blessed Virgin. In the political sphere, meanwhile, the case of two radical Jesuits remains controversial. Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics were kidnapped by the government in May 1976. Though subsequently freed, they later accused Bergoglio of being complicit in their arrest, though this accusation was later withdrawn by Fr Jalics. Bergoglio himself only spoke of the case once, where he claimed to have worked behind the scenes to secure their release. Bergoglio, at any rate, was not an open opponent of the dictatorship, even as his relationship to Peronism remains characteristically obscure.

His period in the wilderness ended with his appointment as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires in 1992. Five years later, he became the city’s archbishop, and in 2001 was elevated to the College of Cardinals. The initial promotion was dogged by controversy, which once more remains opaque. According to rumor, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Hans Peter Kolvenbach, wrote to Pope John Paul II begging him not to make Bergoglio a bishop, allegedly because he had done such damage to the Jesuits. But the Pope persisted. Both the letter and the Bergoglio file mysteriously vanished from the Vatican archives when Bergoglio became Pope, if indeed they ever existed.

This is just one of many conspiracy theories to dog Bergoglio. Yet given how murky so much of his life remains, it could easily be true. Certainly, his time in Buenos Aires remains hard to judge. He had the confidence of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for he was seen as a man immune to the virus of Liberation Theology then sweeping Latin America. This doctrine, blending Marxist dialectical materialism with Catholic theology, was seen as fatal to the sacramental and transcendental message of the Church. Indeed, one could interpret Bergoglio’s ministry as archbishop as an attempt to outflank the Left.

He was assiduous, as he put it, about going to the margins. That meant founding parishes in the outer suburbs of the city, where the poor and deprived lived, and in promoting a Church closer to people in their actual lived situations. Bergoglio himself renounced many of the trappings of his high office; he was regularly seen using public transport, often accompanied, critics noted, by a photographer. Other acts of humility were well publicized too, notably his visits to prisons for Maundy Thursday foot washing. While admired by many ordinary Porteños, Bergoglio remained an aloof, enigmatic and authoritarian figure to more traditional Catholics.

In December 2011, Bergoglio reached the age of 75, and submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict, in accordance with canon law. But as there was no obvious successor, he was asked to stay on as archbishop for the time being. All the same, his career in the Church seemed to be at an end. Then came the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict, and Bergoglio’s election as Pope in March 2013. For the second time in his life, his career experienced a sudden renaissance.

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This was a huge surprise. After the death of John Paul II, in 2005, Bergoglio had been considered a candidate for the Chair of St Peter. But now he was 76 years old, and Benedict had resigned in the serene hope that he would be succeeded by Cardinal Angelo Amato (or so rumor had it — everything in the Vatican is rumor, of varying degrees of plausibility). Bergoglio largely owed his election to the so-called St Gallen Mafia. Named after the Swiss town in which it met, and representing progressive cardinals, it encompassed a group of cardinals including England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

They had apparently been meeting for years, plotting a strategy for the next conclave. This is a charge they always denied — influencing a conclave is against canon law — yet it’s clear Bergoglio had allies elsewhere too. One example is a speech given by Cardinal Prosper Grech before the conclave began. He argued for a shift after Pope Benedict, whose pontificate had ended in supposed failure. It was, many cardinals thought, time for a reformer, someone to shake up the sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy and bring the Church into the modern world.

This might well have been the Bergoglio plan. We don’t know for sure: he unsurprisingly never made his agenda clear, though many of his cheerleaders claimed that Pope Francis was determined to change the Church for good. The first real sign of this came during a synod, held over two sessions in 2014 and 2015, which in the end boiled down to the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion. The majority of assembled bishops were against this, appealing to Biblical tradition. Divorce and remarriage were forbidden by Christ himself, who deemed second marriages to be adulterous. Guilty of a serious sin, adulterers were precluded from receiving Holy Communion, unless they repented and confessed first, promising not to sin again.

The solution was a tremendous fudge, rammed through against all opposition and inserted as a footnote in the final document — a footnote that the Pope himself, the document’s author, claimed not to remember. Whatever the specifics, the consequences of this evasion are clear. The Church split. In Germany, those in irregular unions were welcomed to Holy Communion. Across the River Oder in Poland, they were not. Some nations’ conferences of bishops accepted the perceived new dispensation with alacrity, as in Argentina and Malta. In England, the clerics stayed prudently silent. Deep fissures were revealed in the seemingly monolithic Church, challenging the teaching that doctrine develops, but does not change, for the new teaching contradicted that of John Paul II. Was theology, as had long been accepted, a precise discipline? Or was it something more subjective, more ambiguous?

Further battles followed. In 2019, another synod looked set to authorize the ordination of married men, or even of women as deacons. But in the end, it swerved both issues. There was a further synod, in 2023 and 2024, on something called “synodality” and which supposedly made decision-making less centralized. But, at the same time, the Pope issued numerous decrees establishing his authority more firmly than ever. More than any of his predecessors, Francis was an activist, ruling on all sorts of minor matters and interfering in various religious orders and institutions, from contemplative nuns to the Knights of Malta, whose grandmaster was unceremoniously sacked. Bishops and cardinals suffered the same fate, driven to the edge of the Church by the man who claimed to care for the margins.

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When it came to personnel, the Bergoglio papacy showed its least attractive and most damaging side. Favoritism, and its opposite, were much in evidence. Certain clerics, who should have been fired for the most obvious faults, particularly with regard to child abuse and sexual immorality, were protected — even against the very people the Pope had commissioned to clean up the Church’s act. Particularly notorious was the case of Bishop Barros, who was eventually driven out after a long effort by the Pope to keep him in place. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sins caught up with him remarkably slowly, while Bishop Zanchetta of Argentina was sheltered in the Vatican despite facing criminal charges. On the other hand, those who spoke truth to power suffered: Cardinal Raymond Burke was moved on from his Vatican jobs and even evicted from his Rome flat. Other bishops deemed too conservative, most of whom were champions of the Latin Mass, were removed from office. All the while, Francis put Latin worship under ever tighter restrictions.

The men promoted by Francis raised eyebrows too. Several unknowns were made cardinals, and have remained unknown ever since. Consider his pick for the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, an undistinguished Argentine cleric called Víctor Manuel Fernández. His previous writings, particularly a book on the theology of kissing, were found to be rather embarrassing. In diplomacy, meanwhile, matters were left in the hands of Cardinal Parolin, who oversaw a secret treaty with the Chinese government allowing the CCP to appoint Catholic bishops, an unheard-of usurpation of the Church’s independence in the modern age. This move was bitterly criticized by the former bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen, who could only meet the Pope in a public audience. Like so many others who had concerns about the Church’s direction, he was refused a private audience.

Yet if changing the Church irreversibly was indeed Francis’s aim, the plan seemed to falter by the end of the papacy. In December 2023, Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, published a document that allowed for the blessing of gay couples, albeit in deliberately ambiguous language. The reaction was immediate. Conservatives fumed at the thought of the Church blessing sin; many had always suspected the thrust of the Bergoglio papacy was to liberalize Church teaching on homosexuality, and this seemed proof of that. Most importantly, though, the African bishops rose up and condemned the document. Despite saying there would be no clarifications, Fernández remarkably swiftly issued what amounted to a retraction. Amid the verbiage explaining that blessings were of individuals not couples, people detected a defeat for Pope Francis and his chief collaborator.

Vatican experts have long tried to explain Pope Francis — most of them floundering on the poverty of terms like conservative or liberal. Perhaps he was a radical; perhaps a Peronist. His reign was a time of great confusion for believing Catholics, though those outside the Church continued to applaud the way he reached out to the marginalized, while handily ignoring his constant baiting of traditional Catholics. In the end, though, little substantive was achieved. The Vatican finances remain a mess, its income falling steadily over his papacy. The Holy See has still not shown clear leadership around sexual abuse, even if this has started in the lower rungs of the Church. Ordinary clergy are demoralized and bewildered, and the numbers coming forward to be ordained have declined dramatically. As for changing doctrine, or even changing practice, little has happened. Perhaps there is no new model Catholicism in the offing, for the simple reason that none is possible. There is only the Catholicism of the past two millennia. Francis apparently raged against his critics in private, and many of those same critics died before him. Yet the Church itself survives him, just as it has his predecessors.

Gibson, a staunch Catholic, was livid about a ceremony conducted at the Vatican in 2019. During the Amazon Synod, held to discuss the Church in the Amazon region, wooden statues of the Amazonian goddess Pachamama were dotted around the Vatican gardens. At one point, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis led a prayer while facing a small carving of the Pachamama.

For Gibson, who has been appointed Special Envoy to Hollywood by President Trump, this episode represents everything that has gone wrong with the Church. He blames it on “an inside job”. And, in his eyes, it all started at the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II — which took place from 1962 to 1965. Its purpose: to modernize Catholicism. After that, the Church became “something else” entirely, Gibson told Rogan. That something else, as far as he is concerned, is a sham. “I don’t adhere to a post-conciliar Church,” he said.

He doesn’t sound like your ordinary disgruntled Catholic. In fact, Gibson was echoing the key tenets of a ragtag movement known as sedevacantism.

The sedevacantists take their name from the Latin phrase sede vacante, meaning the See of Rome is vacant. The phrase is typically used to describe the period between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, when the papacy is unoccupied. Sedevacantists, however, believe that the papacy has been unoccupied since Vatican II. There have been six popes since then, but none are considered legitimate.

There are at most 30,000 sedevacantists in dozens of distinct organizations worldwide. The movement originated in Mexico in the mid-Sixties, where a priest named Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga came up with its core tenet: the Church post-Vatican II was “headless”. Predictably, that didn’t go down well with His Headless Holiness, and Sáenz y Arriaga was excommunicated. The movement spread in the Seventies, after it was endorsed by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers, a French friar and the personal confessor to Pius XII. As the last pope before Vatican II, Pius is considered the last legitimate pontiff by sedevacantists. This makes Guérard des Lauriers something of a cult hero.

Now, the movement has moved online. The meme-posting page Novus Ordo Watch boasts more than 25,000 followers on X and 13,000 followers on Facebook. Its logo is a sketch of Pius XII (of course), with the tagline: “Unmasking the Modernist Church of Vatican II”.

So, what really happened at this dreadful council that left the sedevacantists stricken? The conventional narrative of Church reform goes like this: Vatican II was called in 1959 by Pope John XXIII, who thought the Church was in dire need of aggiornamento — an update. He believed that if it wanted to thrive in the 20th century, Catholicism would have to ditch dusty dogmas and embrace the modern world. “Through Vatican II, the Church sought to re-engage with an increasingly secularized world,” the historian Jessica Wärnberg told me.

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This re-engagement crusade took several forms. Vatican II did away with the belief that there was no salvation outside the Church. From then on, non-Catholics could be redeemed. Religious liberty was embraced as the unalienable right of every human being: other religions were to be held in esteem, and antisemitism was denounced.

Vatican II also overhauled the liturgy. Up until then, Mass had been conducted in Latin; the priest had his back to the congregation and faced the altar. But at the council, it was decided that Mass would be conducted in the national language so as to be more inclusive. The priest would face the congregation. The Latin Mass wasn’t abolished, but it became much rarer.

This was a seismic moment for practicing Catholics. For many, it was as if the religion they had followed since childhood, that had given meaning to their lives, had suddenly been taken away from them. The refashioned Mass hit particularly hard. At the time, French President Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked that Vatican II was “the most important event of the century, because you can’t change the prayer of a million men and women without affecting the balance of the planet”.

Millions of conservative Catholics felt aggrieved. Most of them, however, didn’t embrace sedevacantism. It was too radical, too weird, for them. Rather than flee their besieged Church, they chose to stay in it and fight. Their mission: the preservation of the old ways.

These Catholics are usually referred to as traditionalists, and they share many of the same grievances as sedevacantists. They attend Mass in Latin and are critical of the direction of the Church. Yet they stop short of breaking ties with the Holy See, remaining in communion with the Pope. While traditionalists think like reformers, hoping to change the system from within, sedevacantists think like revolutionaries. They want to bring down the whole corrupted system.

Enter a Catholic with chiselled looks named Hutton Gibson, father of Mel. In 1977, he started a newsletter called The War is Now! Think Substack in the analogue age. “This journal has but one purpose: complete recovery of our Church!” Hutton wrote in the first installment. Then, in the hallowed tradition of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, he went after his enemies: “To all who promoted the current deviation… may they roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell!”

Hutton would go on to become one of the leading lights of the sedevacantist movement, writing a series of self-published books. He would argue that Vatican II was actually “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews”, which had rigged the conclave that had elected John XXIII in 1958. In his telling, another cardinal, the arch-conservative Giuseppe Siri, had been elected. But the Jewish-backed Masons had threatened “to atom-bomb Vatican City” if they didn’t get their candidate. John XXIII, a secret Mason, became pope instead.

As Hutton’s tale suggests, sedevacantism is a wonderland of alternative facts, which is another reason why traditionalists steer well clear of it. At its core, sedevacantism isn’t a theological stance; it’s a conspiracy theory. Call it Catholic QAnon, for just like QAnon, it has become a magnet for haters, weirdos, and phonies.

Take Francis Schuckardt, the founder of the Tridentine Latin Rite Church, who in the Seventies crisscrossed America to preach the Bad News: Vatican II had destroyed the Catholic Church. The Pope was demonic, and any Catholic who followed him would be damned — that is, unless they followed Bishop Schuckardt. Hundreds of lost souls fell for it.

The Tridentine Latin Rite Church became a site of horrors. Schuckardt was a sexual predator who regularly assaulted seminarians, according to writer Michael W. Cueno’s The Smoke of Satan. Whenever the nuns were deemed to have misbehaved, they were imprisoned in freezing attics for several weeks. Congregants were mistreated too: nuns once force-fed rotten food to a young girl; after she threw up, she was made to eat her own vomit. “Lick the vomit clean,” one nun yelled while beating her.

The truth was exposed by the press in 1984. Schuckardt took off with his most loyal followers and $250,000 in cash. He tried to get another church off the ground in California, but in 1987 a SWAT team raided his compound. They found drugs, automatic weapons, and gruesome documents about body dismemberment. Schuckardt served a stint in jail and died in 2006.

Another sedevacantist thought leader was Veronica Lueken, a Catholic housewife from Queens, New York. One day in 1968, according to the academic Joseph P. Laycock’s The Seer of Bayside, Lueken started hearing voices. Then the visions began. One time, she saw a giant face in the sky: it was Jesus Christ himself. Soon after that, the Virgin Mary spoke to her from heaven. Surprise, surprise, the Blessed Mother hated Vatican II.

Like a medieval soothsayer, Lueken attracted a sizable following. People from all over the US would flock to Queens to see her in a trance. Her neighbors cursed her. Local restaurateurs thanked the Good Lord for their fortune and set up hot dog stalls for the hungry pilgrims.

In 1975, Mary finally let Lueken in on the secret behind Vatican II. “My child, I bring to you a sad truth, one that must be made known to mankind,” Lueken recalls being told. Paul VI, who promulgated Vatican II, had been replaced by a lookalike. “There is one who is ruling in his place, an impostor, created from the minds of the agents of Satan,” Mary supposedly said. How was that possible? “Plastic surgery, my child — the best of surgeons were used to create this impostor.”

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Not every sedevacantist would pay homage to Lueken. The movement is divided between a myriad of splinter groups, and each group insists on its particular definition. To complicate matters, a few reject the term sedevacantist and will go ballistic if you call them one. Some prefer the term sedeprivationism, which holds that the popes are popes “materially but not formally”. Others still insist they are simply “true” Catholics who follow the age-old teachings of the Church. But these are marginal distinctions: all ascribe to the same core doctrine. In this, they resemble Leninists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists squabbling over the correct definition of Marxism.

However, just as communists hate the moderate Left, sedevacantists are united in their contempt for traditionalist Catholics. Despite fighting similar battles, the two groups are far from brother in arms, with sedevacantists regarding traditionalists as traitors in the pocket of the Holy See.

One target of sedevacantist ire is the Society of St Pius X — SSPX for connoisseurs — a hardline traditionalist organization which has 600,000 members worldwide. It was founded in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a French archbishop who had led the charge against Vatican II.

Lefebvre often spoke like a sedevacantist. Vatican II was “satanic”. It was the result of an alliance between “the highest authorities of the Church and of masonic lodges”. Therefore, Lefebvre concluded, “this conciliar Church is not Catholic. In so far as the pope, bishops, priests and the faithful adhere to this new Church, they are separating from the Catholic Church.” But Lefebvre never became a sedevacantist. He realized that the Vatican was where the power was, and he always hoped to have more influence within the Church than outside it. He entered into negotiations with Rome several times, to no avail. In the end, Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after ordaining bishops without authorization.

In the eyes of sedevacantists, Lefebvre was a weakling. In 1983, a group of exasperated followers left SSPX, claiming Lefebvre was “far too soft”. In a feat of imagination, they called their new organization the Society of St Pius V, or SSPV. But even SSPV wasn’t hardline enough for the most committed of sedevacantists. In the Nineties, a handful of true believers broke away and joined the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, which was itself a splinter group from the Tridentine Latin Rite Church.

The sedevacantists have no intention of standing by while an imposter rules the Vatican. And so, in order to save the one true Church, the most pious of them have taken one for the team and proclaimed themselves popes. There was Pope Michael I, born David Bawden. A former SSPX member, Bawden proclaimed himself pope in the Nineties. He took over a dollar store in rural Kansas to hold a conclave. His College of Cardinals consisted of his parents, three friends, and himself. There was also Pope Pius XIII, born Lucian Pulvermacher. His conclave took place in 1998 in a log cabin in the mountains of Montana.

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The most high-profile antipope yet is Peter III, born Markus Josef Odermatt, the leader of the Palmarian Catholic Church, which is based near Seville, Spain. The Church, though not technically sedevacantist, is essentially a cult: there are around 5,000 Palmarians, who are tightly controlled, encouraged to reproduce (some families have 15 kids), and taught that Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco are saints.

Peter III’s predecessor, Gregory XVIII, quit the organization in 2016 and exposed it as a massive scam. “It’s all a set-up, particularly a financial one,” he said. “They’re just using the miracle of the Virgin Mary as a front.” The whole thing is allegedly bankrolled by donations from wealthy businessmen and may be a front for money-laundering.

It’s tempting, perhaps, to dismiss the sedevacantists as a joke — a droll footnote in the long history of the Catholic Church. But to do so would be to underestimate their influence. While sedevacantism remains a fringe movement, its rhetoric has seeped into Catholic conservative circles in recent years. There is the same sense of paranoia and betrayal, and the same belief that the Church is under threat.

The trigger has been Pope Francis himself. Although he isn’t the firebrand progressive portrayed in the media, he is a liberal. The pontiff has reformed the Vatican and tried to make the Church less judgmental and more inclusive: in 2023, for example, he allowed priests to bless same-sex couples.

The backlash has been nasty. From the moment he became pope, Church conservatives have been out to get Francis. At times, they’ve sounded a lot like sedevacantists. Cardinal Robert Sarah is a prime example. To be clear, he has never openly questioned the validity of Francis’s election. That would be grounds for excommunication. But the Cardinal has not minced words. Francis’s decision to let same-sex couples receive blessings was, he said, “a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition”.

By Vatican standards, such a comment is outrageous. The Holy See, lest we forget, is an absolute monarchy. Francis is the supreme pontiff. While he’s not above criticism, insinuating that he’s betraying Catholicism crosses a red line.

But there is more. Just two months ago, Sarah said that any attempt to abolish the Latin Mass would be akin to “a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ”. This was surely a dig at Francis, who has severely restricted the use of the Latin Mass. Rumors abound that he wants to abolish it altogether. Sarah’s remark borrowed heavily from sedevacantist lore. The implications are clear: the Church might fall under the sway of the Devil. And none other than the Pope might be responsible.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has gone even further. He has not only rejected Francis’s teachings, but also cast aspersions on the Pope’s legitimacy. “Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there’s a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said in 2014. “They are feeling a bit seasick because they feel like the Church’s ship has lost its way.” A ship without a rudder. Burke was aping the core tenet of sedevacantism: the Church (the ship) was without a pope (the rudder). The Cardinal later put out a statement making a distinction between “the person of Pope Francis” and “the divine gift of the Petrine Office”.

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There were doubts over whether Burke still recognized Francis as Pope. A Catholic website published an article headlined “Does Cardinal Burke think Francis is an antipope?” In 2019, Ross Douthat of The New York Times even questioned Burke about it: “You believe Francis is a legitimate pope?” It beggars belief — here was a leading newspaper asking a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church if he was a sedevacantist. In the end, Burke clarified that, of course, he does believe Francis is the Pope. Nonetheless, he admitted that “people are getting more and more extreme in their response to what’s going on in the Church”.

On that point, Burke is right. The Francis papacy has broken traditionalists. Many are losing faith that they can ever change the Church from within. Angry and increasingly desperate, some openly flirt with sedevacantism. Even if most traditionalists don’t come out as sedevacantists, the damage to the Church is considerable.

The Church has struck back. In 2024 the Vatican excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop, for schism. He was found guilty of “refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff… and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council”.

Viganò sure sounds like a sedevacantist. “We have a deep church that has infiltrated and occupied the Catholic Church,” Viganò said last month. “The members of this counter-church have transformed the Catholic Church into an organization in support of the woke globalist Left.” Predictably, he has won plaudits from some lay conservative Catholics. Among them is Brian Burch, Trump’s Ambassador to the Holy See and a vocal critic of the Pope. “Viganò may not have everything right,” Burch said in 2020. “But there is one thing of which I am certain; Satan is real, and he is on the prowl.”

The story of the sedevacantists is a parable for our times: it shows how extremism goes mainstream. It starts when progress is achieved — a handful of zealots lose their minds and, at the start, everyone ignores them. But, over time, their conspiratorial paranoia takes root. Next thing you know, what sounded preposterous has become legitimate discourse.

But a final question remains: is their ultimate fantasy — to overturn Vatican II — possible? Could the traditionalists inside the Church regain control of the Holy See and coax them back into the fold? Could the next pope redeem them?

The polite answer is that it would take a miracle. Francis has appointed 80% of the cardinals who will elect the next pontiff. “I’m not saying he will be a progressive,” says Frédéric Martel, a sociologist and the author of In the Closet of the Vatican, “but he probably won’t be an ultra-conservative.”

It seems that sedevacantists have lost the holy war — but at least they can take comfort in the knowledge that their usurpers will roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell.

They’ve been called “Roswell eyes” because they remind people of alien-abduction art. For decades, visitors to these holy places wondered why the artist — a vastly well-connected Slovenian Jesuit called Fr Marko Rupnik — was commissioned to push them into the faces of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Christ himself.

Now unease has turned to revulsion. Rupnik, 68, has been credibly accused of truly grotesque sex abuse. Religious sisters who belonged to a community he founded in the Eighties claim they endured assaults so disgusting that The Pillar, a major Catholic news outlet, printed the story under the heading: “WARNING. Graphic and disturbing content.”

In December 2022 it was revealed that Rupnik had been excommunicated for abusing the confessional to absolve a woman from the sin of having sex with him. The Jesuits, after investigating what it called “gruesome” allegations made by other sisters he recruited — nuns in all but name — expelled him from their order.

But that was just the beginning of the public scandal. Today it threatens to engulf the Pope himself. As he prepares to preside over a synod of bishops and lay activists that is pledged to raise the profile of women in the Church, Francis is being accused of extending his personal protection to a sadistic clerical abuser of women.

The timeline explains why this week the 86-year-old pontiff finds himself in such a desperate position.

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In October 2018, Rupnik was reported to Rome for absolving his sexual partner in confession. In May 2020, he was excommunicated. Incredibly, in the middle of the excommunication proceedings Rupnik preached a Lenten Retreat in the Pope’s Apostolic Palace. Then his excommunication was lifted within a month of being declared, because he had “repented”.

In early December 2022, Italian blogs revealed that, as long ago as the Nineties, sisters belonging to Rupnik’s Loyola Community in Slovenia accused him of abuse. The Jesuit order was forced to admit that in 2021 it passed these allegations to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Inquisition, which polices doctrine and sexual morality. The DDF refused to lift the statute of limitations that would allow it to prosecute Rupnik for the alleged abuse. Yet it could easily have done so, if Francis had agreed.

On 18 December 2022, one of Rupnik’s alleged victims, a 58-year-old former Loyola sister identified as “Anna”, went public with her “graphic and disturbing content”. She claimed her abuse began with the priest kissing her on the mouth, “telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist”.

Later, she claimed, “he became more aggressive: I remember a very violent masturbation … during which I lost my virginity, an episode that initiated pressing requests for oral intercourse.” By the early Nineties, according to Anna, Fr Rupnik had abused 20 sisters.

Significantly, Anna claimed that the abuse continued at Rupnik’s new studio in Rome, the Aletti Centre, where his creepy mosaics are produced. She told the Italian newspaper Domani: “There Father Marko asked me to have threesomes with another sister of the community, because sexuality had to be, in his opinion, free from possession, in the image of the Trinity…” She also revealed that in December 2021 she and other alleged women victims submitted their testimony to the DDF. She heard nothing more from the Vatican.

The Jesuit order expelled Rupnik in June this year, having judged “the degree of credibility of what was reported or testified to be very high”. This was after decades of ignoring the scandal.

The Pope, meanwhile, gave an interview in January in which he simultaneously claimed that he made a procedural decision about the Rupnik allegations, but that “I had nothing to do with this” (ie, the Rupnik case). The respected Vatican correspondent Christopher Altieri pointed out in Catholic World Report that these statements couldn’t both be true. He said “senior churchmen close to Francis have strongly suggested that Francis had pretty much everything to do with the management of it”.

In the past few months, anxiety in Rome about what the Pope knew has been kept in check by liberal members of the Vatican press corps, who refuse to ask awkward questions lest the answers disrupt the synod. But last week their strategy fell apart when the Diocese of Rome issued a statement on its investigation into the Aletti Centre, the alleged scene of revolting abuse.

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To quote Ed Condon, Editor of The Pillar, the statement congratulated the centre on “maintaining a ‘healthy community life without any particular critical issues’ and praised its members for ‘maintaining silence’ about the scores of accusations that Rupnik spiritually and sexually abused women, including through overtly sacrilegious sexual acts”. Bizarrely, it also suggested (but without explaining why) that Rupnik shouldn’t have been excommunicated for the offence of which he was found guilty, a diabolical abuse of the confessional.

This defies belief, and Condon — always loyal to the Pope — for the first time confronted the possibility that Francis was subverting the Church’s investigations “on behalf of a man accused of arguably more appalling crimes, by far more people, than some of the most notorious names in the canon of disgraced churchmen”. Five alleged victims of Rupnik responded furiously to the Diocese of Rome’s statement, saying it “ridiculed” their pain.

In addition, the Left-wing editor of La Croix, Robert Mickens, upbraided liberal hacks on the papal plane back from Marseilles on Friday for failing to ask Francis “THE most important question of his pontificate”, Given Mickens’s enthusiasm for the Pope’s most provocative moves against conservatives, that’s an extraordinary turn of phrase.

Are we finally witnessing a long-delayed joining of the dots? On at least two occasions in the past, Francis has inexplicably (and unsuccessfully) tried to shield abuser allies from justice. Before becoming Pope he commissioned a report whose aim was to keep the Argentine child abuser Fr Julio Grassi out of jail; he also tried to protect the Argentine predator Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta by parachuting him into a senior job in Vatican finances, and refused to supply documents demanded by the Argentine court that eventually sentenced Zanchetta to jail. There have been other disturbing episodes.

Four years ago, a senior figure in Rome told me he couldn’t explain why the Pope should take such insane risks on behalf of criminals — unless not doing so, for some reason, was an even bigger risk. But he had no evidence, of course, and such is the power of the supreme pontiff that crucial information will be locked away while Francis is alive. There’s very little chance that he’ll resign, and one of the quirks of Catholic canon law is that, if a pontiff announces his resignation in response to any pressure, including a scandal, then his resignation is automatically invalid. But a word I keep hearing now is the Cold War term Kompromat. It’s beginning to look as if, despite Francis’s attempts to distract everyone with the synod, Rupnik and his bug-eyed mosaics have already killed off this pontificate.

To be clear: there has not been a mass return to traditional Catholicism among New Yorkers. Downtown bars have not grown dusty as their former patrons marry, have children and stay in; their denizens have not renounced their stuporous ways. A few microcelebrities are going to Mass and confession; a few thousand fans of theirs post insular memes with half-remembered phrases from the Gospels; and a few brands sell things like “GOD WON’T LET ME DIE” booty shorts and the Praying “Trinity” bikini.

The aesthetics employed are tired and unremarkable: plaid schoolgirl skirts and altarpieces, bedroom photo shoots with Edwardian corseting, photos with nymphet eyes peering up from the kneeler. “Young Catholics” today, long after organised religion fell from centrality in American life, are scraping its remains; they are reviving the Catholic revival of Eighties Madonna, down to the intermammary rosary. The difference is that back then, Catholics weren’t pleased. Madonna started every “Blonde Ambition” performance with a prayer — and Pope John Paul II issued an official statement condemning it as “Satanic”, urging Catholics not to attend. Italian broadcasters refused to play the “Like a Prayer” video, and Pepsi dropped the singer from its ad campaigns.

Compare that to the Met Gala’s 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” theme: Rihanna wore a bedazzled minidress and mitre, while Cardinal and Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan gave an enthusiastic press conference. Are Catholics so desperate for religion to have relevance that they’ll take anything, even what seems almost too superficial to even be sacrilegious?

Apparently so. According to a recent New York Times guest essay, “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church”. What is shocking about this piece is not, primarily, its subjects’ half-hearted prostitution of Catholic imagery. Rather, it is the seeming guilelessness with which its author Julia Yost, editor of the established conservative journal First Things, seems to take them at their word. Though not intimately familiar with Catholic doxa, I suppose her mission faces a challenge: how can one be a public-facing Catholic in a world almost too stupid to evangelise to? 

This is not to say there are no Catholics in New York: there are, and their folkways are quite identifiable. Most strikingly, they tend to abstain from fornication, believing this is necessary to avoid eternal damnation. They generally marry and have children at relatively young ages. They generally marry, therefore, one another. I have a friend who is a recently un-lapsed Catholic. As such, his romantic life, formerly abuzz with tantalising young heathens, primarily consists of a dreary, desperate succession of false starts and mutually embarrassing denouements. He suffers, and his sojourn in Purgatory may very well be shortened for it.

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To those for whom “Catholicism” has provided spiritual comfort and guidance, and introduced useful restraints, we should be encouraging. As famous convert Evelyn Waugh said when Nancy Mitford asked how he reconciled his awful character and his Catholicism, “were I not a Christian I would be even more horrible”.

We should be less encouraging, however, of those who use Catholicism in pursuit of attention and in the exercise of branding: that is, as pure spectacle, exactly like everything else online. The evolution of Catholic Twitter illustrates this. At least the Weird Catholic Twitter that the New York Times profiled in 2020 presented the intriguing oddity of anonymous Ignatius Reilly types, fuming about “dumbed-down doctrine” from the rooks they’d erected in their mothers’ basements. Today, it’s bigger and more banal: young women, unequipped for Instagram stardom, post selfies outside churches they don’t venture inside, and swarms of priapic men lose their minds. Both factions have the dove and fire emojis in their handles.

In these cases, rather than a cure for vanity, Catholicism is a veneer that makes their trespasses more palatable, even giving them cause for sanctimony. The harsh prescriptions of Catholicism could well be a respite from the modern world, but one’s hardly “not of this world” when she claims it to be so before thousands of Patreon subscribers, or Twitter followers, or Instagram voyeurs. Part of the Christian message, in my enfeebled understanding, is to not parade one’s piety (“when thou prayest, enter into thy closet” — Matthew 6:6). Early in Jude the Obscure, Jude recites the Nicene creed in Latin at a pub and is met with thunderous applause, which makes him furious. Repentant and ashamed, he storms off. Can we imagine any Twitter Catholic today feeling bad about making a spectacle of their faith?

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In a striking turn, Yost’s essay doesn’t seem to question a “fake it till you make it” view of Catholicism; the idea that you should believe before performing the rituals is deemed Protestant nonsense. This might make sense in the context of a “dark night of the soul”, but it’s bizarre when applied to conversion. Historically, it doesn’t hold up: the overwhelmingly dominant account of an internal conversion is St. Augustine’s (“there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away”). And while it’s true that Protestants prioritise internal change over external sacrifice (as Luther said, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly”), it’s not like the Catholic-adjacent, in the main, make any changes in their habits. One of the most vocal young converts I know — he’s told me, with a terrifying conviction in his large eyes, that even married men and women shouldn’t have non-procreative sex — shows up to every party with a different Tinder girl. He says they overwhelm him.

Why convert, if you don’t believe it? This is a distinctly postmodern attitude to appropriating the premodern. Sincere belief is hardly even conceivable these days. So, it seems impossible to imagine actually believing Mass and prayers and chastity are a matter of eternal life or death (as do countless Catholics to this day), or to believe it without compulsive ironising. The solution to that problem of imperfect faith could be submission to readily available religious authority. And yet, many of the loudest in this crowd espouse sedevacantism, the view that there has been no valid Pope since Vatican II, and even no valid ordinations — a theology so bespoke it would rattle the bones even of the most traditionalist Catholics. Spending their days engaged in arcane and unconvincing debates in which they copy stuff from Reddit and paste it onto Twitter, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the DSA cretins for whom they bear such scorn. 

I suppose this is how we do politics now that politics is dead: the near entire retreat to the imaginary, a casual contrarianism committed to nothing besides its own ability to shock. Yost claims that “members of a small but significant scene are turning to the ancient faith in defiance of liberal pieties”. The choice of Catholicism is, of course, not random. Pretending to embrace that rapidly dying faith, led by an octogenarian Argentine with one lung, is an expression of antipathy towards the mainstream status quo and its sacred cows. There is apathy here, too. The vague conservatism of the “Catholic revival” does not reflect commitment to improving society or even their own souls; instead, it is merely confused agitation born of obsession with a liberal class they imagine to be composed solely of Jezebel writers — a politics, faith, and worldview with all the conviction and all the consistency of one impetuous toddler angry at another.

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It may be true, for the more sincere among them, that the draw of Catholicism comes from a painful and desperate place. Young people, particularly in the post-Covid years, feel adrift and alone, and may well feel, as Waugh did a century before them, that the choice is between “Christianity or chaos”. The draw is half a longing for rules of any sort. (Is it any coincidence that many of these new Catholics espouse Ray Peat’s Eighties nutritional code, with its inane admonitions against pineapple and paeans to hypnagogic ice cream?) But this so-called traditionalism betokens little more than a hysterical obsession with ever more arcane, ever more irrelevant concerns.

Another part of the draw, I suppose, is general dissatisfaction with the fuzzy, listless conformism of the post-Obama years; it’s almost too banal to observe that the milestones of adult life are gone, the union job, marriage, family home, children, all so easily available to an earlier generation. As one young Catholic podcaster tells the author of the New York Times essay: she didn’t like how everyone told her to get a job when what she really wanted was a family.

But wait: “get a job” is pretty reasonable advice for aspiring mothers. If you don’t have a trust fund, a job with health insurance is probably the single biggest facilitator of having children in America. You don’t have to become a provocatively Right-wing traditionalist to breed. A single stroll through Park Slope makes very clear that the liberal elites, in fact, love children. Throw a stone, and you’ll find a secular, Dem-voting female professional with a husband, children, and a life far more similar to that of any given parishioner than any on-trend “Catholic”. It’s not “choosing the better part” to be an unemployed podcaster, nor does self-marketing through semi-nude photography on social platforms compare to sitting at the feet of Christ.

Young New Yorkers are reacting to modernity via a touristic experiment with the American Right. But, with rare exceptions, they haven’t stopped fornicating; they haven’t started forgoing coke so they can wake up for Mass on Sunday. Instead, the fixation with “post-liberalism” or “post-feminism” or “Catholicism” is superficial: it reveals little more than a narcissism of small differences. Endlessly rejecting “liberal pieties” is easy; what’s difficult is taking a cold and curdling look at one’s own life.

But this was a visit in which neither the White House nor the Vatican seem to be paying the slightest attention to the optics. That was a mistake, because although the Left-wing pope and the liberal president obviously like each other, there were just so many things that could go wrong. And by Saturday night, when bizarre rumours of the encounter started circulating on Twitter, it was pretty clear that most of them had.

The world’s media weren’t interested in what these two old men had to say about the environment. Their combined age is 163. Francis makes a point of reading as few newspapers as possible; Biden’s cognitive decline means he struggles to hold them the right way up. The only thing anyone wanted to know was what the Pope, who recently described abortion as “murder”, would say to a supposedly devout Catholic president whose militantly pro-choice stance extends to support for late-term abortions.

The first sign that the Vatican was nervous about the meeting came when it cancelled the planned live broadcast of Biden meeting Francis. The media had been told they could film the two men shaking hands in the Throne Room of the Apostolic Palace, followed by a few seconds of them sitting down to talk. On Thursday, the Holy See press office suddenly pulled the plug on this — the cameramen would be thrown out as soon as Biden emerged from his limo. The hacks scratched their heads for an explanation. The most likely one was that the Vatican was worried that the doddery president would forget the Pope’s name or walk into a broom cupboard. Or both.

A photograph released afterwards showed the two men chatting happily across the table, an impressive feat since they don’t share a language. But, with the aid of an interpreter, they did spend 75 minutes in each other’s company. That’s more than twice as long as Trump was granted in 2017 — no surprise, since Francis couldn’t stand him — and also more than 20 minutes longer than the Pope’s meeting with Obama in 2014.

Did they talk about abortion, and specifically Biden’s insistence on receiving communion every week — something conservative bishops say he’s not entitled to do, since his lobbying for abortion puts him in a state of grave mortal sin? The Vatican wouldn’t comment: it never discusses these private conversations. But Biden did, in response to a shouted question from a reporter. Asked if the subject of abortion came up, he said: “No, it didn’t. It came up, we just talked about the fact that he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion.”

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The exact words are important, because several US media outlets — unswervingly pro-Biden and keen to protect him from embarrassment — missed out the words “It came up”, thus concealing the fact that Biden had said abortion didn’t and did come up in space of a few seconds. Liberals generally, and especially liberal Catholics, would much rather go with the narrative that Francis diplomatically avoided the subject of abortion and simply reassured the president that he was a good Catholic who could receive communion.

Conservative US Catholics, meanwhile, reacted with a mixture of anger and confusion to Biden’s comments. They were outraged at the thought that a pope could spend over an hour with a pro-abortion Catholic and not remind him of the Church’s teaching — spelled out very clearly in the past — that his activism bars him from the Eucharist. Indeed, if Biden were to be believed, Francis had just demolished that teaching by beckoning the President towards the altar rail, thus making a nonsense of his earlier denunciation of abortion as murder.

But can Biden’s account be trusted? Strict truthfulness was never his long suit, even when he had his full complement of grey cells. Presumably he was advised that, given the Vatican’s policy of not commenting on private discussions, short of a furious papal denunciation he could get away with saying anything.

Also — and this is a difficult point for loyal Catholics to grasp — Pope Francis’s own judgement, even on questions of faith and discipline, is far from infallible. Like his one-time hero, the Argentine populist dictator Juan Perón, he is happy to bend or blur principles in order to wrong-foot his opponents. And there is no one he dislikes more than American Catholic conservatives. When they begged him to reprove Biden for his extreme pro-abortion stance, they were guaranteeing that he would do nothing of the sort. Francis knew that, by allowing Biden to escape censure — and to receive communion in Rome on Friday night — he would pull the rug out from under orthodox US bishops who want their conference to tighten the rules on reception of the Eucharist. Rug-pulling is one of this pope’s hobbies.

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So it might seem that Biden’s visit to the Vatican worked out well for him, despite the lack of official confirmation that he can receive communion. But on Saturday the poor man found himself confronted by an avalanche of tweets and retweets gloating about reports from well-connected sources that he’d had a bit of a “bathroom accident” while visiting the Pope. Hence, allegedly, the meeting over-running so much. And even if we discount this as puerile black propaganda, the edited video of Biden presenting gifts to Francis shows the most painfully frail American president in living memory. At 79 he is the oldest man ever to hold the office, but he could easily be a decade older. His visit to the Vatican will raise questions about how many more foreign trips he’s capable of making. It’s hard to believe he will still be in office for the midterms, let alone the 2024 elections.

There’s no doubt, however, that Biden derived an almost childlike pleasure from meeting the successor of Peter. But it’s less likely that Francis was personally moved by the encounter. You can imagine him rolling his eyes at the White House’s hilariously inappropriate decision to give him an antique vestment made for the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass he’s busy trying to suppress.

What we see on the video is the switched-on charm Francis provides for any foreign leader who passes his ideological smell test. The unofficial motto of this pontificate is “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, and it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to imagine the satisfaction the Peronist pope is feeling at the sight of his conservative critics roused to a new pitch of indignation.

But what the video also shows is a man who, still recovering from major colon surgery at the age of 84, is finally showing his age. He is tired – he had to cancel his plans to attend the Glasgow climate summit – and, significantly, many members of the college of cardinals, including his own appointees, are tired of him. We can’t predict whether the next pope will be a conservative or a liberal. What we do know is the conclave will be anxious to put an end to the Machiavellian antics on display last weekend.

That’s because, around the world, roughly a billion people traditionally regard the state’s geriatric absolute monarch as God’s representative on earth. They may have been aware that, for centuries, a few bad apples in the administration have betrayed the monarch’s trust by embezzling money. But the notion that the whole state was slowly turning into a criminal enterprise would have struck them as ridiculous, even sacrilegious.

Until now.

We’re talking about Vatican City, of course. Visitors to Rome are often sceptical of the notion that this walled enclave behind St Peter’s, less than half the size of Hyde Park, is really an independent country.

They shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever stayed there, as I have done, you’re left in no doubt that when the Swiss Guards wave you through, you’re stepping beyond the reach of the Italian republic. It’s especially true at night, when your footsteps echo in the desolate courtyards.

The Vatican has its own legal system, criminal investigators, gendarmerie and jail cells. And it doesn’t hesitate to use them. When Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was sentenced to jail for aggravated theft in 2012, he served his time in a cell in the Vatican police barracks.

That was a significant conviction. Gabriele had leaked documents alleging bribery and blackmail affecting the Pope’s closest advisors. The resulting “Vatileaks” scandal is suspected to have inspired Benedict’s decision to resign the papal office in despair in 2013.

The cells were occupied again in 2016, when Monsignor Lucio Balda, a high-ranking financial official, served several months there after being convicted of leaking confidential documents to journalists who claimed that the Vatican was engaged in massive property fraud.

At the time of Balda’s arrest, the international press settled on a clear narrative: the Vatileaks scandals showed the scale of the challenge facing Pope Francis as he set about cleaning up the finances of the Holy See. Benedict was weak and craven; his successor fearlessly committed to reform.

That narrative, or at least the part relating to Francis, was soon torn to shreds by events, though the Left-leaning Vatican press corps — utterly smitten by the Argentinian pontiff — was reluctant to draw the appropriate conclusions.

On 18 June 2017, Vatican gendarmes raided the offices of Libero Milone, former CEO of Deloitte in Italy, who had been appointed the Vatican’s first auditor-general at the instigation of Cardinal George Pell, an Australian prelate whom Francis put in charge of reforming finances. The Oxford-educated Pell had the reputation of a bruiser who specialised in detecting bullshit; his appointment was greeted with queasy alarm by the Vatican’s old guard.

At the time of the raid, however, Pell was preparing to return to Australia to face what turned out to be completely false charges of molesting two boys in his Melbourne cathedral in the Nineties. He was convicted of the offence at a retrial and was imprisoned until April 2020, when Australia’s High Court threw out the charges and acquitted him.

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But he was obviously no use to Milone as an ally when, to general astonishment, the highly respected auditor-general was threatened with detention in a Vatican jail cell by Archbishop Giovanni Becciu, 73. As day-to-day administrator of the Secretariat of State, Becciu was effectively Pope Francis’s chief of staff.

Becciu accused Milone of carrying out unauthorised investigations into the affairs of top Vatican officials. But that was precisely why Pell had brought him in: he wanted to know about secret bank accounts controlled by Becciu, one of which was linked to a disastrous £300 million property investment in Chelsea. Pell was Becciu’s arch-enemy.

So the Australian may well have felt grim satisfaction last week, as Becciu — incredibly, and disgracefully, made a cardinal by Francis in 2018 — was charged in a Vatican courtroom with embezzlement and abusing his office. He’s also specifically charged with trying to force a monsignor to withdraw evidence he gave about the London property deals.

The case was adjourned until October 5, and that’s fair enough: defence lawyers need time to go through 28,000 pages of documents relating to 10 defendants. According to the Daily Mail, the 487-page indictment against them “sheds light on hefty bank transfers, text messages between collaborators from seized cellphones – even bags of money changing hands and secret meetings in luxury hotels”.

Note that it’s the Vatican itself that has gathered evidence against Becciu and his alleged co-conspirators. And it’s true that from 2018 onwards the Secretariat of State, the Pope’s civil service and foreign office, went after Becciu relentlessly on the orders of his former boss, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.

But Parolin had little choice. The rumours surrounding Becciu were becoming more extravagant by the day, which made Francis’s decision to give him a cardinal’s hat even more mysterious.

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Many of those rumours are now firm allegations. Ed Condon, editor of The Pillar, a new US-based Catholic news service, has been gathering evidence against Becciu for years — but even he is taken aback by “the sometimes surreal details alleged by prosecutors about some of the supposed ‘investments’ that have been made, including, in one case, a seven million euro investment in the construction of a U.S. motorway that simply didn’t exist”.

Most people first learned of the scandals when they read about the ruinous London property development. “But now the dam has properly broken,” says Condon. “We are seeing the various people charged turn on each other — in the run up to the trial, we’ve had allegations of blackmail, threats of violence and extortion.”

The nightmare for the Vatican is that the defendants aren’t just turning on each other: they’re turning on Cardinal Parolin, who is disliked by many of the faithful for negotiating a deal with China that forced loyal underground Catholics to join Beijing’s puppet “Catholic” Church.

All the signs are that the defence plans to own up to squandering Church money on lunatic speculation — but to claim that Parolin, Becciu’s boss, signed off on the deals. And perhaps they will go further. Becciu’s lawyers have already suggested that Francis himself knew about the London investment.

Is the Pope nervous? Consider one strange detail. When Vatican prosecutors confronted Francis with the evidence against Becciu in 2020, he sacked him from his new job running the Church’s saint-making department, and also stripped him of many of the privileges that go with the rank of cardinal. It was a brutal defenestration, suggesting that Francis had flown into one of his rages, never reported by a compliant press but all too familiar to Vatican staff.

Then, in the week before Easter this year, the Pope chose to celebrate the Holy Thursday liturgy not in St Peter’s but with Cardinal Becciu, in the latter’s private chapel. Was this a radical demonstration of Francis’s much-advertised “mercy”, as official sources claimed, or an ingenious act of damage limitation before the trial started? Perhaps a bit of both?

One thing we know about this Pope’s mercy is that it’s very selective. For a man never suspected of personal corruption or sexual misdemeanour, he’s oddly indulgent of deeply compromised figures. There is a long list of prelates accused of embezzlement, sex abuse or cover-ups who have been protected or rehabilitated by Francis.

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The most notorious example is ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a suspected serial sex abuser who was brought out of retirement by Francis to act as his international emissary. McCarrick was a fundraiser of genius, and was allowed to carry on until the media got wind of claims that he’d abused a minor. As for the $600,000 that “Uncle Ted” handed over as gifts to favoured clerics, who knows where it ended up? In the Vatican no one asks.

This grotesque culture of corruption wasn’t instigated by Francis: things were as bad under Benedict XVI and John Paul II. But neither of those popes were as hot-tempered as Francis, who has just savagely clamped down on the Latin Mass because he considers it too right-wing, and neither of them faced the prospect of a trial in which an unscrupulous cardinal and his former associates will sing like canaries.

Will we learn that Becciu conspired with Australian prosecutors to get Pell jailed on trumped-up charges? Will it shed light on the shameful China deal? The latest theory is that Beijing got hold of the details of the use of the gay hook-up Grindr by Vatican dignitaries and blackmailed the Secretariat of State.

What we can say is that we are well into the second half of Francis’s pontificate — he’s 84 and in fragile health. From October, the trial will overshadow everything, and even if there’s no evidence of the Pope’s complicity in the scandals it’s clear that the proposed reforms that got him elected eight years ago have come to nothing.

The next Pope will inherit a Church whose reputation, finances and internal unity have been destroyed. For the first time in living memory, most of the cardinals processing into the Sistine Chapel to elect Francis’s successor will be praying that the Holy Spirit doesn’t give them the job.

And, of course, she was right. I felt the same at her age, forced to endure the endless, boring ordeal of church; even the words “Mass has ended, go in peace…” still fires up a little dopamine rush in my head. Christianity lacks the glamour of the old gods, but then the world of the old gods was a brutal place and we often forget how strange our society now is.

Reims Cathedral played an important part in a story that began two thousand years ago one Friday, when the sun went down in an eastern province of the Roman Empire and the world was never the same again. A rabbi who had gathered a following in the troubled province of Judea had been condemned to death by crucifixion and suffered that agonising punishment reserved for the worst criminals.

On the Sunday, Jesus of Nazareth’s body had disappeared; soon his followers had, bizarrely, reported seeing him in the flesh and the cult grew and spread; official persecution, starting with the martyrdom of the Apostle Stephen, only made the group stronger.

Yet what might have remained one of many sects during this great period of religious fervour changed course two or three years after the death of Jesus when one of the men tasked with crushing the group, a Hellenised Jew called Saul, was struck blind while on the road to Damascus, and heard the voice: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

These dramatic events would transform the world like no other. Saul, renamed Paul, used his position as a Roman citizen and a Greek-speaker to spread the faith across the eastern Mediterranean.

The impact of the faith, and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, would revolutionise the way humans think, and how they related to each other, in ways that evolutionary biologists and psychologists are only now beginning to explain.

Like with many things, it is only now that we are losing Christianity that we are starting to appreciate its importance. This century began with the New Atheism, an overtly anti-religious movement spurred by the events of September 11; an array of books in the 2000s made the argument that “religion poisons everything”, in the words of Christopher Hitchens. They won, which was largely why New Atheism disappeared. As America moves past the 400th anniversary of its founding by English Calvinists, its religious exceptionalism has finally ended. Atheism is making headway everywhere.

Imagine no religion… fewer than half of U.S, adults belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Gallup) pic.twitter.com/KsnNFVDZ5N

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) March 29, 2021

Yet paradoxically, as the sea of faith has retreated, more public intellectuals now take it seriously. In the field of political philosophy Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual repopularised the 19^thcentury French idea that Christianity was the wellspring of individualism, and that contrary to the belief that Enlightenment liberalism was a revolt against the medieval Church, it was a product of it.

Christianity’s revolutionary transformation of western society was then brilliantly laid out in Tom Holland’s Dominion. Holland told the story of how the new religion had upended our worldview, tamed the sexual prowess of powerful men, sanctified the weak and given the poor kudos and pity. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, even gay marriage and the current political radicalism emanating from US campuses, all were products of the Christian revolution.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explored the positive role that religion has on social bonding; Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods looked at how deities became more moral and more universal as societies scaled up.

Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist, is also interested in the way Christianity has affected and changed the western mind. When his The Weirdest People in the World came out last year, America was still in the grip of one of its periodic moments of moral convulsions. Tens of thousands of people were frenziedly protesting against the evil of racism, with some seen washing the feet of people they viewed as sanctified by race. It was an undeniably Christian event, even if its practitioners weren’t conscious of it; blessed are the meek, the first shall be last. George Floyd, another criminal put to death by the authorities, was transformed into a Christ-like figure on murals, along with the various taboos and blasphemies attached.

Over the centuries Christianity has become so dominant that we assume lots of things to be human nature when, as Henrich points out, they are very unusual in the greater scheme of human nature. Universal human rights are a western concept and to most societies completely unintelligible. “We think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships and expediency,” he writes. People from countries ruled by the medieval Catholic Church, and countries founded by their offspring, are also “less inclined to distinguish in-groups from out-groups, more willing to help immigrants, and less firmly wedded to tradition and custom”.

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At least since the mid-14^th century, there has been an idea that medieval Christianity was a wrong turn for the West, that without monotheism polytheistic Greek-speakers might have sailed the stars, as Carl Sagan imagined. Yet as thrilling as ancient history is, and as remarkable as its achievements were, Roman society was very alien to us in a way that the medieval wasn’t.

A Roman father had total power of life and death over his children, and female infanticide was not unusual. Romans would happily watch an innocent man being torn to pieces by a wild animal for entertainment; slavery was ubiquitous and it was assumed that a man would sexually abuse his female slave; charitable giving outside the family was rare, and those who reached rock bottom in the imperial city would be left to literally die in the gutter.

This was Tom Holland’s realisation: that, although as a classicist he was fascinated by the Greeks and Romans, he couldn’t help but feel a revulsion about their worldview, one which almost completely lacked any pity for the weak. That was because he was a child of the great revolution that began on that Friday in Judea.

Like Holland, I previously imagined Christianity as being a fun-sucking succession of prohibitions, lacking the glamour and vitality of the ancient gods. I pictured ancient Valhalla as a sort of never-ending stag do, while the Christian Heaven appeared as an eerily quiet place where you sat having tea with some great-aunt who disapproved of everything. The Viking religion seemed like it was specifically designed by adolescent males, while Christianity was thought up by elderly women.

And there is a reason for that. Christ appeared that Sunday to his women followers, and, paradoxically for a religion that excluded women from senior roles, it was very female-dominated. Research from early Christian communities in Athens and Rome suggests that women may have outnumbered men by 5 or 6 to 1. The appeal of the new religion was that it domesticated men.

Men can be very idiotic creatures; our bodies start producing huge amounts of testosterone around the age of 14, which gives us the compulsive urge to fornicate or fight. Our brains don’t fully develop until 24 or 25 (and some of us don’t really grow up even after that). In that window between sexual and mental maturity the gender gap in every range of idiotic behaviour goes off the scale — car crashes, drink-related accidents, hospitalisation from violence.

Unlike the totalitarian quasi-religions of the modern era — including the one currently developing in America — Christianity had no naïve illusions about human nature. We are fallen creatures; young men in particular are barbarians who need to be tamed.

As Henrich notes, in bird species male testosterone rises as mating season begins and they prepare to fight other males. The world is cruel, and in both birds and mammals, males with higher testosterone levels tend to have more mates and offspring. Polygyny, the practice of a male having more than one mate, is also associated with higher testosterone, while monogamy comes with lower male testosterone — although in both cases the causal arrow goes both ways.

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So while low-testosterone men are more likely to be monogamous, the state of monogamy lowers their testosterone. So does childcare. As men are drawn into family life their testosterone levels plummet faster than those of their single contemporaries; that’s why many middle-aged men become obsessed with exercise in order to naturally up their T-levels.

Divorce acts as a form of de facto polygyny if powerful men are able to produce offspring with multiple women. It was standard practice in Ancient Rome but Jesus of Nazareth forbade it, seeing it as desertion. His followers opposed infanticide, which was largely initiated by men against females; they also prohibited men from having sex with anyone but their wives. For women this had huge benefits; for low-status males it was an even bigger boon, producing a sort of sexual socialism, or at least sexual social democracy.

From the late second century, Rome was struck by a series of epidemics that fatally weakened the empire. The Plague of Cyprian in the 250s also had a huge cultural impact; all of a sudden Christianity, a minority religion practised by maybe 5% of the population, was everywhere. Traditionalists would have been stunned by the sudden arrival of Christian processions, of younger relatives adopting this strange new faith, worshipping a common criminal. It would have been popular among women in particular.

The western empire was already in ruins by the time that the fatal blow came with the Justinian Plague in the 6^th century. That, combined with a war between the Goths and Byzantines and a freakish period of cold weather, left Rome a ruin of no more than 20,000 people and, like in many former Roman cities, the power vacuum had left the running of the city to the local bishop, who had long since adopted the title of Papa, Pope.

Catholic Christianity was not destined to conquer Europe; it might not even have triumphed over rival interpretations of the faith, such as Arianism. Its eventual dominance owed a lot to its adoption by one of the fiercest of the western tribes, the Franks. In 496 the Frankish leader Clovis, in the midst of a losing battle with a rival German tribe, the Alemanni, cried out to the Christian God who his wife followed; the battle turned in his favour, and in return Clovis was baptised in Reims Cathedral, along with his followers. And this was the fascinating tale I explained to my young children, who were obviously enthralled.

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Clovis’s wife Clotilde was from Burgundy, and was already Catholic, but her husband her previously resisted her demands for him to adopt her religion. Now he was persuaded, and it began a close relationship for “the first daughter of the Church”, as France would become; Charles X would become the last of Clovis’s descendants to be crowned at Reims cathedral, in 1825.

Clovis’s conversion also set about a series of events that would transform Europe; in 800AD the Frankish king Charles came to the aide of the Pope in his conflict with yet another German tribe, the Lombards. When he arrived in Rome in triumph, the Pope placed a crown on his head and Charles the Great — Charlemagne — was named Emperor of the West. Victorian academic Sir James Bryce wrote of this event that “From that moment modern history begins”, but Charlemagne’s empire was less interesting for the usual violence than for the sex, or at least the lack of it.

As well as gathering around him a group of scholars who arguably rescued western Europe from the Dark Ages, Charlemagne’s greatest legacy was in enacting the Catholic Church’s marriage laws. No man was to have more than one wife, no one was to marry a relative. This would have a revolutionary impact on western society, setting us apart from 95% of global cultures. Without cousin marriage, clans grew weaker as people married out; they saw themselves less as members of a patrilinear line and more as wider members of society. Church rules on consent were also vital too; marriage was a sacred institution, and no one could now enter into it unwillingly.

Soon the almost unthinkable developed, the idea of marrying for love, a process known as the “Romeo and Juliet Revolution”. Adult sons and daughters were no longer subject to the patriarch but were individuals in their own rights; increasingly they would set up their own separate homes upon marriage. They were individuals.

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These marriage rules were a way of taming men, in particular high-status men, and they brought huge benefits. Polygamous societies are racked by violence and turmoil, because large numbers of males are left without mates and inevitably cause trouble. The Vikings are the classic historical example, Scandinavia exporting its excess men to terrorise the British Isles, France and what is now Russia.

St Vladimir, who brought the Viking Rus into the faith, supposedly had 500 concubines before accepting Christianity and becoming an improbable saint. The Rus — the name probably means “rowers” — were Vikings who had sailed down the rivers leading to the Black Sea, creating a state that would eventually evolve into the world’s largest. The tenth century Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan had spent some time with them, calling them “Allah’s filthiest creatures”, an adventure which ten centuries later would become one of the biggest box office bombs in history.

Ibn Fadlan recalled how at the funeral of one Rus warrior a slave woman was sacrificed, having first been drugged and forced to have sex with the dead man’s friends, passed around like meat before her murder. It was once thought that a lot of similar tales about the Vikings were Christian propaganda, but multiple examples of human sacrifice have now been uncovered in graves, including in the British Isles.

The Rus had been a nuisance in Constantinople — no more than 50 were allowed in at the same time, like a cornershop next to a troubled comprehensive — and it was left to the Byzantine princess Anna Porphyrogenita to convert them by marriage to Vladimir, a prospect which naturally horrified her.

Her barbarian husband had initially been attracted to Islam, which permitted polygamy — and had the future rulers of Russia been Muslim history would have been very different. It was said that he changed his mind when his ambassadors walked into the Hagia Sophia and felt they were in heaven; the alternative, and perhaps more plausible, explanation is that Vladimir then heard about Islam’s prohibition on alcohol, and lamented that the Rus could never live without drink (“Ivan, call those other guys back in”).

Some Vikings took longer to abandon the old ways; King Canute, whose grandfather Harold Bluetooth had adopted Christianity, still continued the old Danish tradition of a handfast, or second wife. But he was the last officially polygamous ruler of England.

Today we barely notice how unnatural our norms are in a world where traditionally powerful men behaved with the brutality of Caesar or the libidinousness of St Vladimir. That all changed one Friday on a hillside in Judea. I sometimes wonder, though, what we will lose as church attendance continues to slide and, like Romans of the 3^rd century, we see our gods dying around us.

America has seen one of the most rapid de-Christianisations in the past two decades and the results so far are not good. What is left is not the rationalist paradise some naïve public philosophers were claiming at the start of the 21^st century, but a sort of distilled Christianity, which without the supernatural elements is far less rational: and so what results is endless moral panics, a world seen in stark black and white between good and evil, competitive sanctimony and the sentimental glorification of victimhood in which everyone wants the glory of being on the Cross.

For Catholics who reject such ideas, Pope Francis was a breath of fresh air. Compared to his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he seemed modern, relatable and as close to progressive as a man emerging from the Catholic hierarchy could be. Francis’ compassionate attitude and “who am I to judge?” comments frightened conservative priests and lay members who saw their deeply-held beliefs being compromised.

On the other hand, they gave hope to progressive Catholics, who hoped the new pontiff would allow women to serve greater roles within the hierarchy; soften the Church’s hostile stance towards divorced parishioners; stop demonizing LGBT members; and take serious steps to end the horrific sexual abuse crises engulfing the Church.

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Francis’ first major meetings of Catholic bishops – the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family – seemed to be move the Church in that direction. It was suggested that divorced Catholics be allowed to engage in the Eucharist; that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community”; and that children within the Church must be protected from abuse.

Still, the last few years have been a disappointment for those hoping for a Francis-led Left-ward shift in the Church. Women are still barred from the priesthood, and the female editors of the Vatican’s women’s magazine recently resigned over complaints that they were being subordinated to men. Divorcees are regularly denied communion. Contraception remains banned by official Catholic doctrine.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has not endorsed blaming the gay clergy for the decades-long sexual abuse scandal that has left tens of thousands of victims across the world: at February’s much-heralded church conference on sexual abuse, the Pope kept discussions of homosexuality off the agenda. But he couldn’t prevent conversations from drifting in that direction, according to reports coming out of the summit. High-ranking Cardinals and bishops continue to declare that a vast “gay lobby” is corrupting the Church from within. Benedict’s latest letter is evidence that this thinking continues to endure in the highest of Church circles.

And this notion – that the larger problem within the Church is sexual liberation in general and homosexuality in particular – has been reinforced within the Church hierarchy for decades; it existed long before the current pontiff or his immediate predecessor had taken their first communion.

As Pope Francis tries to steer the Catholic Church in new directions regarding a host of issues, he is grappling with the legacies of the turbulent 1960s and the conservative 1980s, wrestling with the stances of the last two popes, and facing an accumulation of theology and tradition that spans millennia.

*

The modern Catholic Church cannot be understood without reflecting on the Second Vatican Council, commonly known as Vatican II. In the midst of the 1960s – a decade of social upheavals: decolonization, the Cold War, civil rights – hundreds of bishops met regularly with a view to radically reforming Catholicism for the modern world. Spanning four years and two popes, Vatican II arguably reshaped Catholicism more than any event in modern history.

The changes brought about included conducting mass in local languages instead of only Latin, recognizing religious freedom as a basic human right, encouraging dialogue with other faiths, condemning anti-Semitism, endorsing democracy, giving national Catholic hierarchies more autonomy, and creating the Synod of Bishops – a body of church leaders from around the world that would gather periodically to advise the Pope on important Church issues (as was the case for Francis’ 2014-2015 meetings).

For many leading Catholics, including the substantial bloc of progressive Latin American bishops who embraced liberation theology (a Marxist-inspired brand of Catholicism focused on justice for the poor and oppressed), Vatican II was a major step forward for the Church.

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Yet the council also set the stage for a conservative backlash, in two ways. Firstly, the radical transformations of the Church went too far in the eyes of many Catholics, who subsequently sought to reign in the progressive movement. Benedict’s new letter is representative of this viewpoint where it cites Vatican II as introducing a moral relativism that watered down Church doctrine and lowered standards for clergy.

Secondly, Vatican II mostly ignored what Loyola professor Stephen R. Schloesser calls “biopolitics” – issues of sex, reproduction and the regulation of the human body. In some ways, this oversight was understandable. Many of the defining moments of modern biopolitics – the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent gay rights movement; Roe v. Wade; legalization of no-fault divorces and the widespread use of “the pill” in western societies – did not occur until after Vatican II concluded. But by offering little guidance on these issues, Vatican II created an opening for more conservative bishops to reassert their influence and put the brakes on what they saw an immoral Leftward shift in the Church.

Their opportunity came in the 1980s – just as the eras of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (in many ways a political liberal by modern American standards) and Carter gave way to the Reagan Revolution, and dissatisfaction with Labour set the stage for Thatcherism.

In 1978, Pope Paul VI, who had taken office during Vatican II, died. The new Pope, John Paul II, was sympathetic to the conservative faction of the Church.  In 1980, John Paul convened his first major bishops’ meeting, the Synod of the Family. Unlike Pope Francis’ meetings of the same name, the 1980 Synod pushed a conservative agenda.

Those clergy and faithful hoping that the Church would reaffirm its moral principles even in the face of changing societal norms were delighted with John Paul II and the archbishop he placed in charge of the Synod, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). Together, they reaffirmed conservative positions on issues of divorce and remarriage, abortion, artificial contraception and celibacy. Catholics hoping the Church would adjust to changing times were disappointed.

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Ratzinger’s handling of the Synod led John Paul to appoint the Cardinal as the primary official in charge of enforcing Catholic doctrine. In this capacity, Ratzinger issued a hugely influential 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” – a document intended to address the “problem” of homosexuality within the Church, the one major sexual issue left unaddressed by the 1980 Synod. The official Catholic stance toward gay Catholics is often described as “love the sinner, hate the sin”, but Ratzinger’s letter barely paid lip service to the first half of that formula. In his view:

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

The document went on to identify homosexuality as “a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent”.

While Ratzinger’s words and tone may sound harsh and even offensive, the substance of his remarks largely built upon and reasserted millennia of Judeo-Christian doctrines. He quotes both the Old Testament prohibition of same sex sexual relations and Paul’s New Testament Letter to the Romans, in which the Apostle labelled such activities “unnatural.”

And although Ratzinger doesn’t mention him by name, the future pope’s 1986 stance owes much to the works of Thomas Aquinas, the famed 13^th Century theologian whose Summa Theologica systematised Catholic doctrine in ways that continue to shape the Church’s theology today. It was Aquinas who used St. Paul’s “unnatural” label to categorize all forms of sexuality outside the bounds of both marriage or procreative purposes: Summa placed same sex sexual activity alongside incest and even bestiality – all “unnatural” acts; fornication, adultery, and even rape were meanwhile classified as mortal sins that were still “natural” and thus less grave.

Condemning homosexuality as immoral for existing outside of the “sacrament of marriage” and the “transmission of life”, Ratzinger was following a line of argument directly from Aquinas.

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These documents by John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger intentionally torpedoed any ideas that the Church would moderate its social positions to match the changing realities of the larger world. These conservative pontiffs and their supporters believed the Church was under attack by the forces of liberalism and moral relativism; they saw a need to strongly state that some doctrines were immutable.

For many women, remarried parishioners, proponents of contraception and particularly LGBTQ believers, the message was that they did not fully belong in the Church.

The future Pope Benedict’s 1986 letter also popularised a new idea that was not found in previous Church doctrines. Where it condemned the “pro-homosexual movement and…its deceitful propaganda”, both outside and inside the Church, it sowed the seeds of the idea that a gay conspiracy had materialized as a corrupting force within the Catholic hierarchy.

This conspiracy theory has only grown since the sexual abuse scandal broke. Conservative Catholic leaders and groups like the American-based Catholic League use the fact that the victims of abuse have been mostly boys as “proof” that the abuse is homosexual rather than paedophilic in nature. The abuse is, supposedly, just another form of the “self-indulgence” towards which gay priests are inclined. Pope Francis’ opponents – such as Carlo Maria Viganò, a disgruntled former Vatican ambassador to the United States – explicitly make this argument and accuse Francis of ignoring or even placating the “gay mafia” to the detriment of the Church.

Pope Francis has continued to fight for reform, removing high-ranking officials implicated with violating minors or covering up abuse; pushing the church into the #MeToo era by recognizing widespread sexual exploitation of nuns by priests; and dismissing the significance of a “gay lobby” pulling the strings within the Vatican. But he is facing an uphill battle, and the hill is a steep one.

His immediate predecessors had well over 30 years to enforce their socially conservative vision of Catholicism, and they were able to draw upon hundreds of years of Church doctrine to do so.

*

Even if Francis achieves his agenda, many progressive Catholics may still find themselves disappointed. Despite the various criticisms he has received from the Catholic Right, Pope Francis has demonstrated little interest in actually changing fundamental Church stances toward issues such as homosexuality, celibacy or women in the priesthood. His mission, which may still succeed, is more about changing the tone and focus of the church than altering its theology.

Instead of changing doctrines about sin, Pope Francis has attempted to emphasise those concerning humility and Amoris laetiti, “the joy of love” – as the address he gave after the Synods on the Family was called. Instead of discussing sex in terms of restrictions and prohibitions, Francis has attempted to emphasise the role of sex as “a gift from God”. And rather than searching for a “homosexual clique” at the centre of the Church’s problems, the Pope is seeking to directly hold abusive priests and their enablers to account and to change the culture that encouraged the Church to avoid scandal at the cost of not protecting its most vulnerable members.

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In order to succeed, Pope Francis must keep walking this tightrope. He must convince conservative opponents that he is holding fast to scripture above the theology of his “liberation” mentors in Argentina; that he is committed to the traditions established by Church founders like Aquinas (an argument that the Pope has made, only to be greeted with skepticism); and that his papacy has more substantive continuity with his predecessors than widely believed.

While doing this, Francis will also have to change the tone of the Church’s message – and the attitude of its clergy – enough to make it inclusive to members who wish to remain part of the Catholic community without conforming to all the Church’s teachings on issues of sex and the body.

Francis’ Church would be one in which LGBTQ Catholics, divorcees, the remarried and those using birth control could participate in the public life of the Church, while they (and their priests) perhaps squint at the particulars of certain doctrines on which they disagree. It would be a Church where women feel respected and valued, even if their roles do not match their male counterparts. And it would be a Church where bishops and priests feel a solemn duty to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of their flock from abuse – and take swift action against colleagues who violate their trust, without searching for ways to deflect blame.

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Despite its setbacks, Pope Francis’ approach so far – overwhelmingly emphasising the love and service components of the Catholic message, which conservatives and progressives should be able to agree upon – is perhaps the only feasible option for bridging the gaps between the factions that have developed within the Church since the 1960s. Though these gaps seem larger than ever today.

Jesus himself, to read Gospel accounts, held his followers to high standards (he equated lustfully looking at a woman with adultery, for example), while also conducting a ministry that sought out the marginalised and showed love and kindness toward those who failed to live up to the moral standards he espoused.

Within a Church still wrestling with the radicalism of the 1960s, Pope Francis’ attempt to enact a love-based “back to basics” approach to Christianity is perhaps the most radical strategy of all.