Editorial: The doors are sealed. We pray that God is in the conclave

To take the counsel of Francis one last time, perhaps our questions to this point have been "too small" or "partial questions." He gave that answer during a trip home from Africa in 2015, when a reporter asked if, given the severity of the AIDS crisis in Africa, the church should change its teaching on birth control, especially condoms.

"The morality of the church is found on this point, I think, in front of a perplexity," he said. "Fifth or Sixth commandment? Defend life, or that sexual relations be open to life? This is not the problem. The problem is bigger."

The papal insight is more profound in this moment than ever. 

Problems and perplexities remain bigger. Bigger than the sum of the questions posed in the days since Francis died April 21 at age 88. Questions have hung over this conclave about issues including candidates' geographic origins, administrative experience, global familiarity, perceived place on the conservative-to-liberal spectrum and language proficiency. LGBTQ issues, the Latin Mass, the environment, synods, synodality, personality, charisma — all have been thrown into the calculus.

It is consequential that the selection of the successor to St. Peter occurs against the backdrop of the ongoing clergy sexual abuse crisis, a stench emanating from hidden rot, and a rat's nest of financial scandal and shenanigans. These scandals will continue to contort the church in yet unknown ways and the next pope will have to be more prepared than any of his predecessors to confront it.

As became so dramatically evident during the 12-year Francis papacy, the person at the top can change not only the direction of the institution but how it is perceived throughout the world.

Francis changed the image of the church from a walled encampment where everyone's papers had to be in proper order to a community on the move and into the world, seeking to accompany "todos, todos, todos" — everyone, especially those on the margins of society.

It was not as jarring a departure from the past as some misinformed observers would have us believe.

St. Pope John Paul II, for instance, was the first pontiff to visit a synagogue, the first to visit a mosque and the first to invite leaders of other faiths to join him in Assisi for an interreligious prayer service for peace.

Benedict XVI was legitimately labeled the "first green pope" for his theologically buttressed warnings about environmental destruction, the first pope to meet with sex abuse victims, the first to have a Twitter account and the first to resign, a step that dramatically humanized the papacy. His resignation in 2013 was an admission that even Peter's successors might have limited ability to handle certain circumstances. He further placed the office within the imaginative grasp of ordinary Catholics by describing it as a ministry.  

Francis made his way to the papacy in 2013, it is now widely accepted, because of a bold speech describing a church that was ill, closed in on itself and, in a metaphorical sense, holding Jesus captive. He knew the corruption beneath the abuse and financial scandals that he would inherit. The church needed to change.

In the hindsight of a dozen years, it seems obvious that Francis realized change meant more than administrative shuffling in the Roman Curia and new canon laws, essential as they might be.

The movement of the church since Vatican II, its greater openness to the world, to other religions, with popes showing up in religious circumstances that would have been unimaginable in earlier eras, giving credibility in prayer together to not only other denominations but other faiths, had consequences far beyond those discrete events. All of that was the result of the Spirit moving not only among the hierarchy and the ordained, but among the People of God as well.

Just as his predecessors sensed that the time was right for bold gestures, Francis sensed the time was right to emphasize the God of Mercy whose embrace goes well beyond denominational boundaries and whatever mechanisms we've devised to determine who is in and who is out.

He determined that the time was right to invoke synodality, an expansion of collegiality in the governance of the church. The time was right to include lay people, including women, in the synodal process. Just as the church can no longer retreat to its pre-Nostra Aetate views of other faiths, it can't retreat to the time when lay men and women were excluded from discussions of the church's activity in the wider world. 

Synodality is an important step if the church is not to become a "self-contained sect."

That same sense of movement or shift was behind the answer Francis gave on the plane trip home from Africa. "This question makes me think of what they asked Jesus one time: 'Tell me, master, is it licit to heal on the Sabbath?'

"Malnutrition, exploitation of persons, slave work, lack of drinking water," Francis said. "These are the problems."

The demands of the next pope are those that only an evolving, crisis-riven world of the 21st century could present. It will be a long journey through increasingly looming questions, in urbi et orbi (to the city and the world), until injustice is conquered and all are healed.

The doors are sealed. The deliberations have begun. We pray that God is with them each step of the way and that their questions are as big and complex as a God of mercy and compassion might inspire.