At the beginning of his pontificate, no Pope recently fueled such great expectations that fundamental will change in the Catholic Church, as Francis. The cardinals chose the then 76 -year -old Jorge Mario Bergoglio in March 2013 as the successor to Benedict XVI, because the Archbishop of Buenos Aires promised a change: the first Pope, named after St. Franz von Assisi, stood for a “tied church” without clericalism. For a church that does not see their most distinguished task in raising the believers with the moral index finger, but donating hope and comfort. Roman Centralism and Vatican Self -Handy, the Jesuit rejected, but what did Francis actually change in his twelve -year term? What remains beyond a mere climate change after his death? If you measure him alone by his predecessors, then Francis could appear as a revolutionary. He has again made the church a room in which freism of the future can be debated without having to fear the Vatican spell: about celibacy, on women’s offices for women, about a greater participation of laypersons and dealing with homosexuals. No successor will be able to undo this. Hardly anyone could have imagined that women would ever take part in a bishop’s synod in the Vatican and would even be entitled to vote. It would also have been unthinkable that a woman leads a Vatican authority, as has been the case for several months, but a Pope is not only measured by his predecessors. From the perspective of many Catholics in Germany and in other countries that live in a social reality in which equality is taken for granted, these changes appear marginal. If you take the hopes as a yardstick that were connected in Germany with the “Synodal Way”, the balance of the pontificate is different: Pope Francis did not allow women to be diaconate, as the Würzburg Synod demanded fifty years ago. Reform projects “Synodal Weg” demanded. The often summoned departure from Roman centralism was at most half -hearted. When the bishop’s synod for Amazonia spoke out to the priesthood for the approval of married men, Francis stood over it without a detailed reason. A reform pope? Francis did not even value collegial forms of work in the Vatican. He hardly ever gathered the Cardinal College and the Vatican Head of Office. Despite all the rhetoric, he maintained an authoritarian government style. The other one has to ask this question: How realistic was it to assume that this Pope could catapult the Catholic Church into modernity in a few years, even if he had wanted it? This is all the more than with comparatively minor reforms, such as the approval of the communion of divorced Catholics, which were married in second marriage, articulated strong resistance. 20. April 2025, Vatican, Vatican City: Pope Francis appears in the central lodge of St. Peter’s cathedral to grant the blessing Urbi et orbi (Latin for “the city and the world”) at the end of the Easter mass led by Cardinal Comastri. had a certain project in the head, which he then determined. He was primarily concerned with to initiate irreversible processes that lead to changes without the result being foreseeable beforehand. Francis will no longer be able to allow such an in-der-Schwebe. The challenges that the World Church faces are too great are the largest of them, probably the one to react appropriately to the simultaneity of the unevenly in the World Church. While in Germany and some other countries a church that excludes women from the ordination is hardly conveyable, a church is hardly conveyed in many African countries that accepted homosexuality. Such doctrinal questions are not interested in other countries drawn by war or poverty. Dealing these fighter and opposites without tearing the church will be one of the most difficult tasks of the new Pope. Franconian has repeatedly expressed that everything in Rome does not have to be decided, the local churches should progress courageously. However, he has remained guilty of the answer, which must be regulated in concrete terms and what is not. This answer must now give his successor.
