Pope Leo XIV faces limits on changing the Catholic Church

Leo could choose, to an extent, to make changes his predecessor had cued already.

- By Dennis Doyle

Cardinal Robert Prevost of the US has been picked to be the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church; he will be known as Pope Leo XIV. Attention now turns to what vision the first US pope will bring.

Change is hard to bring about in the Catholic Church. During his pontificate, Francis often gestured towards change without actually changing church doctrines. He permitted discussion of ordaining married men in remote regions where populations were greatly underserved due to a lack of priests, but he did not actually allow it. On his own initiative, he set up a commission to study the possibility of ordaining women as deacons, but he did not follow it through.

However, he did allow priests to offer the Eucharist, the most important Catholic sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, to Catholics who had divorced and remarried without being granted an annulment.

Likewise, Francis did not change the official teaching that a sacramental marriage is between a man and a woman, but he did allow for the blessing of gay couples, in a manner that did appear to be a sanctioning of gay marriage.

To what degree will the new pope stand or not stand in continuity with Francis? As a scholar who has studied the writings and actions of the popes since the time of the Second Vatican Council, a series of meetings held to modernise the church from 1962 to 1965, I am aware that every pope comes with his own vision and his own agenda for leading the church.

Still, the popes who immediately preceded them set practical limits on what changes could be made. There were limitations on Francis too, but the new pope, I argue, will have more leeway because of the signals Francis sent.

The process of synodality