Early actions and statements suggest that, in keeping with his namesake, the new pope will adopt a more humble, ascetic style, and work to reorient the church toward a fuller embrace of its mission to serve the poor. But critics have also pointed out that Francis remains bound to the same conservative positions on questions of sexuality, gender, and reproduction upheld by his predecessors. Moreover, questions have been raised about the new pope’s relationship to the military junta responsible for Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 80s, when Bergoglio served as provincial for the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Does the election of Francis I signal a major shift in Vatican policy, structure, or doctrine? How significant is Francis’ status as an “outsider” to the Roman Curia, especially his background as a Latin American and a Jesuit? Is this status likely to position him as an agent of change within the Church, or do his theological continuities with his predecessors and the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy guarantee that any reform he initiates will be largely cosmetic?

Our respondents are:

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociologyx, University of New Hampshire

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

J. Michelle Molina, John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

The election of Pope Francis, an Argentinian Jesuit who has many years of experience ministering to and living amidst the poor is refreshing. It sends a symbolic reminder to the world that the Catholic Church is geographically universal and that its ethnically, culturally and economically diverse members enact an on-the-ground catholicity that continues the living tradition of Catholicism. Closer to home, it is also particularly significant to the growing number of Hispanic Catholics who are putting their imprint on American Catholicism that the new pope is from their home region and speaks their language. Symbolism alone, of course, does not produce institutional change. But change, I would argue, is an ever-present fermenting possibility in the Church. I know it is easy to point to the encrusted ways in which the church operates and to the many well-established doctrinal and institutional mechanisms it uses to resist the tides of social and cultural change in the name of Tradition. Yet, as Benedict’s resignation itself underscores, where there is a will to do things differently, it can be legitimated within the confines and with the imprimatur of the Church. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) is the most obvious and the most transformative case in point; and yet it, too, was fully in continuity with already existing doctrinal strands in Catholic thought (a point recently reaffirmed by Benedict).

The many legitimation problems confronting the Church today call out for a willfully bold response from Francis. For example, the acute shortage of priests in the U.S. and its implications for the celebration of the Eucharist strike at the theological and the communal core of what it means to be Catholic. While some will resolutely resist change in the Church’s understanding of ordination for political and doctrinal reasons, the larger question demanding Francis’s leadership is whether the Catholic tradition can continue as a living tradition if its members cannot participate in its core ritual. Sometimes, particularly over the course of a long and pluralistic tradition like Catholicism, a discontinuity with settled practices (e.g., changes with respect to who may be ordained) may be necessary in order to sustain more important continuities (e.g., the Eucharist, which according to the Catholic Catechism is the vital source and summit of Catholic life).

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John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

The election of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a relative unknown and conservative initially seemed par the course, given all the conservative cardinal candidates appointed by John II and Benedict XVI. However, statements he made as a cardinal indicated a potential openness to change regarding issues like celibacy and gay marriage: “For the moment I’m in favor of maintaining celibacy, with its pros and cons, because there have been 10 centuries of good experiences rather than failures. It’s a question of discipline, not of faith. It could change.” And while he did publicly opposed the Argentinian government’s move to legalize gay marriages, he did eventually indicate support the Church’s recognition of civil unions for gay couples.

While Liberals or Progressives welcome a move away from Benedict XVI’s retrenchment and retreat from the spirit of Vatican II, Francis’ conservative theological opposition to married clergy, women’s ordination, and abortion/birth control are all significant hurdles. However, Pope Francis could lay the groundwork for future change. With regard to women in the Church, while he may not alter his opposition to women priests, a first step, based on recent scholarship that demonstrates women had prominent leadership roles in the early Church, would be to support their ordination as deacons. Given recent Vatican appointments, the Vatican decision last year to place Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the main representative group of U.S. Catholic sisters, under the control of bishops, which was made without consultation or knowledge of Congregation for Religious, the Vatican office that normally deals with matters of religious life, may well be reversed.

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Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

If you want a pope who’s going to support abortion, women’s ordination, and gay marriage, Pope Francis is going to disappoint you. (If you want him to spend a lot of time opposing them, you’ll be disappointed too.) I don’t think those issues bother him, which, well, bothers those folks—liberal and conservative, Catholic and non-Catholics—whose first priorities are pelvic. While these are not “first world” problems (gay rights, women’s rights, and sexual health matter everywhere), glance at the global church and you’ll find they can sometimes obscure others: war, environment, poverty, and corruption, to name a few. Through its tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, the Church has maintained its Gospel commitments to peace and the poor, even if these teachings’ sometimes low priority make them the Church’s “best kept secret.” Because of his experience in the Global South and because his order vows to be loyal to the Vatican’s teachings but not tempted by its trappings (their founder Ignatius was sometimes misrecognized in Rome because of his filthy robe), Pope Francis will change things. Like that earlier Francis, he will lead by example, cleaning up Vatican careerism, striving to make our world cleaner and safer for this and future generations, and modeling a concern for the poor, whether blocks away or around the world. He will make a difference on gender as well: he’s appointing women to key Vatican positions, washing women’s feet, and attempting unprecedented though not uncanonical innovations. Pope Francis’s radical commitment to Gospel values might not be the precise political goals of estadounidense liberals and conservatives, but I hope I can be forgiven for believing, with that first Francis and this one, that a recommitment to Christ’s values of poverty, peace, and compassion might be enough.

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Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

As a non-Vatican insider (thank heaven!), all speculation about the degree of Pope Francis I’s departure from the conservatism of his two immediate predecessors seems to be just that. However, an analogy with not-too-distant history of a different kind may be apt. I’m thinking of the Mikhail Gorbachev analogy—someone who was supposed to shake things up just enough, provide some new thinking, but not change the order of things. And of course Gorbachev himself intended to rejuvenate an ossified governing structure and alliance without bringing the whole edifice down. Yet Gorbachev helped set in motion a series of events that in the end went far beyond his vision or his control, opening spaces for restive social movements to grow, innovate, and initiate the end of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European alliance.

We can only hope that this Pope’s current initiatives, however modest at the moment, might open just enough space to engender a similar and perhaps even more revolutionary awakening of restive Catholics and Catholic theology in the world. It is unlikely that Francis will initiate a revolution in Catholic social teaching himself. Nevertheless, the theological and social resources are present for such a revolution, but each and every opening needs to be better articulated, acted upon, and expanded by Catholics across the globe. Such activism should not remain warehoused in either social or economic agendas, but should combine both in an across-the-board insistence on the transformational potential of Catholic teachings on “catholic” love and human dignity, if only they can genuinely include the poor and people of all genders and sexuality as equals.

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James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

Pope Francis has already initiated change in the Vatican. But when looking for “change” we should be careful to consider not only words, but also symbolic actions, which carry enormous weight in Christian and especially Catholic circles. Remember that Jesus did not only teach with words, but with his actions as well. The first Jesuit pope ever elected (itself a sign of change within the College of Cardinals) chose the name Francis, as a sign of his commitment to the poor and to what he would later call “a church that is poor.” So far he has eschewed many of the trappings of his papal office—setting aside some of the more elaborate vestments that popes have worn, choosing to move out of the grand Apostolic Palace (aptly named) into a small two-room suite, and also referring to himself not as “pope” but as the “Bishop of Rome.” On Holy Thursday, when priests traditionally wash the feet of parishioners to emulate Jesus’s washing the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper, and as a reminder that the true leader is the one who serves, Francis broke with tradition. Instead of celebrating this Mass at a grand church in Rome and washing the feet of priests, he went to a youth detention center and washed (and kissed) the feet of young inmates, including two women and a number of Muslims. Pope Francis’s unexpected liturgical action was a vivid symbol of his desire to do whatever is needed to spread the Gospel in new ways to a world hungry for authenticity. Will changes come to the Vatican? They already have.

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J. Michelle Molina, The John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

In these early days of Francis’s papacy, change seems to be in the air. Yet the ethereal currents are impossible to chart, in part given the flimsiness of available categories. “Liberal,” “conservative,” “radical,” “outsider,” “entrenched,” are tin sign-posts that, in often too breezy assessment, rattle rather uselessly.

What is possible with a Jesuit as pope? We can best grasp the inability to easily capture this man and this moment if we approach “possibility” as framed by the philosophical practice that is the Spiritual Exercises. This program of spiritual renewal offers the means through which every Jesuit finds his vocation; he also takes up these meditative practices to shape his attitudes and actions in everyday life.

The purpose of undertaking the Spiritual Exercises is to know and overcome oneself in an effort to find God—in particular, the Jesuit seeks to discern God’s will as he evaluates his life in terms of the past, present and future. The question “what ought I do for Christ now?” is how every Jesuit—Pope Francis included—tests himself.

In other words, we would be wise to be attuned to how Francis prays. For Jesuits, prayer and meditation signal that life is full of possibility. As Bergoglio wrote in a recent publication: “To pray is an act of freedom.” To pray, he continues, is to take leave of self, of the desire for control, or any effort to gain the upper hand with God. And this meditative experience must find its full expression in the world as the Jesuit looks for God in all things. Or as Bergoglio says in the same publication, “My experiences with God are found on the road, located in the search itself, in the act of giving myself over to the search.”

If we inhabit a moment of suspense in these early moments of his papacy, so does Francis. Yet he has been trained to live in that tension, to avoid easy categorization, to discern signs, to listen, to test. Francis, as a Jesuit, is necessarily experimental, paying attention to the ordinary as he discerns what might be possible within the Church he now leads.

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Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

Like many people, my first reaction to the news of Cardinal Bergoglio’s accession to the papacy was “Who is that?” By no means one of the much-discussed frontrunners singled out in the lead up to the conclave, Pope Francis is something of an unknown quantity. This has in many ways inflated the expectations of Catholics across the ideological spectrum, who see in Francis an answer to the grave challenges currently confronting the Church.

A new translation of the dialogue between then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka provides some indication of the direction the new pope may take. These pages reveal to us, as John Allen puts it, a “moderate realist” whose unimpeachable orthodoxy on the major doctrinal questions is tempered by a characteristically Jesuit sense of flexibility and practicality. Citing the late Cardinal (and fellow Jesuit) Henri de Lubac, Pope Francis calls upon the clergy to avoid the temptations of both politicization and quietist retreat into a private faith that ignores the central religious significance of social engagement.

It will be interesting to observe how Francis squares these commitments with his new role as both a temporal and spiritual sovereign. I suspect that the main features distinguishing his papacy from that of his predecessor will remain at the level of personal style and symbolics. While Francis’ impressive humility and personal piety may help to rebuild the spiritual stature of an institution that has been severely damaged by revelations of sex abuse, corruption and curial infighting, the new pope is unlikely to push through the kind of substantive doctrinal reforms for which many liberal Catholics worldwide have been clamoring. At best, we are likely to see some reforms to the bureaucratic structure of the Curia and a more collegial leadership style. The appointment of the “G8”—an advisory commission of eight cardinals representing every continent—signals the new pope’s desire to reorient the Vatican towards a more global outlook that is responsive to the concerns of the local churches. It also signals a shift in the balance of power away from the Secretariat of State, which took on an expanded role under Benedict XVI. However, the new pope is unlikely to inaugurate a “Vatican Spring” of the kind Hans Küng called for in a powerful editorial penned on the occasion of Benedict’s resignation.

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The current “peril” for religious freedom is global, given forces like communism and Islam that often trample it. On unclear evidence, the statement goes so far as to say that “the greatest period of persecution in the history of Christianity” is occurring right now. It calls for a response abroad, in how “the foreign policy of the United States and Canada” are conducted. But religious freedom is also threatened within.

All this is very interesting. Rooted in the vision of the founder of First Things, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, and imbued with the spirit of his resounding complaint that the public square is naked in this country, the statement portends a continuing period of strife over the very meaning of religious freedom and the everyday management of the secular public space.

It is important that the group situates itself historically. Religious freedom is deeply rooted in the West, the statement explains. The group offers a “genealogy” (its term) of the principle, starting from Jesus and running through Lactantius, Roger Williams, and Martin Luther. And then, rather remarkably, it leaps to the last half of the twentieth century, most especially Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae (1965).

I want to take up some of that history in this short post—but first let’s consider the contemporary politics of the statement.

It may have appeared too late to welcome the Supreme Court’s “ministerial exception” case that, in January, limited the scope of antidiscrimination law in the name of religious freedom. With perfect timing, the statement coincided with the politics of the accommodation President Barack Obama famously offered (and continues to seek in new versions), constricting reproductive choice in view of objections based on the same principle. Some might see those developments as illustrating the considerable force of religious sentiment, and the power of the norm of religious freedom, in American public affairs. Outside the United States, the Lautsi v. Italy case decided last summer by the European Court of Human Rights suggests a similar conclusion. A prominent American law professor invoked Neuhaus’s slogan in his appellate defense of the continuing presence of crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, and the Court’s decision to side with him shows that religious freedom and public Christianity maintain a healthy communion.

This coalition of American Christians, however, is still worried, as it explains in a crucial paragraph:

Proponents of human rights, including governments,” it writes, “have begun to define religious freedom down, reducing it to a bare ‘freedom of worship.’ This reduction denies the inherently public character of biblical religion and privatizes the very idea of religious freedom, a view of freedom such as one finds in those repressive states where Christians can pray only so long as they do so behind closed doors. It is no exaggeration to see in these developments a movement to drive religious belief, and especially orthodox Christian religious and moral convictions, out of public life.

In view of such fears, I write to ask how serious a “genealogy” of this coalition’s preferred understanding of religious freedom is required to understand its own current advocacy. It may seem strange, especially on this blog, to bracket a currently influential critique of secularism, in order to investigate instead the lineage of the worry that privatization of “orthodoxy” is normatively misguided or practically discriminatory. In view of the coalition’s statement, however, this agenda seems pressing. Where did the strategy of insisting on the “inherently public” character of religion come from, especially one grouping some Catholics in alliance with American evangelicals?

It’s important to recall that the defense of Christianity as an “inherently public” religion is nothing new; but until very recently Catholicism—and especially conservative Catholicism—considered the principle of religious freedom to be the disease rather than the cure. The failure of various mid-twentieth century political attitudes led to an Americanization of Catholicism in which religious freedom made unprecedented inroads. It did so, however, as the new way that “inherently public” religion was pursued—one in which American Protestantism suddenly became model rather than stigma.

Most people know—though the statement doesn’t mention—that Catholic authorities generally rejected religious freedom prior to Vatican II. In its scandalous indifference to truth, religious freedom, Pope Leo XIII explained in Immortale Dei (1885), is little more than slavery to falsehood. According to this encyclical on “the Christian constitution of states,” Catholicism must stand against the:

theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that every one is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all if he disapprove of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one’s conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that every one has unbounded license to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks. Now, when the State rests on foundations like those just named … it readily appears into what and how unrightful a position the Church is driven.

In the crisis in the middle of the twentieth century, when liberal democracy was destroyed, it was therefore not out of nowhere that Catholics frequently voted with their feet in favor of explicitly Catholic states in crisis circumstances (in Austria, Portugal, and Spain before World War II, and then Croatia, Vichy France, and Slovakia during it) and fascist states when this first best option was not available (in Germany and Italy before World War II and most of Europe during it). Indeed, forsaking state capture still seemed radical in the 1940s, when  powerful Vatican forces remained stalwart in its defense of the older view that an endorsement of religious freedom made sense only as a “hypothesis” in those situations in which Catholics were in the minority—as in the United States—rather than a general principle or “thesis.” (Leo XIII proceeded this way, for instance, in first taking note of American Catholicism in his encyclical Longinqua Oceani [1895].)

The end of World War II famously gave birth to a widespread new compatibility of Catholicism with liberalism, including liberal rights. Yet through the 1950s, and in fact through Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church as a whole still opposed religious freedom, against a strong set of dissidents like Jacques Maritain and others. After the war, figures like Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (last head of the millennial inquisition) continued to inveigh against religious freedom, offering Spain, where clericofascism in a majority Catholic country had survived, as the ideal model. Indeed, Ottaviani and his allies, in a once dramatic set of events, nearly derailed Vatican II’s declaration on religious freedom, which was the most high-profile and visible part of its work precisely because it was by no means uncontested.

In short, the idea of religious freedom as the key buttress of inherently public religion was painfully acquired—thus allowing today’s coalition. Among Catholics, it had to be developed against those who insisted that “inherently public” religion needed to be immunized against the idea of religious freedom, with its Protestant, liberal, and privatizing implications. Long censured as a principle that brought ruin on Christianity, religious freedom now seemed a tool to buttress it.

It is not obvious why the switch happened. Those interested should be sure to read a new book by Emile Perreau-Saussine, a scholar who died tragically young a couple of years ago, for one important account. In my somewhat different opinion, it was a process in which the geopolitics of the Cold War mattered most, as certain principles like freedom of conscience once denounced by a reactionary church got a second look. The stimulus for this to occur was provided by a frightening secularist enemy against which the United States now stood as principal opponent, after an interwar period in which different choices—and serious mistakes—were too often made. Once tasked in Catholic political thought as a catalyst of secularism, religious freedom found itself recuperated as a crucial tool to stave secularism off. No wonder, then, that in privatizing faith, liberalism in the United States still seems analogous, for this coalition, most of all to communism. (As the statement explains, “the totalitarian temptation … seems to exist in all forms of political modernity.”)

The adoption of religious freedom in the face of the totalitarian danger also allowed an unprecedented move in the direction of Protestantism, once denounced as the source of modern ills. It also permitted American life to become a model—though many Catholics had commonly associated it with modern, individualist, and materialist error. Catholics like Maritain, for example, promoted America on the grounds that it showed how religious freedom promoted rather than undermined Christianity. In the nineteenth century, Catholic thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s attitude towards Protestant America was that it had figured out, by disestablishing the church, how to make Christianity more publicly powerful than ever. His message to Catholic reactionaries at home who denounced America as godless was that they needed to know how strong Christianity can become precisely among those who have given up the campaign to capture the state. “I shall wait until they come back from a visit to America,” Tocqueville wrote of his reactionary opponents. Maritain, who had once attacked America too, spent World War II there, forging alliances with theologians like John Courtney Murray who followed him in marginalizing the thesis/hypothesis model. Murray, under Maritain’s influence, became the most pivotal figure in Vatican II’s work on religious freedom.

That conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants rally around religious freedom together is nothing like a smooth continuity from Tocqueville’s America. Yet this is not simply because Tocqueville lost the argument in his time, with the unedifying politics of the twentieth century following, and the Cold War finally prompting the Catholic pivot. It is also because, after World War II, mainline Protestants in the United States turned religious freedom into a more genuinely liberal and privatizing principle than ever in this country’s history. If the Catholic transformation with respect to religious freedom was fateful, this mainline Protestant move was equally so. For in making it, mainline Protestants may have sealed their doom—and provided a short-term boost to privatizing liberalism that did not secure it in American life for long. After all, the evangelical ascendancy away from mainline coastal fortresses, which are today so depopulated, opened the door to the other side of the equation for today’s conservative coalition—not to mention to the rise of American conservatism generally.

The strange fact today, in summary, is that the principal defenders of American religious freedom defined as recognition of the “inherently public” role of faith could not have been in coalition at any other time. Even in postwar America, the coalition was not inevitable, and ending the story at Vatican II also leaves aside the very recent years when this coalition came together in what some have seen as a disturbing pact—one that certainly didn’t follow from a deeply rooted past.

Attractively, the group pauses at the start of its text, mindful of the injunction about casting the first stone. It alludes vaguely to some prior period when “Christians have also employed the state as an instrument of religious coercion.” But this passing allusion doesn’t interfere with the spotty history the statement goes on to give. After its acknowledgment that mistakes have been made by politicized Christians, the statement concludes that “memory of Christian sinfulness … gives us all the more reason to defend the religious freedom of all men and women today.” But everything then turns on what the “inherently public” forces deploying the principle of religious freedom really aim to achieve.

History won’t settle America’s debates about what religious freedom means. But its uncomfortable bits matter fully as much as its inspirational bits in showing that the principle is far from straightforward: for it is as much a novel tactic as it is an eternal truth.