Conservative Christian politics are not everywhere and always destructive, but today’s right is more extreme than its recent predecessors. I fear that the next era of American Christianity will be about conquest and triumph rather than peace and humility, and will profligately lend its imprimatur to nationalist agendas that are hostile to the weak and the marginalized. (Vance’s invocation of the ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant politics is perhaps a preview of things to come.) And that would be a devastating development, not just because of the predictable political consequences of such an alignment, but also because the Christianity Francis represented really is loyal to the Gospels in its devotion to the people Jesus loved so much, whose fortunes are rarely of interest to people in power: the poor, the sick, the oppressed and exploited, the displaced and rejected. It was for those that Francis prayed, wrote, and spoke, and to them that he dedicated his time on the chair of St. Peter. And theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.
I don't have much to say about Church politics or its official policies. Sometimes they reflect the spirit of gospels, sometimes they don't. There are the creeds of course, and I assent to them, but nobody, including the magisterium, has any definitive or clearly precise idea what those creeds mean, or what mysteries lie behind them. The creeds are a portal into a dimension of existence about which what we understand will always be dwarfed by what we don't. The idea that there can be "clarity" about any of that creates more problems than it solves.
Nevertheless, there will always be people who call themselves Christians spouting nonsense in the name of Christianity, and that nonsense has to be called out for what it is. Unfortunately that nonsense has too often been spouted by official representatives of the Church, and usually such officials had little interest in peace and humility. Clearly that was not true for Francis, and for many things, but perhaps for that most of all, I am grateful for his papacy. He was a mensch.
What matters is that there is available to all humans grace, and whatever is good in the world is in some way a response to it, and that's true for everyone whether they are in or out of the church.
Nevertheless, the world needs the church as a presence that in its liturgies, customs, practices, and works incarnates and mediates that grace and goodness in a real way for all of humanity. It does so in ways that are mostly out of the public eye, but in ways that from time to time become visible. That's the lower-case 'c' catholic mission of the Church, and Francis, for all his flaws, embodied that in an important and instructive way. It remains to be seen whether his successor builds on that or retreats from it.
There are good reasons to share Elizabeth Bruenig's pessimism, but we could be surprised. If there was one thing I thought the film Conclave captured nicely was that while the people who rise to positions of power in the church are all too human, something else is at work in and through them. The question is whether in this go-round there will be a constituency among these prelates alert enough to notice and influential enough to prevail. For that let us pray.