As the conclave begins
We should remember Francis's flaws as well as his virtues
Today, 133 cardinal electors will begin the secret deliberations to decide the Catholic Church’s next leader. Since 2013, the Catholic Church has been led by Pope Francis, who has been lauded for his humble and receptive leadership style. But popes leave an imprint on the global Church by their vices as well as their virtues. Before we turn resolutely forward - a natural response to the election of a new leader - let’s reflect for a bit on the vices that characterized Pope Francis’s approach to leadership.
Ukrainian Catholics have witnessed firsthand the complexities of Pope Francis’s character as a leader, especially his moral hubris that became clearer in the latter years of papacy. Pope Francis’s concern for Ukraine is a throughline in his papacy. As early as 2014, he praised Ukrainians’ political and cultural aspirations to move closer to the West. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, his failed efforts to broker peace seemed like hubristic overreach. This pope had too much confidence in the power of his moral charisma, and he met his nemesis in Russia's Orthodox Church leadership. In the process, he ended up alienating the everyday Ukrainian Catholics who suffered the most in this conflict.
Pope Francis was newly in office when, in late 2014, Ukraine was gripped by nationwide protests – the Maidan Revolution – calling for independence from Russian influence. For Francis, who had become pope just a few months before, the Maidan Revolution was an early geopolitical crisis. While Catholics are a minority in Ukraine - approximately 12% of the population – the Church’s leadership has long been an important geopolitical bridge to Europe. Through Pope Francis’s close relationship with Ukrainian Catholic leaders, he ended up supporting Ukrainians’ desire for freedom and closer ties with the West.
A year later, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, Francis appeared at the Vatican alongside the leader of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv: “The Holy Father expressed words of solidarity to the Ukrainian people for the suffering and the dangers that is now before them,” according to a Vatican statement released at the time. Francis turned his attention to Eastern Europe at a time when this instance of Russian aggression, which we now can see as a precursor to the current conflict, was only an intermittent international concern.
In 2014, he also expressed a desire to end the conflict; his promise to do “everything possible for peace in Eastern Europe” would become a central theme of his engagements in Ukraine. While some saw this message as an attempt to take a moral stand above the conflict, it was more an expression of his pastoral commitment to be with the people.
But Francis could not avoid divisiveness as tensions bled over into ecumenical relations between the Catholic Church and Orthodox Christians. In 2016, while visiting Cuba, the pope held an informal and friendly “conversation” with Patriarch Kyrill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, after the conflict in Ukraine became a global concern in 2022, Francis failed to make any further headway in strengthening these ties. Leaders of Russia’s Orthodox Church, especially Kyrill, have enthusiastically supported the invasion. Ukrainian Catholics urged the pope to express disapproval of Russia’s Orthodox leadership, but he never did. Instead, he asked Patriarch Kyrill for meetings and said he would even go to Moscow, a remarkable statement at a time when Russia was being diplomatically isolated.
Although Ukraine’s Catholic leaders remained some of the pope’s closest advisors, everyday Ukrainian Catholics – especially those who had lost relatives on the front – became increasingly alienated. In 2023, I traveled to Uzhhorod in western Ukraine to meet with women in a grief program for war widows organized by the Caritas Catholic charity group. Some had lost relatives in 2015 and 2016, when the fighting was confined to Ukraine’s eastern provinces. To me, they expressed gratitude that Pope Francis had been one of the few international leaders trying to draw attention to the conflict in Ukraine.
Though Francis has been consistent in calling for peace, the pope has seemed to focus on Ukrainians alone as he became increasingly alienated from Russian leaders. Francis’s notorious exhortation to Ukrainians to embrace the courage of the “white flag” stands out. The war widows I met in Uzhhorod, for example, were outraged.
“What he said about raising the white flag,” a woman named Lesia complained, “why isn’t he saying this to the Russian soldiers in our country?” She added: “We were not the ones who started this war.”
When he visited Hungary in 2023, Pope Francis met with Ukrainian refugees, some of whom had lost relatives in the war. But this wasn’t nearly enough for a woman named Kateryna. “The pope does not understand because these are not his children who are being slaughtered,” she said. “He should come here. He should see the victims of war crimes with his own eyes, and then he should say what he has been saying.”
In 2025, Francis elevated a Ukrainian bishop, Mykola Bychok, to the rank of cardinal. Bychok, 44, became the youngest member of the College of Cardinals, the group that will soon meet to select the next pope. The appointment was seen as a step toward repairing the pope’s strained relationship with Ukrainian Catholics. But it did not come without complications, since many had wanted the pope to elevate Archbishop Shevchuk, the titular head of Ukraine’s Church.
Just a week after the news of Bychok’s appointment broke, Pope Francis seemed to give an important symbolic gift to Shevchuk by announcing a promise to visit Ukraine. This will no longer be possible, of course. But will the next pope honor Francis’s pledge to visit Ukraine? Traditionally, a pope’s promises and pledges die with him. But Francis himself broke with this tradition: He honored the promise Benedict XVI had made to visit World Youth Day 2013 in Rio de Janeiro.
So many people are asking if the next pope will follow in Francis’s footsteps and continue his reforms, but I also wonder if Francis’s successor will show the same concern for Catholics in Ukraine. If the next pope does indeed style himself after Francis, perhaps he could declare this intention by keeping once of Francis’s final promises to visit the faithful. As the process begins to select the next head of the Catholic Church, Catholics and non-Catholics alike will be pondering these questions.