With the death of Pope Francis, I have lived through seven papacies (Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis). The next will be my eighth.
I thought that Francis was a very good man but, honestly, not the right pope for the times.
The Church is going through significant challenges at present. In the developed world the pews are empty or, at least, emptying. That is not new. When I worked in Germany nearly 50 years ago the only people attending Mass were a handful of old women and me. And that was in a traditionally Catholic part of Germany.
Here in the United States many Catholics are leaving the Church. In some cases they feel they were driven away by a hierarchy too eager to defend priests for their abusive activity. In other cases Americans are disheartened because they see the Church as too conservative; in others they see it as too liberal.
The Church is being persecuted in China and Africa. Francis’s strategy for China was accommodation which I doubt was the right one.
I suspect the next pope will be Italian, a reversion to mean. We’ll see.
I left the church when I was in high school before Vatican II. While I have been an atheist for some 60 years, most of my family and most of my wife’s family are nominal Catholics, so I have more than a passing interest in Church affairs.
Francis was plainly, obviously a heretic and a doctrinaire communist. He also protected the large numbers of homosexuals/pedophiles in the priesthood. He was a disaster. It will be interesting if the next Pope continues his apostasy.
The Church is in decline, especially in its European homeland, but I do not think it will disappear. More likely, there will be a schism, with competing Popes, and a trad catholic, Latin mass remnant separating from the homosexual, heretical Catholic establishment in Rome