How should a conflicted Catholic pray for the papacy this conclave?

Tom Colsy• May 7, 2025

The bells of Rome have tolled. The See of Peter stands empty once more. With the death of Pope Francis, who reigned from 2013 to 2025, the Church finds herself again poised between grief and expectancy, with a conclave looming beneath the frescoed gaze of Michelangelo.

Smoke shall rise soon from the Sistine chimney, but before it turns white, the faithful must reckon with a subtler, deeper matter: how should a Catholic pray in this hour?

Not just for whom, but how.

For many, this question already surfaced in the final months of Pope Francis’ illness. Some, while more than willing to pray for his good, were unsure whether praying for his recovery was good for the Church. What were the lips of the faithful to ask of God in such a scenario?

Now, in the shadow of his passing, their prayers take sharper shape: a longing for clarity, a clamouring hope among many for Cardinal Sarah, a growing chorus joining Cardinal Burke’s novena for the conclave. But what does it mean to petition heaven with such specificity? Is it holy boldness – or dangerous presumption?

This is no idle question of piety for those inclined toward ecclesiastical sport. It is a spiritual question. It confronts the Catholic soul with a fundamental dilemma: when some feel a pontificate has confounded or wounded the Church, are they still to pray for its extension? Are we allowed to pray for specific outcomes at conclaves – and to avoid others? May we beg God for deliverance? Or must we content ourselves with a simple genuflection to providence, whispering only, fiat voluntas tua, while our hearts seethe with silence or grief?

These are questions now on many minds – relevant to all, yet particularly to those faithful who walked beside the figure of Pope Francis with more sorrow than solace.

The weight of a pontificate

For many, Francis will be remembered as the Pope of the peripheries – the smiling shepherd who disdained baroque flattery and reached out to the excluded. He was accessible, unpretentious, and, for millions, a healing presence. His mantra – todos, todos, todos – resonated with those long alienated by legalism or abstraction. He witnessed smelled, as they said, of his sheep.

But for others, his legacy remains difficult. The early mishandling of the McCarrick scandal and the Vatican’s response to grave allegations against Fr. Marko Rupnik cast long shadows. The lifting of Rupnik’s excommunication, and delayed restrictions, deepened the pain among victims of abuse who had hoped this reforming Pope would mark a new beginning.

Then there are the traditionalists: faithful Catholics who find spiritual nourishment in the Church’s ancient liturgy. Their advocates in the Curia – Cardinals Raymond Burke, Gerhard Müller and Robert Sarah – were quietly dismissed. For many, this felt less like reform than repudiation. Flourishing Catholic communities often found themselves under scrutiny rather than being supported. Harsh words, censure and even expulsions replaced pastoral encouragement.

The paradox was painful: a Church struggling to fill seminaries, led by a pope who seemed to often clamp down on, and make life harder for the faithful in, the very enclaves where vocations were growing.

Petition and the shape of hope

So again: how do we pray?

Are we permitted to ask for a specific man, a particular kind of pope? Is it factional to desire someone like Cardinal Sarah: a man of deep prayer, doctrinal clarity and liturgical reverence? And what of Cardinal Burke’s global novena? Is it boldness, or overstep?

Scripture does not leave us paralysed. Abraham bargained with God. Moses pleaded. The Syrophoenician woman was dismissed – then returned. Even Our Lord, trembling in Gethsemane, first prayed, “Let this cup pass.” Only then did He whisper the holiest words of all: “Yet not My will, but Thine be done.”

In other words, to pray for a specific outcome is not to be unspiritual. It is human. Scriptural. And when done in charity and submission, it is holy.

It’s wise to pray that the conclave elects a man of integrity and orthodoxy, a man who can speak clearly in today’s Babel of moral confusion, who can bind up wounds and re-establish confidence in the Church’s voice. The desire for Cardinal Sarah’s election, or another of similar stature, is not unseemly. It is, for many, profoundly reasonable.

And Cardinal Burke’s novena, now drawing thousands across the globe, is not factionalism. It is fidelity – an expression of sorrowful hope by those who love the Church and long to see the papacy filled by a man after God’s heart.

The Petrine office, not the man

What about acting popes? How are we to treat and pray for them?

When crowds gathered on Saint Peter’s Square in Rome from 24 February this year to pray the rosary for the Pope’s health – finishing with a beautiful sung Salve Regina in the Church’s historical universal tongue – were Catholics obliged to pray for his longevity?

Some are legitimately hesitant to voice any criticism of the late Pope. They rightly understand he was their spiritual father. After all, it’s not the behaviour of a good son to liberally parade the faults of their father around without delicacy, reserve, discretion or charity.

And yet, a father may have faults. Sometimes they are manifest. This does not nullify the need for discretion, but it allows space for honest acknowledgment.

It’s tempting in a polarised age to turn the papacy into a personality cult – whether of loyalty or loathing. But the Church does not venerate popes for their charm or ideology. We honour Peter because Christ chose him, not because he always lives up to the call.

Gianni Crea, key keeper of the Vatican Museums, shows the key that opens the door to the Sistine Chapel, Vatican, 13 February 2024. (Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images.)

Pope John XII is remembered as having turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel; Sixtus IV gave his encouragement to a (half-successful) plan to murder multiple political opponents in cold blood during Mass; Honorius I even made a statement later magisterially corrected and condemned as heretical. They did not nullify the papacy.

And to acknowledge the harm of Traditionis Custodes or the confusion caused by Fiducia Supplicans is not disloyalty – it is fidelity. Fidelity of the kind shown by Paul when he rebuked Peter, Catherine of Siena when she chastised Gregory XI, or Benedict lived towards a Church in ruins.

True fidelity is never venomous. But neither is it silent.

Being mindful of Saint Paul’s injunction “bless, and do not curse”, Catholics are not obliged to pray that a particular pontificate last indefinitely.

And yet there is a higher form of prayer. One which should always, ultimately, supersede.

The wisdom of Gethsemane

A fruitful answer to these contentions is found in an anecdote I was once given at university by a young Spanish cradle Catholic. When discussing times in our lives we had found prayer to be not only a source of comfort but directly efficacious, she shared with me a deeply personal story. It has stayed with me ever since.

This lady (let us call her Emilia) continued the habit of daily prayer taught to her by her parents. As a teen, she would pray daily for the intention of a young, terminally ill student, a few years younger than her and whom she pitied.

One day, after a severe episode, he was rushed to hospital. Emilia prayed desperately, and to everyone’s surprise, he pulled through.

But seeing his continual severe agony, Emilia discussed her prayers with her priest. Were her prayers keeping him alive? Was she being naïve? Should she feel guilt for his suffering?

Her priest advised her to change her prayer – not to pray only for survival, but for abandonment to God’s will. To pray for the deliverance of this individual’s soul, but also for the Lord’s will to be done.

It took her weeks to embrace this. But the night she changed her prayer, she learned the boy had died the next morning.

This is not to suggest that her earlier prayers were wrong. But there is a time for petition, and there is a time for Gethsemane.

Her story offers no easy lesson. But it teaches the necessity of abandonment to God’s will. The Church teaches that God has both an active will – which desires truth, beauty, holiness – and a permissive will, which allows suffering, even papal misgovernance, for a greater good. This mystery is writ large in history: wicked popes, schisms, confusion – permitted, but never beyond God’s sovereignty.

Praying with a clean heart

So how should we pray now?

First, we must pray for the soul of Pope Francis. That is an immediate duty of charity. However one views his papacy, we commend him to God’s mercy and Our Lady’s intercession.

Second, we pray for the cardinals. That in the Sistine Chapel, under the aegis of the Last Judgment, they will tremble, listen, and obey the Holy Spirit – not their ambitions, not the trends of the age.

But this must be wrapped in abandonment to providence. God sees the whole; we see in part.

If we do not get the outcome we desire, we must obstinately refuse despair. God is a loving Father. He will deliver Israel. Faithful, devoted priests are already coming from the seminaries as we speak. Observers have commented that it is only a matter of time before they inherit and amend the Church. But this will happen on God’s timeline, not ours.

Third, we may pray with clarity and boldness for the next pope. It is not wrong to desire a man of deep holiness, doctrinal fidelity and liturgical reverence. And yes – we may pray for a particular man. We may ask that Cardinal Sarah, or one like him, ascend to the Throne of Peter. We are not disqualified from grace by our hopes.

But our final and ultimate prayer must be Christ’s.

Not clenched. Not bitter. Not partisan. But open-handed, pierced-hearted.

Fiat voluntas tua.

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Photo: Members of the Catholic Templars of Italy walk in a silent procession past Castel Sant’Angelo, after visiting St. Peter’s Basilica earlier in the day in anticipation of the 7 May conclave, Rome, Italy, 4 May 2025. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.)