‘We need clarity’: Fr Gerry Murray on Francis, Trump and this week’s conclave
William Cash• May 5, 2025
ROME. We are in the midst of Sede Vacante, and I am sitting in the hot, early lunchtime Roman sunshine with Fr Gerald Murray, one of America’s leading conservative Catholic “media” priests, as well as a respected multi-lingual canon-lawyer. He is wearing a smart Panama hat along with his black clerical suit, and reminds me of Ronald Knox, the famous pre-war Oxford chaplain, scholar, priest and broadcaster who helped convert Evelyn Waugh and other intellectuals to Catholicism.
Fr Gerry is a longtime contributor and friend to the Catholic Herald. I can remember – in 2023, just after Fiducia Supplicans was issued, allowing blessings of people in same-sex relationships – sitting with him at Brown’s Hotel in London after lunch with Sir Rocco Forte, discussing how Pope Francis’s controversial legacy would impact the next papal election. “Oh, when I read this encyclical I thought the progressive pendulum now has to swing back the other way,” he said.
That was two years ago. Well, will it or won’t it later this week? That’s the question on every Vaticanista mind right now. We begin with the Team Bergoglio campaign that operated behind the scenes to get Pope Francis elected. With the College of Cardinals stacked so heavily – over 80% – with Francis appointees, are conservatives determined not to be out-flanked again?
“They didn’t expect Benedict XVI to resign,” Fr Gerry explains. “And they thought that after Cardinal Bergoglio turned 76, he wasn’t someone to worry about because they wouldn’t elect someone that old. They thought Angelo Scola would get elected, but he just didn’t have the support of the Italian cardinals, apparently. And that didn’t help.”
The progressive camp will have at least four candidates whom they want to be Successor of Peter, but this shared ambition will divide the Francis-legacy progressive vote. Does Fr Gerry think the more conservative cardinals will this time rally around one candidate?
“I think there’s a very good chance of that this time because I think there’s a lot of unspoken dissatisfaction with the last 12 years and the way it developed. There was enthusiasm at the beginning, and hope – but then things devolved into a progressive agenda. Some cardinals did oppose it publicly, and they’ll be the rallying points for the candidates most likely to reverse some of the mistakes.”
Whilst sitting on a conclave panel discussion at the Kolbe Hotel the day before, John L Allen Jr, a Herald Special Vatican Correspondent, suggested that Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York was now acting like the late Cardinal Pell in 2013 – being an elder statesman figure and bridge builder. Cardinal Dolan is thought to be talking to younger, inexperienced, cardinals from the developing world – most of whom don’t speak Italian – and educating them in the arcane arts of conclave voting.
“I’m not surprised to hear that,” says Fr Gerry. “Cardinal Dolan was here 12 years ago, so he knows how the process works informally. I would be all in favour of that.”
The week’s round of lunches and dinners in the trattorias around the Borgo Pio neighbourhood near the Vatican will be critical to the outcome of the conclave. There are many new faces in Rome, and with major sees like Milan, Paris, Venice, Los Angeles, Dublin and Naples not having a cardinal to represent them, the old Holy See power axis has shifted to produce a hardening of curial (as well as Italian) power – although curial cardinals are now only 20% of the 133 cardinal electors, down 7% from 2013.
Does Fr Gerry think it is time for another Italian pope? The last was John Paul I, who had clashed with the curia, and died in August 1978 after only 33 days in office. He agrees that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Francis’s Italian Secretary of State, has emerged as the likely front runner candidate for continuity.
“People who are more liberal, in the mould of Francis, might vote for him, even though Cardinal Parolin is not really at the radical end and leading the way, like Cardinal Fernández. Because I think the continuity people would say that’s the best chance they have to keep the Synodality project, and Francis’s legacy, intact.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the US Ambassador to the Holy See is Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote advocacy group, who was instrumental in getting him elected. Why does Fr Gerry think that President Trump likes to surround himself with so many Catholics in his inner circle?
“Trump is interesting because he’s not a Catholic, but he’s been dealing with Catholics his whole life in New York, a large number of his cabinet members are Catholic, and his wife is Catholic. So I think he appreciates Catholics, and he sees the role of the Catholic Church in getting him elected both times as a sign that Catholics are a conservative group that favour him.”
Geopolitically, Trump won’t want to be seen to be clashing with a progressive pope. It’s not good for the optics with some 59% of the 60 million US Catholics voted for him in 2024. How important is it for Trump to have a good relationship with the next pope? At the time of our interview Trump had just joked to US media that he would like to be the next pope, and his posting of an AI picture of himself in papal vestments was seen as offensive by some American Catholics. How does Trump really view the Church?
“I think Trump sees the Pope as a deal-maker,” Fr Gerry observes, “and he would look at the Catholic Church as just another group to make a deal with to benefit what he thinks is important. But on the other hand, he does respect the religious role of Catholicism in the world, and in his country. He’s has a relationship with New York’s Cardinal Dolan going back years. It’s hard to figure out exactly what motivates Trump on any particular issue, but I think religion’s always an important factor in what he thinks is good.”
Who are the key cardinals working behind the scenes for the all-important papal hustings before the conclave starts on 7 May? “Well, Cardinal Müller speaking out, I find very refreshing,” Fr Gerry says, “because due reverence to a deceased pope cannot cover over the major divisions in the Church that Pope Francis created by virtue of his reforms and innovations. So he’s saying we can’t continue in this way.”
Müller has said that if the conclave doesn’t choose the right pope (ie a conservative one) there could be schism. Does Fr Gerry agree? “Yes, I would,” he replies. “Pope Francis normalized the idea that everything in Church teaching and practice is subject to revision and questioning. It was a sort of the dynamic of Hegelianism, with no fixed, stable truth – only evolving truth, with those who claim there is fixed truth cast as obstructionists. That’s where I think Muller’s been very helpful.”
What about the Zen factor? I had just heard that the outspoken former bishop of Hong Kong had landed in Rome after being given back his passport by the Chinese authorities to travel to the Eternal City for the conclave – although at 93 he does not have a vote. “Yes, Zen will have a good influence, I think, because among the mistakes that Pope Francis made was surrendering the nomination of bishops in China to the Communist Party of China.”
Will the Asian and Pacific cardinals (making up 16% of the conclave) be listening carefully to what Zen has to say? “Yes, anyone who’s had dealings with Communists will look to Zen, because essentially Zen is enunciating what Benedict XVI and John Paul II said. We want normalization of the church in China, but we’re not going to make the Chinese Communist Party the controller, which is what Pope Francis did, which, for me, was inexcusable.”
Fr Gerry believes the spirit of St John Paul II will be critical factor in this Conclave. “I think JP II will be important because part of the pontificate of Pope Francis was to ignore what his recent predecessors had said and done, unless he was going to overturn it. For example, the Pontifical Academy for Life was turned into a debating society with left-wing pro-abortionists being made members. That kind of thing revealed the mindset that we’re facing.”
We move on to how views on the Traditional Latin Mass might become a litmus test for any future pope as it quick indicator of papabile political colours. “The Latin Mass is important. Do we want a Church which claims to be open but is in fact a closed shop?”
Fr Gerry thinks the future of synodality will also be a key issue that may decide the next pope. He sees an analogy between the Francis regime and the People’s Republic of China: “It’s allegedly run by the people. The people have nothing to say about what happened. So synodality is similar. Everyone’s involved, but the people on top are picking everyone.”
Is another issue the huge disconnect between the young seminarians and priests who will serve the next generation (who are almost universally traditional in outlook) and the majority of elector cardinals in their sixties and seventies? “This is a great point,” Fr Gerry says. “Leadership in America is coming from conservative priests. In many ways, Pope Francis represented a return to a 1960s approach to Catholicism. And most people thought that that had died its death with the previous two popes.”
Inevitably, I ask who Fr Gerry’s favourite candidate from the conservative camp might be. He admits that he is hearing “a lot of talk in Rome in favour of Cardinal Erdo from Budapest”. My eyes light up at this, as I once interviewed Cardinal Erdo for the Herald in at his residence in Budapest. It turns out that Erdo used to teach Fr Gerry canon law in Rome. “He was my professor when I was at the Gregorian. He’s a very scholarly man. I sat in the class. I listened. It was a dry subject, the history of canon law sources. But he was thorough. He knew what he was doing. He gave clarity – which is what we need now’.