Czerny on papacy: ‘Part of a beautiful mystery’

"We are called to bring the Gospel to all creation."

As the College of Cardinals heads to a conclave to elect the next pope, many in the college feel a need for stability after Francis’ eventful 12-year pontificate.

Cardinal Michael Czerny. Credit: Vatican Media.

In that light, some cardinals have stressed the importance of unity as a priority for the next pope.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, on the other hand, made headlines when he told The New York Times last week that he thought the call for a unity had become an ironically divisive theme in the run-up to a papal election.

Unity “sounds really good… but it means reversal,” Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, told The New York Times.

“If you ask me, ‘How would you name the wrong track for the conclave?’ I would say the idea that unity is the priority… Unity cannot be a priority issue,” he added.

Czerny was born in 1946 in Brno, Czechoslovakia — now Czechia — but his family migrated to Canada two years later. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1964 and was ordained a priest in 1973.

After a career spanning Canada, El Salvador, Africa, and Rome, and after founding the African Jesuit AIDS Network, Czerny started in 2010 working with Cardinal Peter Turkson in the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

In 2016 he became the undersecretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, until he became its prefect in 2022.

Pope Francis created Czerny a cardinal in 2019.

Czerny spoke with The Pillar about his criticism of “unity,” evangelization as the mission of the Church, Pope Francis’ legacy, and his views on the next pope.

And as the interview came to a conclusion, Czerny dropped another fact worth noting. The cardinal is, he said, “a Pillar reader — in a good way.”

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Cardinal Michael Czerny with Pope Francis. Credit: Vatican Media.

You made some headlines recently because you said in an interview that “unity cannot be a priority issue” to choose the next pope. I wanted to understand the rationale behind your statement.

Unity is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It's a characteristic of the Church. In the Creed, we say that we believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. Like the other qualities of the Church, [unity] is a gift of the Holy Spirit, it's in the same paragraph as the Holy Spirit in the Creed.

We are called to bring the Gospel to all creation, as it says in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark, and that's the priority.

The more we do it, and the better we do it, the more united we will be. And that will be a sign of God's blessing, of God’s showing us that the Church is on the right track.

So, I would be sorry if the [upcoming] Holy Father were elected on a unity ticket, as if he could make establishing or imposing unity his priority.

I want to be perfectly clear about what you mean by “unity” in this regard. Is it unity in doctrine, unity in frame of mind? What do you mean, more precisely?

Well, I can’t define it because it’s not my word, it’s your word. You asked me the question because some people are talking about this. But I expressed myself and I continue to express myself this way: I don’t know what unity means because I don’t believe it’s the right issue [for the conclave].

Do you think there's any aspect of “unity” that would be important for the next pope?

I think that one of the most important aspects of unity is the enormous diversity within the Church. Those of us who had the blessing to participate in the recent synod in 2023 and in 2024 had a vivid experience of our diversity and of how marvelous is the variety within the Church.

And we experienced how, by appreciating and valuing all the different aspects that came forth, and others that we could just imagine, that we indeed felt united and knew that this was the reality of our Church.

In that view, what is the unifying thread among Catholics?

That we are disciples of Jesus Christ, that we are baptized and that we are sent, or receive a mandate — which is maybe the best way to say it — to bring the Gospel into every corner of the reality that we live in. And that makes us all missionary disciples.

Without exaggerating the differences, you might say that the mission of every missionary disciple is at least slightly different but then in some places there are huge differences.

So, we could say there’s a bare minimum — a sacramental and vocational unity.

We express it in the Creed, we express it in our loyalty and adherence to the Magisterium, in our appreciation for the history of the Church, the history of salvation, and in our mutual respect.

And as we learned in the synod, and I think this is so important, we should be united in our listening. Our listening is what will finally bring us to the unity that is God's gift to us.

So, if I understand correctly, your concern is that too much stress on unity would perhaps turn into “uniformity” or into twisting the diversity which exists in the Church?

I'm not worried about it. I appreciate the question, but I don't think this is what's important for us right now, this is not what we should be talking about on the eve of a conclave.

What should we be talking about?

We should be talking about the Church sent to bring the Good News of salvation, of Jesus Christ, to all creation. Not just to my people, not just to my corner of the planet, not just to my type, but to all creation.

Both Francis and his predecessors, beginning with Saint John Paul II, have helped us to understand what Matthew and Mark said with more clarity and with more richness.

When we talk about bringing the Gospel to all creation, we now understand very clearly that caring for our common home is not just a good deed, but an essential part of our faith — an essential part of our Church life.

If we want to follow Christ in 2025, then caring for the common home is essential.

There's a lot of discussion in the general congregations on what should be the priority for the Church. The Vatican press office has said that some of the topics discussed have been finances, governance, evangelization, the social dimension of the Church, etc.

In your opinion, what should the cardinals be looking at as a priority for the Church?

Evangelization. Bringing the Gospel to all creation. I keep repeating it because it's essential.

All the topics which the press office reports are supplements, implications, conditions, possibilities or possible distractions. All of those are fine and important, and God bless us for talking about them all, but we mustn't take our gaze off of the primary mission of the Church.

The Church exists to evangelize. If we didn’t have that reason to exist, then Jesus could have just come and gone and we wouldn't have to be doing this.

You've been at the forefront of some of Francis' main social concerns and efforts such as migration, the environment, etc.. How do you think the next pope should address these issues?

I would say these are not just social concerns, but evangelical concerns. If we see them just as social issues, we might marginalize them.

But it depends on which issue we’re talking about specifically, and if we’re talking in terms of a particular country or continent, because we live them and we suffer them where we are.

So, the real question is a concrete attention to how the Church lives, her mission in the particular circumstances of a particular portion of God's people.

The pope is not living and working at the level of the United Nations. He's not a world functionary. He's a leader of a Church which exists and hopefully flourishes in a thousand places. And he is the servant of the mission as it's lived in each place.

What do you think was Pope Francis' greatest legacy for the Church?

I really don't think I can answer that question for a few more years.

If you ask me what achievements he had, I could tell you some of them, but to speak of a real sense of legacy or, in other words, what are the aspects that will carry forward as urgent issues? What are the aspects that will come forward as still unfinished? What are the course corrections that will take place? I can't predict that.

That's why I keep saying that our concern is not to patch together some kind of a government-style program or plan, like saying “this is our main priority, and this is our second, and we’ll achieve this in a hundred days and we're going to do this next week.”

People talk about the Church in these terms, because it’s what they've learned to ask about their municipal government, their national government, or the United Nations, and they apply them to the Church and it doesn't fit.

A national government must have priorities regarding ecology. We don't have that kind of priorities about ecology. We are taking care of the common home as part of our faith. And it's up to Christians to figure out how to do that in their place and time.

So, I can't give you the kind of coherence that someone running for public office would like to offer you, so that you'll vote for him or her.

At a personal and spiritual level, what is important in the next pope?

He should be the successor of Peter, we want him to have all the qualities of Peter as we have experienced them and appreciated them over the centuries. And we also have to allow ourselves to be surprised because the Holy Father that the Holy Spirit guides us to elect, is also a revelation of what's at stake, as you asked me.

We will learn about the Church when we discover who the new Holy Father is. That's part of a beautiful mystery, and not the fruit of a political election.