Have you ever spent a whole day inside your own home, never venturing out, distracted by the undone laundry and increasingly feeling cooped up?  

It is a recipe for anxiety, creating a sense of turning in but with nowhere to go. Persons and communities thrive when they go out and live their mission; they stagnate when they close in on themselves.  

The next pope needs to summon the whole Catholic Church back to its sense of having a mission, of having been sent, of needing to go out. Our mission as a Church is fundamentally shaped by martyria, leitourgia and diakonia: to witness to the Revelation of Christ as handed on in Scripture and Tradition, to offer worship and foster contemplation, and to live in service of the poor and marginalized. We must be a Church of mission, one that does not turn inward on itself but outward towards God and neighbor.  

The Church is, as it has always been, marked by tensions — between dynamism and lethargy, unity and division, growth and crisis. The task of the pope is, as much as possible, to drive and advance the positive features of the Church in his time while counteracting the negative. This is best done by ever centering the Church on her mission to be the “universal sacrament of salvation.”  

The next pope must call us to this. The Church is at its least dynamic when it is shaped by its own intra-ecclesial disputes and thus does not manifest as sacrament. It is at its most dynamic when it lives out its threefold task of witness, prayer and service and so is a sacramental sign of Christ.  

Living this out must be done by all Catholics, who are, in the words of Cardinal Gerhard Müller, “co-responsible citizens in the City of God.” The pope’s task is to help energize the global Church so that she lives this mission.  

In many ways, the tensions of the Francis papacy can be traced to the divide between being an Evangelii Gaudium Church and being a synodality Church. While both have their complexities, the former was about a Church living its dynamic mission. We can see this in Pope Francis’ many occasions of asking for and offering prayer, his summons to joyfully proclaim the gospel, and his consistent emphasis on serving the poor and marginalized. Synodality, while meant to serve this, too often felt like an endless pastoral council meeting about how to be a pastoral council. Drawing on the best of the Francis papacy, our next pope needs to be an Evangelii Gaudium pope more than a synodality Pope.  

The pope cannot make us evangelical, prayerful and charitable — but he can summon us to these actions and act as a source of unity. I think the next pope can do this best by embracing what I would call a Vatican II traditionalism — which is what fundamentally shaped the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI — and by encouraging efforts like Word on Fire, FOCUS missionaries, Catholic study programs, and the dynamic, rapidly growing Church in Africa. Such a Vatican II traditionalism has no interest in a fortress Church but also is not interested in capitulating to the world. Rather, as sacrament, the Catholic Church must seek to encounter and transform the world.  

The next pope — in word and deed and fidelity to the Tradition — must call us to go out to God in worship and sacrament, to believers and unbelievers in teaching the whole of the faith, and the smallest and the most forgotten in service.  

We cannot stay cooped up in our ecclesial squabbles. The pope needs to open the doors of the Church so that her members can more fully live our witness, our worship, and our service.