

Ianus bifrons—two-faced Janus—was the Roman god of liminal spaces, doorways, beginnings and endings, and transitions in general. So, here are some “January” reflections in both the calendar and the etymological senses of the term: Three stories to watch and three prognostications for the Year of Our Lord, 2025.
It’ll be another doozy of a year, but not for the reasons you’d expect if you only read the headlines on the Vatican pages.
Christian persecution (especially in the Holy Land)
The war in Gaza will wind down and the aftermath of Syria’s fourteen-year civil war will ramp up. The tiny Christian minority in Gaza will be pressed and squeezed from every side, while the more sizeable Christian minority in Syria—Christians of various Churches constituted roughly 10% of the population before the war—will face more than just rough treatment and may come in for anything from systematic harassment to Decian or Diocletian-level persecution.
The role of the Catholic Church will be crucial in both places and throughout the region, not least because of the Catholic Church’s strong presence in both places as a social force punching far above her weight.
In Syria, Christians are on tenterhooks because they tended to support the rule of the country’s recently ousted strongman president, Bashar al-Assad. Christian support for Assad was not the consequence of personal sympathy for his monstrous persona or ideological affinity with his Ba’ath Party politics, but the result of calculated necessity in an impossible situation.
The Assad family, which ruled Syria for more than a half-century after a military coup in 1970, belongs to an ethno-religious minority offshoot of Shia Islam called Alawism, with Alawites constituting between 10% and 12% of the total Syrian population, roughly the same as Christians.
The short version of a millennia-long and an irreducibly complex story is that Syria is mostly Sunni Muslim, but the population is very diverse and the social fabric an intricate weave of familial, confessional, and religious threads, all with political heft and significance.
The complexity of the situation in Syria especially—though by no means exclusively insofar as regards the Alawite minority—aptly and starkly illustrates the need for Christians in the West to know and understand how vastly diverse the Muslim world really is.
Concretely, life has been hard for Syrians, unbearably brutal for a great many Syrians of every ethnic and religious stripe. It has been so for more than a decade. Timely international assistance will be essential to any rebuilding worth the name, but getting it is easier said than done. Major regional and global powers from the US, Russia, China, and Iran are all interested.
Things are not going to get better overnight, and they may well get worse for some people before they get better.
Ecumenical tectonics (eyes on Ukraine)
Incoming US president Donald Trump has promised an end to the illegal Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, but nobody on the Ukrainian side of that bloody and destructive conflict is expecting a happy or even minimally satisfactory proposal for resolution to come from Trump, whose admiration for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is well known.
The eyes of the world will be on Ukraine, but for a set of mundane reasons only tangentially related to the deep cultural drivers of the major civilizational question at stake, namely: Which Christian Church will be the global representative of Ukrainian Christianity?
Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but Orthodoxy in Ukraine is more splintered than divided, with some divisions running through Russian Orthodoxy along political lines and other divisions running through Ukrainian Orthodoxy generally along the fault line separating Constantinople and Moscow.
Under the careful leadership of a young and energetic Major Archbishop, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church may establish itself as the leading voice of Ukrainian Christianity. If that happens—and there is a good deal to suggest it is already happening—the geopolitical and ecumenical repercussions will be significant.
One word: Conclave
The likelihood of a papal conclave increases with each passing day—everybody knows this—and everybody knows the next election will be one with no shoo-in front-runners.
Usually, there are voting blocs discernible in any papal conclave, but the election that will pick Francis’s successor is particular inasmuch as the fragmentation of the College of Cardinals is—in ways measurable and immeasurable—greater than the prevailing wisdom appears to warrant or even realize.
Much ink has been spilt over how little the red hats know of one another, but Vatican Watchers have talked relatively little about how fractured—and fractious—the various cardinalatial factions are internally.
Even “liberal” cardinals who were happy enough to ride Francis’s coattails and maybe even to be the tail that wagged the dog for a while, are fairly tired of the “Buenos Aires-on-Tiber” modus gubernandi that has prevailed since March 2013. “Conservative” cardinals, meanwhile, agree more on what’s wrong than they agree on what’s right. There are divisions and divisions-within-divisions within each group, to the extent there even are such groups within the College.
The cardinals who will gather to elect the next guy will be divided along different lines: “What are or ought to be the priorities of the Church’s global head?” is only one of the questions for which there are at least three times the number of opinions as there are men who have them.
Added to the difficulty and complexity of the task is the business Francis will leave unfinished.
Two issues Francis will leave for the next guy are the reform of ecclesiastical justice and the general leadership culture in the Church, and the reform of Vatican finances. The issues are closely related, critical, and urgent.
It matters little whether one believes Francis made some real progress on either front (or on both) or is of the view that Francis made one or the other problem measurably worse. He did not fix them, nor will he have done by the time he leaves office. Perhaps the task is too great for any one man, but that observation is marginal. The purpose here is to assess the circumstances of global Catholicism with a view to understanding how those circumstances will affect the cardinal-electors’ agenda.
The cardinals are going to have to settle on a profile before they can pick candidates.
The next guy will need better language skills than Francis, strong team-building and administrative abilities to fix the Church’s central governing apparatus, savvy to manage a Holy See in difficult diplomatic and political straits, strength of will and know-how to keep the Holy See and Vatican City minimally solvent, and charisma—in the colloquial sense—to reassure a sorely tried and thoroughly exhausted global body of the faithful.
Most importantly, the next guy needs to have no skeletons in his closet, and that is a tall order.
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