How to Forecast a Pope's Ministry

How to start.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to talk about the next evangelism.

So I’ve got a head cold or something right now — and along with it probably a case of The Dumb — so let’s throttle back a bit and take on a nice, easy topic: Forecasting what kind of pope that Leo XIV may be.

And whatever you just snarked in your head — you know, in your Snarkal lobe — just hold off for a minute because I’m going to give you a whole lot of tools right now that will help you tell good pastors from bad. And will help you forecast the actions of different kinds of religious people.

See, I’m a professional futurist — originally for churches but now I’m a public servant. I know a good bit about Christian ministers: I trained many ministers during my 19 years as a part-time seminary professor and my dad trained several thousand over his 30-40 years as a seminary professor. (He retired as a bishop-level person.) I’m the son, nephew, and grandson of Baptist ministers and grew up on a seminary campus surrounded by seminary professors and seminary students. I have lifelong experience with ministers from growing up neck-deep in a community of them, working in ministry alongside them for decades, and from training them.

I know that one of the quickest ways to forecast how a pastor will do ministry is to get a bead on his or her most basic theological orientation. Or as Carl Jung said once “Tell me your image of God and I will tell you your theology.”

I wrote an e-book on this. It’s called The Knight and The Gardener: Worldviews Make Worlds. It’s free and it’s here. (If you want, you know, extra credit on-a-life-exam-that-doesn’t-exist, my follow-up e-book is Combat Theology: How to Weaponize and De-Weaponize a Religion. It’s also free and it’s here. It’s about why people kill for God and what you can do to thwart them. Yes, I’m serious.)

Here’s the premise of The Knight and The Gardener:

Everyone holds a storyline in their head about how the world works and who they are in that story. And which storyline you hold shapes what you perceive as heroic which in turn shapes how you handle your love relationships which then shapes how you handle conflict situations and then all of that shapes how you approach matters of the soul. In the book I talk about two worldview-narratives:

• Knights see the world as the site of a great cosmic or political struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, and they want to be on the side of the good and they want to defeat evil. They believe that when whatever’s bad is removed from the world the world will then self-correct. Knights are culture warriors and holy warriors.

• Gardeners see the world as the site of a great cosmic or global garden of mostly good (and only rare evil) and that to do good is to cultivate that garden with kindness and construction and good policy so that all flowers might bloom. Gardeners try to convert the wrong and redeem evil so that it might be transformed and become part of the Garden again.

The Knight and The Gardener contains 120+ differentiations between the two worldview-narratives/belief-orientations — and not just on religion but on everything including business, military, diplomacy, family systems and more. Distinctions such as:

• Knights yearn for the Great Showdown. Gardeners yearn for the Great Breakthrough.

• Knights aren’t always conservative and Gardeners aren’t always liberal. There are conservative Gardeners and liberal Knights.

• Knights tend to be hierarchical; Gardeners tend to be egalitarian.

• For Knights, correctness trumps compassion. For Gardeners, compassion trumps correctness.

• (To flip the order here) Gardeners need no Devil but must have a God or a vision to work toward to find life meaning. Knights need no God but must always have a Devil.

So let’s overgeneralize about recent popes to make a few larger points.

• Pope John Paul II saw cruel Communism as the greatest global threat during the early part of his tenure. He also saw predatory capitalism as a potential world devastator so he positioned Catholic social teaching as a middle way between the two. He was a Knight during the Cold War and a Gardener during the 1990s and through his death in 2005.

• Pope Benedict XVI was mostly (in emphasis) a Knight against secularization, liberalism, and what he saw as moral relativism on the world stage.

• Pope Francis began as a parish priest and never stopped thinking like one. He was a Gardener. My understanding is that he was elected pope by the College of Cardinals because they recognized he would be a world pastor rather than a world crusader.

So, again, am I overgeneralizing? YES because I’m trying to introduce a concept and I need to speak very broadly in order to draw this distinction.

But before we get to Pope Leo XIV, you may be asking If Knights are hierarchical and the Catholic Church is the greatest religious hierarchy in the world, then how on Earth could a Catholic pope be a Gardener?

The structure of a religious organization actually matters far, far less than you might think.

See, every major religious organization of the-organized-religion-variety set itself up to mirror the dominating governing structure at the time of its inception so the secular world of that era would respect it as if it were another secular authority even when the religious organization’s theology directly subverted the secular powers of its day.

• The Roman Catholic Church set itself up to parallel the hierarchy of the Roman Empire. Pope as emperor. Bishops as prelates and down the line. Zones of the Empire for one were dioceses and parishes of the other. The Roman Catholic Church is the last surviving shadow of the Roman Empire.

• The Southern Baptist Convention was founded at the onset of the Civil War as a confederation of church associations — mostly by states — just like the Confederate States of America. (To take the judgment off of this, Canada is a confederacy of provinces and I suspect the larger religious organizations in Canada are confederacies as well. I’m making a point about structure here only.)

• The modern megachurch is set up like a large corporation with the pastor as CEO and with all the parallel work divisions — and a concert arena and good stagecraft and a really good marketing department.

You can lead any of these organizations as a Knight or as a Gardener.

• IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: If the religious organization has radicalized itself through a series of Knight leaders then the first Gardener who leads it will probably get eaten alive because the members will conclude that less than a total spiritual war footing amounts to capitulation to evil and, you know, kindness. If you remember the podcaster who snarked at Bishop Budde’s sermon to Trump right after his inauguration in 2025 in which she plead for mercy for immigrants and the downtrodden and the podcaster later responded “Do not commit the sin of empathy. This snake [Bishop Budde] is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and his people. You need to properly hate in response” then you know what I’m talking about. That’s an extremist Knight’s response to a Gardener’s sermon. At best and at worst, Knights and Gardeners appear to be worshippers of entirely different Gods because they emphasize the parts of Scripture consistent with their worldview-narrative and not the other.

• LARGE SIDE NOTE: The senior leadership of a religious organization might be of one orientation but its rank and file clergy may be of another — resulting in confusion and accusations of hypocrisy. That’s how you get good words from the top that’s not lived out by the rank and file. It doesn’t mean that the good words aren’t meant or aren’t sincere; it means something else happened to the rank and file such that they can’t accept what spiritual seniors and ethicists have discerned. Welcome to some of the American Catholic Church.

The College of Cardinals — the body that elects the pope — leans more Knight or Gardener depending upon the orientation of the majority of its members. And my understanding is that Pope Francis spent a lot of time stacking the College of Cardinals with Gardener-cardinals who — even when they disagreed with him — still shared the same basic orientation.

One last side note before I talk about Leo:

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely in the case of religious leaders because most religious leaders know they do not have absolute power. Also:

• Gardeners tend to be hyperaware and highly sensitive to temptations and corruption because they know those things poison the Garden.

• Knights sometimes conclude that power was given to them by God and that they have the right to wield it and have the right to abuse any who disagree with them. Knights sometimes believe that objection to their rule amounts to rebellion against God. Which if nothing else should explain every megachurch-pastor-gone-wrong you’ve ever heard of. American conservative evangelicals have been suffering through a long rolling set of crises and doubt because so many of their megachurch champions have fallen to scandal or worse. They’ve been out in the wilderness searching for why-why-why and don’t understand that the problem is their own theology in the first place. Bad theology makes bad pastors. And bad theology inflicts spiritual, moral, and human wounds. And sometimes leaves people dead on the ground in piles.

So a College of Cardinals made up of Gardeners elected a Gardener as pope — Pope Leo. But part of their prayerful criteria I’m sure was about matching a pope to a world era so that pope can be the right kind of world pastor for today.

Global leaders — even global religious leaders — don’t think parochially-politically; they think strategically. They look at the world challenges of the next decade or so and ask who among them is uniquely suited — spiritually, intellectually, with wisdom and in temperament — to care for a world flock and to mobilize the Church against the greatest dangers of our day.

They know — because the Catholic Church thinks in eras and in sweeps of time — that China (and thus Chinese Communism) is about to implode as its demography and then economy are due to crash by the end of this decade or into the next. They know that Russia is destroying itself in Ukraine even if they win. They know that the new world princes are ultrawealthy global oligarchs who can move populations with the push of an AI-assisted button. They know that if there will be a new Nazi type of movement soon that will arise to destroy the world it will come from America and it will come from the Right. They know where the next dangers to the world will come from and that one of the biggest next dangers is from the United States so they elected an American who understands Americans to stand up and get in the way.

I’m saying two things with all of this:

First, if you want to forecast the ministry of this pope, then the Gardener material in The Knight and The Gardener may give you a place to start. It won’t forecast specifics but it may provide you with a map of his patterns and tendencies.

Second, the Catholic Church just not-so-subtly told the world it plans to body-block Donald Trump. And plans to take J.D. Vance out to the theological woodshed. And that Leo will speak directly to the American people — early, often, and in native American English and natural Chicagoan — and right-straight-to six of our nine Supreme Court Justices.

I’m saying here’s how a Gardener-filled College of Cardinals probably sees it:

They elected a multilingual, multicultural American to be world pastor. To help, care for, and protect the people of the world. And to convert the American Right to Christianity.