Pope Francis was meant to be a pontiff for the age of globalization.

The pope’s spiritual mission doesn’t change, but its earthly context does, and when the College of Cardinals chose Argentina’s Jorge Maria Bergoglio as successor to the retiring Pope Benedict XVI, they made a guess about where the world was going.

They proved to be wrong.

In 2013, when Bergoglio became Pope Francis, same-sex marriage was rapidly gaining acceptance in America and Europe, but no one was yet talking about “pronouns” or what transgender ideology would mean for women’s sports and children’s bodies.

Barack Obama had just been reelected as America’s president, heralding, in the eyes of hopeful supporters, a post-racial epoch not only in our politics but perhaps everywhere.

The political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic favored free trade and high levels of immigration — the question was only how high.

The entire planet would soon be a single community, and all that remained to do was reconcile the United States and Europe with the global South.

That called for reminding wealthy Americans and Europeans of their duties to the world’s poor: Francis wasn’t picked to be a socialist pope, but one who would provide a moral counterpoint to the cold logic of economic globalization.

The cardinals also wanted Francis to strike a balance between north and south in the politics of sex and sexuality.

Francis was meant to bridge the Catholic Church’s factions.

He would — and did — uphold the church’s core teachings, yet he’d present them in ways designed to reassure dissenters and progressives of their place in the flock.

Recent polling shows the decline of Christianity in America and Europe has slowed, halted, or even, in places, reversed:

Young men in particular are becoming more religious, a trend connected to a rightward turn in politics.

In France, the church has just recorded a 45% increase over last year in adult baptisms at Easter — leading to the largest number of converts entering the church this season in the 20 years the French Bishops’ Conference has been conducting its survey.

On the last day of his life, Pope Francis met with Vice President JD Vance, a young Catholic convert on the populist right who exemplifies the changes taking place in the world and Church alike.

The next pope may be as critical of Trump-Vance immigration policy as Francis was: a pope can be expected to prioritize compassion, including for illegal immigrants.

But if Francis was the pope for a globalist era, what the Catholic Church needs now is a populist pope, one who understands that if the church renews its ties to the working class within the West, not just in the global South, it will find ready converts.

Likewise, a church that emphasizes traditional moral teachings in Europe and America, as well as Africa, will grow.