The past twenty-five years have seen four popes and the Church grow by more than 400 million people. They have also been marked by intense turbulence, with sexual abuse scandals shaking the Church’s foundations, most notably the 2002 Boston Globe reports in the United States, followed by an annus horribilis in 2018, when the actions of the now-deceased Theodore McCarrick were made public alongside the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report.

Liturgical wars have also been waged. Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum, which liberalised the use of the Traditional Latin Mass, was reversed within his lifetime by Pope Francis’s restrictions under Traditionis custodes. Doctrinal battle lines were also drawn when Pope Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia was met with dubia, and again when the release of Fiducia supplicans saw entire bishops’ conferences reject its application.