On Thursday, the cardinals gathered in Rome to choose the new leader for 1.4 billion Catholics. Now, following the sighting of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, the announcement of a new Pope is expected shortly.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church once again stands at a crossroads. The animating question facing the conclave was whether the cardinals want the Church to continue in the direction of a broader, more capacious understanding of the faith as articulated by Francis, or will they revert to the conservative, more traditionalist ways of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

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The Church has stood at similar crossroads several times in the modern era.

From 1545 to 1560, the Council of Trent met to determine the Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar prior to his excommunication in 1520, had pointed out the corruptions of medieval Catholicism and emphasized the doctrine of justification by faith (not works) and what he called the priesthood of believers.

The question before the prelates at the Council of Trent was whether to acknowledge the excesses and reform the Church in the direction of the more stripped-down Protestantism that Luther and other Reformers advocated. Trent, however, moved in the opposite direction, becoming “more Catholic” in its affirmation of the importance of the sacraments and good works. This hyper-Catholicism can be traced most graphicly in the........

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