No matter who wins the online pot on the pope’s successor, writes David Von Drehle of The Washington Post, the U.S. Catholic Church will be faced with a number of questions concerning the traditional hierarchy of the Church and the proper role of the laity, including how increased lay leadership could effect not just the Church’s power structure but also its priorities, and how such changes could exacerbate the divisions between Church traditionalists and “dissenters” more open to challenging doctrine and to structural “power sharing.” These debates are all made more urgent, writes Von Drehle, by the Church’s current shortage of priests, monks and nuns; the ranks of which have dropped by at least 28% in the last generation, leading to a deficit so severe that there aren’t enough ordained leaders to run the Church’s vast network of services. As a result, in the last 20 years, lay people have assumed as much as 90% of the leadership of Catholic organizations, bringing with them less hierarchical views on running the Church, and, on their heels, a traditionalist backlash which blames innovation and dissent themselves for the priest shortage and would “rather see the church split in two than change its structures.” Without any clear resolution in sight, Von Drehle bases his predictions on the political model: between the two sides of the debate — each claiming an estimated 25-30% of American Catholics — is a sizable blok of centrists who “may favor more lay decision making and hold solidly orthodox views,” and seek a middle ground between radical changes and major divides. It may be a more realistic prediction than that of Nicholas Kristof, who argues that the shortage of priests and the rise of Pentecostalism will force the Church into major doctrinal changes, but after Von Drehle’s summary of the connections between the rise of lay power and increased openness to dissent, it’s hard to imagine how this resolution could hold. But that’s also in the political model: identify two sides of a debate as extreme, then discover reason in the middle, and leave any ideological dissonance for history to sort out.