In a blog post titled “This Extraordinary Pope,” Andrew Sullivan, an outspoken gay Catholic, expressed the sentiments of many like-minded Church members: “What’s so striking to me is not what he said, but how he said it: the gentleness, the humor, the transparency. I find myself with tears in my eyes as I watch him. I’ve lived a long time to hear a pope speak like that,” Sullivan wrote. “Everything he is saying and doing is an obvious, implicit rejection of what came before.” This conviction—that the Pope is in the process of making a radical break with the past—has fast become conventional wisdom. Even an analyst normally as sober and sensible as John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter has gone so far as to conclude that nothing less than a Vatican “revolution” is underway.

It isn’t. Francis’s renewed emphasis on the poor is certainly welcome and valuable, and there are circumscribed areas in which the Pope may achieve real reforms. But when progressive Catholics pine for change, they mostly mean that they want to see the Church brought into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality. And that simply isn’t going to happen. To hope or expect otherwise is to misread this Pope, misinterpret the legacy of his predecessors, and misunderstand the calcified structure of the Church itself.

Any pope who wanted to dramatically change the Catholic Church would have to do so through the processes and procedures of the institution—and it is an institution seemingly designed to thwart such ambition. Consider as a counterexample the U.S. political system. Commentators often rightly note how it is designed to stymie the will of would-be reformers: with numerous veto points; representatives in different branches drawing their support from different, frequently clashing constituencies; and so forth. Yet it is also true that when an American president takes charge of the executive branch, he has considerable power to almost instantly shape its many departments and their priorities. Yes, each bureaucracy is staffed by career civil servants who stay on from administration to administration. But the chief executive gets to appoint the top positions, drawing freely from his party and allied individuals in the private sector.

A new Pope, by contrast, has comparatively little freedom to remake the ideological cast of the Roman Curia, as the Vatican’s administrative apparatus is known. Although the cardinals and archbishops who head the various congregations, tribunals, councils, commissions, academies, and other bureaucracies that make up the Curia do typically resign upon the death of a pontiff, his replacement must choose new appointees solely from the existing ranks of cardinals and archbishops, all of whom will have been promoted to their positions by his predecessors. Coming into the job following John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s solid 34-year run of forceful theological and doctrinal conservatism, Francis has inherited a Church staffed at the highest levels with men who would oppose any dramatic change in course. Imagine a newly elected Democratic president attempting to move the country in a more progressive direction while being required to pick his Cabinet and advisers entirely from the ranks of the Republican Party, and you start to get a sense of the constraints under which he is operating.