Thanks to a question from my colleague Jason Horowitz, the pope himself weighed in recently, noting that “there has always been a schismatic option in the church, always.” That’s demonstrated by recent history as well as the deep past, the miniature schisms after the First and Second Vatican Councils as well as the big 16th- and 11th- century breaks. In each case, Francis argued, the schism tended to be an “elitist separation stemming from an ideology detached from doctrine … so I pray that schisms do not happen, but I am not afraid of them.”

That papal formulation is an excellent way to understand what the different Catholic factions think is happening right now. When liberals talk about schism, they have in mind the activities of the conservative wing of the American church, which they believe is engaged in an “elitist separation” driven by right-wing ideology and money — one that simultaneously seeks to depose Francis (the former papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò’s letter alleging papal complicity in a sex-abuse cover-up being the main attempted coup) and indulges in narratives that veer close to sedevacantism, the belief that the pope is not, in fact, the pope.

The anti-Francis spirit in American Catholicism was the “schism” my Times colleague was asking about, and it clearly preoccupies the pope’s inner circle. But meanwhile conservative Catholics fear that a different “elitist separation” is happening — one led by liberal theologians and funded by German money, which seeks a kind of Episcopalian evolution on contested moral issues. Conservatives see this version of schism being advanced in Germany itself through a doctrinal renovation that the Vatican keeps trying to gently redirect, and in Rome through the upcoming synod on the Amazonian region, which they fear will undermine clerical celibacy and welcome pantheism and syncretism.

The underlying dynamic is basically what I anticipated years ago. The partway-liberalization of the Francis era has encouraged the church’s progressives to push further, while many conservatives have been flung into intellectual crisis or a paranoia-flavored traditionalism. And the overlap of theological and national divisions means that national churches could evolve away from one another at a rapid pace.

But having been alarmist in the past, now that everyone is talking schism I want to be more cautious. The pope has risked a great deal in his pontificate, but he has consistently avoided pushing conservatives into a theologically-untenable position, choosing ambiguity over a clarity that might cleave his church.