ex catholic, many feelings about this sorry.

Francis is in and of himself a complicated figure of course. He did a lot of good for sure and I feel he was one of the better people to be leading the church. I like him a lot and he has a kind of really cool background. Dude was a chemical lab technician for a while, from Latin America, actually lived reasonably non-extravagantly and cared about the poor. Despite memes, his last appearance was NOT the JD vance castigation, but calling for a Gaza ceasefire. The whole "trans people are nuclear weapons" and "letting the abuse scandal fester" bits sucked though but every pope would do this also.

Overall I don't see things getting markedly better with his death. Some people hold out hope for a radical vatican 3 that makes it ok to be gay and stops calling trans people evil and lets women finally receive one of the even sacraments they've been barred from (fuck you timothy and your stupid fucking epistle). Vatican 3 will not happen, though. Vatican 2 was already so controversial it sparked a huge sedevacantist movement and the church is still struggling to actually institute all of it.

Overall I'd say we can look to the history of the church a bit for a picture of what a "moderate" pope looks like with fascism on the rise: Pius XII. Fascism was sweeping europe and killing millions, Pius was content to lightly complain about Germany and focus on excommunicating all communists from the church lol. There's a lot of controversy surrounding him and he was a mixed sort of figure, who did some good! But I hate his guts so you get the very biased version.

The church is very content to work alongside fascist movements. Naziism just went a bit too far for them, but spain's fascism was entirely compatible and theologically sound. If you look into the theology of this stuff you find the church is very very comfortable with totalitarianism, as you might expect.

As a whole I don't expect huge changes even if one of the insane evil guys gets it. Despite everything most Catholics barely practice the faith and are effectively Protestant lol. I've seen my own family flirt with sedevacantism because they're much too far right for Francis.

As with most things it's really down to local concerns. The person's church and diocese is going to provide the biggest influence on them and a changing pope doesn't necessarily change the local conditions a lot.

alternatively next guy starts the childrens crusade 2

but genuinely, if it's another cool guy I will permit myself a Liberalism and pop open a bottle of something nice and celebrate. like it's still a death cult but it's MY death cult and I still feel nice when my death cult guy says something epic