Vatican City: When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was chosen in 2013 as Pope Francis, he was an almost total stranger of the Vatican. He had never been a Vatican official, but spent decades in the local ministry. And came from Argentina, the first Pope of the Americas.
As Catholic cardinals in the world meet this week to discuss who should happen to Pope Francis, deliberations can reduce to a simple option: do they want another stranger? Or is it the time for a source, someone more familiar with the arcane forms of operation of the Vatican? “Pope Francis … changed the attention of the Church to the outside world,” said John Thavis, former chief of the Rome office for him Catholic news servicethat covered three papacies.
“Some cardinals will now be tempted to choose a source, someone with the abilities to handle Church affairs with more care and silence than Pope Francis.” Pope Francis, who died on April 21 at the age of 88, focused much of his papacy on the reach of the dissemination in the places where the Church was not traditionally strong.
Many of his 47 foreign trips went to countries with small Catholic populations, such as South Sudan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, and was especially committed to Catholic-Muslim dialogue.
He was also known for giving free wheel press conferences, where there were no issues outside the table and the Pope could respond to an unexpected joke. When asked about the Catholic prohibition of birth control in 2015, Pope Francis reaffirmed the prohibition, but added that Catholics do not have to have children “like rabbits.”
The unusually open style of the deceased Pope attracted the criticism of some Catholics, but also the global interest. His funeral on Saturday and a procession through Rome to his place of burial in the basilica of St. Mary Major attracted crowds estimated at more than 400,000.
The German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, one of the main Catholic prelates in Europe and once a main advisor of Pope Francis, said that the cardinals who will meet in a secret conclave to choose his successor would not seek an “official.”
“We don’t need a manager,” Marx told reporters. “The essential thing is that he is a brave person … people around the world need to be comforted, raised.” Other cardinals are expressing a strong disagreement.
“We need to return the Catholics to the Church,” said Italian Cardinal Camillo Ruini to the newspaper Corriere Della Sera.
Ruini, who is 94 years old and is too old to enter the conclave, said that Pope Francis sometimes seemed to favor the distant from the Church, “at the expense” of the faithful devotees.
Others argue that it is precisely a more managerial Pope that is needed at this time to address the financial problems of the Church, which include a broad budget deficit and growing responsibilities for their pension fund.
Cardinal speeches
The cardinals will meet daily this week to discuss general issues facing the Church of 1.4 billion members before people under 80 years enter the conclave on May 7.
Posted in Dawn, April 30, 2025
