Who expected Pope Francis’s pontificate to last until 2025 when it began in 2013?
Born in 1936, ordained a priest in 1969, installed as archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and elevated to the College of Cardinals three years later, when the Conclave was summoned by the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was on few of any lists of “papabile” when the proceeding commenced.
His election was an even bigger surprise for a Catholic Church unused to papal resignations much less a pope from far away South America. Pope Francis was an older man with one lung and neither he nor his fellow cardinals thought in 2013 of the first ever Jesuit pope as naming two-thirds of the cardinals voting in the next Conclave. Such is the working of the Holy Spirit, Catholics very much believe, that surprises should never really surprise.
So who knows what to expect? Or when? Expectations are foolish. But “hopes” are not heresy, and I am hoping for a younger man from among the cardinals.
My very simple reason is that the older the cardinal the less likely he is to be well versed in the speed of events and communication in this decade. The successor to Saint Peter will be arriving in his office aware of the unrelenting, indeed ferocious, speed of the world’s crises. But only a handful of the older men will genuinely understand and be prepared for how very different 2025 is from 2013. How the world has accelerated in those years.
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America has seen its last Boomer elected president, I suspect, and much as we like to hang around and offer our opinions, there are jobs which cry out for either energy at a level that is extraordinary in an older man —President Trump has that— or for a generational shift in leadership. It is hard to imagine the cardinals electing anyone with the zeal for the job that would-be presidents must possess when they declare their candidacies, so the temptation must be strong among the 133 voting cardinals present for the conclave to compromise on a new pontiff who won’t be in the job for more than a decade.
They will take their missions very seriously, but there is a very great diversity of “mission ambitions” among the 133. There is no easy correlation to American politics or politics of any sort. The Roman Catholic Church is 2,000 years old, after all, and it is presumptuous for even scholars of church history to make predictions about what lays ahead of the new pontiff.
THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS MEET TO ELECT THE NEXT POPE. WHO WILL IT BE?
It is very easy to guess, however, that whatever lies ahead will come at the new pope all at once and perhaps far faster than any of his predecessors save Pius XII on whom fell the awful obligations and choices of a pope surrounded by a world run in large part by Hitler and Mussolini for the critical first six years of his reign. Pius XII’s record in those years of total war is often debated and will never be resolved, but no one could have foreseen when he was elevated in March of 1939 that his Vatican would be ringed by monsters of the sort before then unimaginable.
They are very imaginable now, with genocides and massacres marking the years since the Holocaust with a regularity that silences even the most optimistic of forecasters of the future. A pope must prepare to confront evil in its many disguises and to stand with victims of evil even as he avoids making bad situations worse. Caution in a pontiff when it comes to breaking news would be very welcome. Caution, and extraordinary care when the world is watching complex conflicts evolve.
The judgment necessary to hold up the Church’s mission of teaching the divinity and message of Christ has never been more urgently needed. Pause and say a prayer for the 133.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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