“For anyone who wants to go back to the way things were before Francis, it’s game over.”

NPR’s Indira Lakshmanan sat down with Rocco Palmo this weekend to talk about Pope Francis, two years into his papacy.

Snip: 

LAKSHMANAN: Can he compel priests and cardinals to follow his example, or is this just him expressing a personal opinion and hoping that they fall into line?

PALMO: As for the leadership of the church, you know, there are many who are on board with him, but one of the perks of being pope is that you have the exclusive power to appoint all the bishops in the world, and especially powerfully this weekend, you know, the members of the College of Cardinals who will elect his successor. And, you know, calling in these guys not from the great prestigious cities in the world, bypassing the United States again for the first time in 40 years, you know. You have new cardinals from Tonga, which has never had a cardinal before; from the Cape Verde Islands, places that never been thought of having a cardinal. And somebody said to me, it’s not that these guys are going to elect the next pope, it’s that one of them can be the next pope. And if that happens, you know, again, the pope has absolute power in the church. So it’s basically, for anyone who wants to go back to the way things were before Francis, it’s game over.

Check out the full interview here. 

Meantime, John Allen has this astute analysis of the new cardinals:

When Francis was elected in March 2013, Africa and Asia each had 9.6 percent of the vote. After Saturday, Africa will have 12 percent and Asia will have 11.2 percent, both of which are essentially all-time highs. Overall, the developing world will now make up almost 41 percent of the College of Cardinals, its highest share ever and significantly up from the 35 percent it represented just two years ago.

All this, of course, is nothing more than bringing the leadership of the Church slightly more in life with its demographic realities at the grassroots. Of the 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world today, two-thirds now live outside the West, a share projected to reach three-quarters by the end of this century.

Americans put out by the fact that Francis passed over the United States for the second time in a row in distributing new cardinals might ponder the fact that the 70 million Catholics in the country account for just 6 percent of the global Catholic population, but the 11 US cardinals are almost 9 percent of the college.

As of Saturday, in other words, Catholics everywhere will be living in a bit more of a global village, with a crop of new leaders taking the Church in unpredictable new directions. It may not come with a cool sound-bite, but it’s the stuff of which revolutions truly are made.