He spoke with ABC News this morning and in a wide-ranging interview touched on the subject of the papal conclave: As cardinals gather at the Vatican to elect a new pope, President Barack Obama said he believes U.S. politics wouldn’t stand in the way of an American pope doing his job. “It seems to me that an American pope would preside just as effectively as a Polish pope or an Italian pope or a Guatemalan pope,” the president said in... Read more
A worthy idea from the indispensable John Thavis, describing the hallway cardinals passed through on their way to the Sistine Chapel: If the cardinals glance at the frescoes, they have to be thinking: How times have changed. The paintings celebrate the pope as a worldly power. Kings are depicted presenting territories to ruling pontiffs, while the “Donation of Charlemagne” commemorates the medieval gift that launched the papal states. Today, of course, the pope’s territorial holdings have shrunk to the 110-acre... Read more
How does media coverage of the Vatican work? Some insight from someone who knows, via web journalist Tom McGeveran: I Skyped Jason Horowitz, an old colleague of mine who’s been dispatched to the Vatican by The Washington Post, and who worked a while back in the New York Times’ Rome bureau, for some perspective. And immediately we got onto the topic of the foreign press’ reliance on Italian media to drive their stories forward. “They are our only door, it often feels like,”... Read more
Maybe another Gregory? Leo? John? See what others are saying: As Catholics around the world watch for white smoke above the papal conclave this week, speculation about the next pope’s choice for a holy moniker is heating up. Bookies are even following the action, with popular Irish bookmaker Paddy Power offering 10/11 odds on Leo, 9/2 odds on Pius, and 6/1 odds on Gregory as of Tuesday afternoon. The company is also offering fairly favorable odds on Peter, the original pope, but... Read more
Bless her. Details: Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn’s elderly mother hopes he won’t become pope because she fears she would never see him and that he would be overwhelmed by Vatican intrigues. “The whole family is afraid that Christoph will be elected pope,” Eleonore Schoenborn, 92, told the Kleine Zeitung newspaper in an interview printed on Tuesday as 115 Roman Catholic cardinals gathered in Rome to pick the new head of the Church. Recalling Pope Benedict’s farewell speech, which made clear... Read more
His final blog post before the conclave: I hope the conclave will not go on too long. All I know is that I’m just taking in a small “carry-on” piece of baggage. If we’re in there too long, and if they show photographs of St. Martha’s from outside Vatican City, my room will be the one with the laundry hanging in the window to dry! The veteran cardinals tell me that the conclave is almost like a retreat. We of... Read more
This video from Rome Reports shows some other staffers in the Vatican taking oaths of secrecy this morning, and explains who they are and what their role will be in the days to come. Read more
An interesting perspective, from Religion News Service: Together, Islam and Catholicism represent about 40 percent of the world’s population, so the estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world have more than a passing interest in the new pope who will shepherd the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Too often, relations between the two groups have been shaped by conflict — the Christian Crusades of 1,000 years ago are still a raw wound for many Muslims, and more recently, Muslim extremist attacks... Read more
It happened during the presidential election last fall: An Ohio nun was charged with voter fraud for casting an absentee ballot in the 2012 presidential election that belonging to a fellow sister who had died, authorities have said. Sister Marguerite Kloos, 54, allegedly voted both under her own name and under the name of Sister Rose Marie Hewitt, who had passed away a more than a month before last November’s poll. Kloos, of Delhi Township, faces up to 18 months... Read more
This morning, she offers an eye-opening look at a phrase that has more applications than most of us realize: I am “intrinsically disordered” when it comes to food, and it doesn’t really matter how I became so. Whether it is due to a genetic pre-disposition, or a habit of psychological buffering—or some combination of nature and nurture—the fact remains that I am disordered, and I must deal with it. Every day. Sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by tempted minute.... Read more
The Deacon's Bench
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