My Baylor colleague, the historian Philip Jenkins, has posted over at The Anxious Bench the first of three entries on the Francis Papacy and how it portends to the next conclave’s selection of a successor. Here is how it begins:
In the quite near future, the world’s largest religious institution will be choosing a new head. As everyone knows, Pope Francis is extremely sick, and for a man of his age, there is a strong possibility that he will be leaving us ere long. I am not being ghoulish when I say that: the Vatican is already organizing dry-run funerals. Also, even if he does recover (as I hope), it is very probable that he will resign. What follows here is not an obituary, nor a preliminary draft of one. Rather, I seek to answer a question. When the time comes to elect a new Pope, presumably during 2025, what will happen? And more specifically today, how will the course of these future events be shaped by what has happened during Francis’s time, particularly during the messy last five or so years? I will talk about these issues in three posts.
Please do read the rest of it here.
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