Updates: 0
Cardinals over 80 do not have a vote in the election of the next pope, which means Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, will not be involved. But the Catholic church is stressing that English and Welsh Catholics will still have input since cardinals talk to each other – and anyway the whole process is guided by the holy spirit.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was chosen to become Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, the Guardian judged him to be “the most conservative and internally perhaps the least divisive choice” the papal conclave could have reached, and wrote:
Here is an overwhelming sense of an opportunity missed. After the Polish Pope, there is no longer a sense that the Vatican belongs to an Italian. Now, when half of the Catholic church's members are in Latin America and a further 165 million are in Africa, it seems inappropriate for him even to be European. It may be too soon for Africa to produce a leader with the stature to command the whole church, but there were strong contenders from Latin America, men like Cardinal Hummes from Sao Paulo with a tradition of engagement with the labour movement of Brazil or Rodriguez Maradiaga, the young and able Cardinal from Honduras. Doctrinally conservative, but these are men who would have stood at the gates of the richest nations in the world as symbols of the poorest.If the bookmakers are right and Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana is favourite, the era of an African pope may now have arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment