Category Archives: Vatican City

Italy, United States, Vatican City

Don’t be surprised by papal meeting with Kim Davis

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Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi meets former Pope Benedict XVI. (Alessia Giuliani/Getty)
Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi meets former Pope Benedict XVI. (Alessia Giuliani/Getty)

Days after Pope Francis left a historic visit to the United States, news emerged that he spent part of his time at an unannounced meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk waging a fight to withhold marriage licenses to same-sex couples on religious grounds.USflagItaly Flag Iconvatican flag

As The New York Times reported earlier this morning, Francis met with the Kentucky woman last Thursday at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C.:

On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said. The couple met for about 15 minutes with the pope, who was accompanied by security guards, aides and photographers. Mr. Staver said he expected to receive photographs of the meeting from the Vatican soon. On Wednesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed that the meeting took place, but he declined to elaborate. “I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no other comments to add,” he said.

Noah Feldman, a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University, argues that the meeting undermines the rule of law:

When Francis met with Davis — who let it be noted is an evangelical Protestant, although her parents apparently are Catholic — he was sending the wrong message, namely that there’s something sympathetic or even legitimate about public official refusing to do his or her job when religious teaching goes the other way.

Running for president, John F. Kennedy had to overcome the Protestant allegation that as a Catholic he would obey the pope and not the laws and Constitution of the U.S. In a famous speech, Kennedy made it clear that he wouldn’t take instructions from Rome. And he said he would be a president “whose fulfillment of his presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.” That’s exactly what’s required of all public officials. And no one should undercut it, pope or otherwise.

For better or worse, the Vatican City is a state (albeit a very small one), and both the Vatican City, a traditional jurisdictional-based sovereign, and the Holy See, the universal ecclesiastical government of the Catholic Church have their own versions of the ‘national interest.’ That is, the Vatican and the Holy See both work to perpetuate their global power and influence, chiefly by maintaining and growing the base of 1.2 billion Catholic believers worldwide.

So it should come as no surprise that any pope, Francis or otherwise, would seek to empower the religious influence of Christians, including Protestants like Davis, even if it means trashing the rule of law. It’s no shock to learn that the Catholic Church has often joined the side of illiberalism in history.

The Vatican City came into existence on in 1929 as a sovereign entity when Italy’s Fascist leader at the time, Benito Mussolini, signed the Lateran Treaty with the Holy See, settling a long-running question that followed Italy’s unification in the 1860s. The support that the Catholic Church provided to Italy’s Fascist government is well-documented. Moreover, the Church played an important postwar role in bolstering the essentially one-party rule of Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy), making the Church all too often bedfellows with the Sicilian Mafia and other uncomfortable backers of the Christian Democrats.

As recently as 2008, the Vatican helped pressure senators in Italy’s parliament to bring down the elected government of center-left prime minister Romano Prodi because it fiercely opposed Prodi’s effort to introduce same-sex civil unions. Prodi, it’s true, pushed ahead with the vote despite warnings from many politicians that it would cause his government to collapse. The Church, for what it’s worth, did not force anyone in Italy to vote for Silvio Berlusconi in the resulting election, who won and would serve as prime minister until 2011. But it’s impossible to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that the Vatican played a significant role in Prodi’s fall. Moreover, Italy today remains one of the only western European countries that lacks marriage equality. That’s almost entirely due to the Vatican’s influence.

Throughout most of the world, the Vatican’s power is limited to ‘soft power’ — that is, the authority that it commands as an arbiter of moral and ethical standards for 1.2 billion Catholics and, likely, throughout all of Christendom. Sometimes, a pope’s influence is political, like John Paul II’s particular experience and anti-Communist credentials as a Polish national serving at the height of the Cold War. Francis, the first Latin American pope, has a particular hold in South America, especially in Brazil and his native Argentina, that mixes religious belief with national pride.

But in Italy, the Vatican actually has quite a bit of ‘hard power’ — according to a recent article in The New Yorker, the Church owns around 20% of all real estate in Italy and 25% of the property in Rome, Italy’s capital and home to the Vatican City itself: Continue reading Don’t be surprised by papal meeting with Kim Davis →

China, Vatican City

Xi’s hard power trumps papal soft power on climate change

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US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping arrive at Beijing's Great Hall of the People in November 2014 (White House).
US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping arrive at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in November 2014 (White House).

Despite the Fellini-esque excitement that swept the American capital over Pope Francis’s first-ever trip to the United States, it’s the arrival of China’s president, Xi Jinping (习近平), this week that will have the broader impact on global affairs.vatican flagChina Flag Icon

While the pope invoked human rights when he spoke about the environment in spiritual terms at the United Nations General Assembly Friday morning, Xi was preparing to announce that China would initiate in 2017 its own national cap-and-trade program, giving teeth to a pledge for carbon emissions in the world’s most populous country to peak in 2030, declining thereafter, part of an ambitious bilateral agreement signed between the United States and China last year.

It’s hard to think of two actors in international affairs who reside more starkly on the spectrum of ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’ more than the two men who visited Washington this week. Francis, nominally the head of a country of less than 500 residents and 110 acres, leads a church with over 1.2 billion members, and he carries the moral authority with Catholicism’s believers to influence everything from LGBT rights to immigration reform. But Xi, as the leader of a country with 1.3 billion people, wields the political, military and economic power that comes from controlling the world’s largest economy and military force.

For all the talk about Francis’s ability to deploy soft power with tactical skill, it is Xi’s hard power that is setting the agenda for climate change policy around the world, and the dual contrast on Friday revealed the limits of soft power. There’s no indication that Francis’s exhortations have made any difference on the willingness of the Chinese government to embrace transformative environmental policy.

What’s more, Xi’s increasingly progressive stand on climate change isn’t driven by the desire for international praise or even necessarily the merits of a policy that will reduce global emissions, but by hard domestic politics. In a one-party state, the Chinese Communist Party knows that it ‘owns’ every problem in China (there’s no alternative Democratic or Republican Party it can blame), so Xi knows that his government has to be seen as doing something to ameliorate his country’s crippling and health-threatening pollution. Continue reading Xi’s hard power trumps papal soft power on climate change →

Brazil, Vatican City

Pope-acabana: How the Catholic Church and the Latin American middle class could forge a symbiotic electoral majority

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Although Pope Francis made global headlines last month by appearing to accept that some priests might have same-sex attractions, it’s easy to forget that the comments, which came at a press conference on his flight back to the Vatican, capped the new pope’s first trip abroad to Brazil, which neighbors former cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s native Argentina.vatican flagbrazil

Francis’s comments touched on a wide range of issues, including the role of women in the Catholic Church, but his remarks risk overshadowing that the pontiff’s visit to Brazil, where Francis delivered a mass to three million Brazilians on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, had already been viewed as a massive success, and showcased that Francis is determined to lead a global Church.

What does all of this have to do with Latin American politics?

First, after the perceived hardline doctrinal conservatism of Benedict XVI and John Paul II, the new pope is certainly more media-savvy about communicating that the Catholic Church will be more open than it’s been perceived in previous years.  Francis may not necessarily be any more doctrinally liberal about social issues like homosexuality, abortion or birth control, but his tone, warm and unjudging, is much different.  The fine print may not even matter if Francis downplays more contentious doctrine in favor of issues of more relevance to economic policymaking.  Even though one of Benedict XVI’s three encyclicals covered the topic of the virtue of social justice and the dangers of global development (Caritas in Veritate — ‘Charity in Truth’), published in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, it is instead Francis who has been credited as the pope willing to take the Church’s teachings into the most dangerous corners of the world and to the poorest in society.  Francis has spoken out against poverty repeatedly since his election as pope earlier this year and while in Brazil, he toured Varginha, one of Rio’s most notoriously poor and violent favelas.

Secondly, the Catholic Church, which has long been a global church (one out of two Catholics worldwide now lives in the Americas, and three-fourths of the world’s Catholics live outside Europe), now has a truly global leader.   Continue reading Pope-acabana: How the Catholic Church and the Latin American middle class could forge a symbiotic electoral majority →

Argentina, Vatican City

What the election of the first Latin American pope means for world politics

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So it’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who will take on the name Francis (or Francesco, in Italian — or Francisco in Spanish) as the Catholic Church’s first Latin American pope — an election that recognizes the centrality of Latin America in the Catholic Church but which also shines a spotlight on the Church’s role in Latin America during the Cold War and the liberation theology that developed in Latin America, which melds church teachings with the concepts of economic and social justice.

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I noted a few days ago on Twitter that, given the reticence to appoint an Italian pope, the closest thing that the conclave could have done is appoint an Argentine pope, given that Argentines have so much Italian ancestry anyway.  That turned out to be more prescient than I realized.

The conclave, consisting of  115 cardinals — 67 of whom were appointed by the retiring pope, Benedict XVI, and 48 of whom were elected by his predecessor, the late John Paul II — elected Bergoglio after just four ballots.  That’s the same number of ballots featured in the 2005 conclave that elected then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — Bergoglio, age 76, is rumored to have been the runner-up to Ratzinger in the previous conclave.  He’s been a cardinal since 2001 and the archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998.

Bergoglio is also the first Jesuit pope — as Rocco Palmo of the invaluable Whispers in the Loggia blog writes, he’s certainly more moderate than either Benedict XVI or John Paul II:

This ain’t Francis I so much as John Paul I.

Although as the Bishop of Rome, Francis is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s smallest sovereign country, he’s now the leader of the Catholic Church to which 1.2 billion people belong — one out of every six people worldwide.  Church teachings, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, shape policy decisions throughout the world, with implications for civil rights (notably with respect to gender and sexual orientation), family planning and reproductive rights, and public health across the globe.

Latin America is home to 41% of the world’s Catholics — more than even Europe at this point — and in some ways, Bergoglio’s election can be seen as the arrival of Latin America’s centrality to global Catholicism.  It’s too much to say that geography was the main rationale for selecting the next pope, of course, but it has symbolic value and certainly the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel today and yesterday knew that.  With the Mormon church and protestant Christianity making inroads into Latin America, Bergoglio’s selection could both energize Latin American Catholicism and shine a light on some of the shortcomings of the Church in Latin America in previous decades.

So there’s no denying that the election of Francis I will have profound consequences on world politics — notably in Argentina and Latin America, but also in Europe and throughout the rest of the developing world.

Bergoglio is a long-time resident of Buenos Aires, and he’s been intimately involved in Argentine public life.  The selection will certainly shine a spotlight on Argentina, which under the rule of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, faces a potential debt default in 2013 amid ever-tough economic times.

But it will also bring to light tough questions for Bergoglio, who’s received criticism, along with the entire Church in Argentina, for not doing enough in the light of the military junta that took control of Argentina from 1976 to 1983 that initiated what’s known as the guerra sucia (‘dirty war’) that resulted in between 10,000 and 30,000 ‘disappearances’ of various political activists:

The Argentine church has acknowledged its failure to challenge the military’s anti-leftist repression, which according to human-rights groups left 30,000 people dead or “disappeared,” including dozens of Catholic clergy and lay activists.

To the harshest critics, church leaders were not merely indifferent to the violence but complicit in it. They say that includes Bergoglio, 68, who led Argentina’s Jesuits at the time. Such charges were revived after the death of Pope John Paul II, when Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor.

An Argentine tribunal in January 2013 found that the Catholic Church was complicit in those crimes:

En lo que los corresponsales calificaron como un fallo histórico, la corte dijo que la jerarquía de la Iglesia Católica cerró los ojos y a veces incluso actuaron en connivencia, ante los asesinatos de sacerdotes progresistas.  Los jueces dijeron que aún hoy en día la iglesia sigue renuente a investigar crímenes cometidos durante el régimen militar.  [In what correspondents described as a landmark ruling, the court said that the Catholic Church hierarchy closed its eyes, and sometimes colluded, with the murders of progressive priests.  The judges said that even today the church is reluctant to investigate crimes committed during the military regime.]

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio has been viewed as a modernizer in pulling believers back to the Church, in the 1970s and early 1980s one of Latin America’s most conservative, following the fraught years of the guerra sucia.

In other ways, Bergoglio’s election brings to light the broader — and more uncomfortable — topic of the Catholic Church’s role in Latin America during the Cold War.  Latin American Catholics developed the concept of ‘liberation theology’ — the idea that church teaching is consistent with the struggle for economic and social equality.  As you can imagine, that concept was incredibly controversial during the Cold War under a pope, John Paul II, who grew up in Poland and became one the world’s most avowed foes of communism and the Soviet Union.  Church conservatives at the time argued that Latin American proponents of liberation theology were hijacking church teaching in the service of third-world Marxism. Continue reading What the election of the first Latin American pope means for world politics →

Vatican City

Fumata blanca

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whitesmoke

In perhaps what’s the most awaited election result of 2013, white smoke from the Sistine Chapel indicates the 115 cardinals gathered to choose a successor to Pope Benedict XVI have done so — and on the fourth ballot (the same number it took for them to choose German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

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In other news, right now would be a very good time for the White House to dump a lot of news that it wants buried on page A23.

Benedict XVI is the first pope in centuries to resign the papacy.

More thoughts when we find out who the 266th pope — and head of state of the Vatican City — will be.  Self-determinist that I am, here’s hoping they have chosen a native Vaticanese.
Photo credit to La Repubblica.

Italy, Vatican City

What the papal abdication means for Italy’s upcoming general election

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benedettomonti

The shock news earlier this week that Pope Benedict XVI (pictured above, right, with Italian prime minister Mario Monti) would step aside as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church on February 28 has overshadowed the campaign currently taking place in advance of Italy’s general election — an election that will take place on February 24 and 25, just hours before the first papal abdication in six centuries.Italy Flag Iconvatican flag

So what does that mean for Italy’s election?

First and foremost, it means that much of the week’s media coverage has been focused on Benedict XVI (above all on Ash Wednesday, of all days) in Italy, not the election campaign.  It’s hard to know exactly what the result of that has been; perhaps it may freeze in place the state of the campaign from the end of last week, and perhaps it might even staunch the incremental momentum of Silvio Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom), and Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement), both of which were seen inching up in support in polls at the end of last week.

Substantively, the Vatican has long been one of the most powerful forces in Italian politics, and its long-standing support for Italy’s former Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy) allowed it to govern Italy uninterrupted from the postwar era until the ‘Tangentopoli’ (‘Bribesville’) scandal in 1993 that scrambled Italian politics and begat a new ‘second republic’ in Italy.

In many ways, the Catholic Church and the former Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI, Italian Communist Party) were the two major, and counterbalancing, ideological and social bulwarks of postwar Italy — given that the Christian Democrats always found ways to foreclose the avenues of power to the Communists, the Communist Party became as much a cultural and social force as a traditional political party.

Many organizations associated with the Catholic Church became booster organizations for the Christian Democrats as well — the Christian Democrats shared much in common with the previously Catholicist party, the Partito Popolare (Popular Party), which was disbanded in 1926 shortly upon the rise of Benito Mussolini to power.  The social organization Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), which was associated with the Church and not actively engaged in politics (and therefore not disbanded during the fascist era), quickly swung behind the Christian Democrats in advance of the 1946 general election that swept Alcide De Gasperi to power. 

That support held firm for 30 years, and in the 1976 and 1979 elections, the closest that the Communists ever came to winning an election in Italy under longtime leader Enrico Berlinguer, Catholic groups also played a key role.  Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation), a traditionalist and political Catholic movement (very closely associated, by the way, with longtime and now outgoing Lombardy regional president Roberto Formigoni) were crucial in holding back the Communist gains in the late 1970s, despite having mobilized an unsuccessful effort in the 1974 referendum to roll back Italy’s 1970 law allowing divorce. 

The Catholic-DC alliance was cemented anew in 1979 with the elevation of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyła (pictured below with former prime minister Giulio Andreotti) to the papacy in 1979 as John Paul II. In a world where U.S. foreign policy interests were keen on keeping Italy’s Communist Party out of office during the Cold War, and where John Paul II would become in many ways a vital spiritual warrior against the Soviet Union’s officially atheist and communist domination of Eastern Europe, it was clear that the Vatican’s full political power (and the United States’s considerable influence) would remain behind the Christian Democrats until the Iron Curtain fell.

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For what it’s worth, the Vatican has all but endorsed prime minister Mario Monti and his centrist coalition — the Vatican’s chief newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano and a semi-official mouthpiece for the Holy See, announced its support for Monti in late December 2012:

È in sintesi l’espressione di un appello a recuperare il senso più alto e più nobile della politica che è pur sempre, anche etimologicamente, cura del bene comune. [Monti’s campaign is in synthesis the expression of a call to return to the highest and most noble sense of politics which exists, as always, even at a etymological level, for the common good.]

The support came days after Benedict himself seemed to indicate a veiled preference for Monti in his Christmas message to Italians:

The pope, in his Christmas greetings in 65 languages, said in his special message to Italians that he hoped the spirit of the day would “make people reflect, favour the spirit of cooperation for the common good and lead to a reflection on the hierarchy of values when making the most important of choices.”

In the past, the Vatican has generally supported Silvio Berlusconi and his centrodestra (center-right) coalition in government to the detriment of Italy’s center-left.  In 2008, former prime minister and senator for life Giulio Andreotti, a longtime fixture in Italian politics (he even has his own biopic!), is said to have sunk prime minister Romano Prodi’s government — on the Vatican’s orders — by opposing Prodi’s attempt to pass a law in the Italian state to give unmarried couples (including same-sex couples) special health, welfare and inheritance rights.

But this time around, in light of Berlusconi’s various bunga bunga scandals — including the solicitation of sex for money from  allegedly underage, North African girls — it would hardly seem befitting the family values of the Catholic Church to endorse such a tawdry candidate.

All the same, the Vatican’s power, in Italy as elsewhere in an increasingly secular Europe, isn’t what it once was, and its stances on contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage stand at odds with the majority of Italian and European voters.

So even if Benedict XVI had a vital grip on the papacy and were willing to engage in a sustained, long-term effort, it’s not clear that the Vatican could necessarily swing the vote significantly towards Monti, and even in an alternative universe with a more engaged pope or in the event that a successor to Benedict XVI had been chosen prior to the election, it’s doubtful that the Vatican could have — or would have — swung more actively into political action.

Given that Benedict XVI is meeting with Monti today, there may well be a benefit to Monti through his association with a pope that’s now certain to dominate headlines through the rest of the election, but it certainly won’t be enough to pull Monti’s coalition, currently polling in fourth place, to victory.  Continue reading What the papal abdication means for Italy’s upcoming general election →

Assorted Links, Vatican City

First Past the Post: Feb. 12 (papal abdication edition)

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East and South Asia

North Korea has confirmed a nuclear test.

Japan wants to goose its stock market by 17% in the next seven weeks.  Felix Salmon has some thoughts.

The view on papal succession from India: ‘Wanted, a new pope: White, European and old.’

A closer look at the 2nd prime minister appointee for South Korea, former prosecutor Chung Hong-won.

North America

Pope Benedict XVI’s influence on American politics.

U.S. president Barack Obama is expected to take a particularly aggressive tone with Congress in tonight’s annual state of the union address.

Kathleen Wynne has become Ontario’s premier and chosen Ontario’s new cabinet.

U.K.-born, U.S.-resident, gay Catholic blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan’s take on the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is as solid as anyone’s.  What I wouldn’t give to read an original Christopher Hitchens column today.

Cardinal Mark Ouellet gets rave reviews from The Montreal Gazette and from The Globe and Mail.

Latin America / Caribbean

Francisco Toro on the Venezuelan bolivar’s devaluation.

The #YoSoy132 movement in México launches a magazine.  [Spanish]

Austin “SuperBlue” Lyons and Machel Montano will share the ‘soca monarch’ title in 2013 after Trinidad’s carnival.

The view of papal succession from Latin America.

A profile of Rafael Correa in advance of his likely reelection on February 17.

Epsy Campbell will run for president in Costa Rica in 2014.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Kenya held its first-ever presidential debate Tuesday.

Frontrunner Raila Odinga taunted his opponent Uhuru Kenyatta over his war crimes trial at the ICC.

Europe

The political rift deepens in Georgia. (Latest on the talks here).

BBC’s primer on electing a new pope.

A little late, but The Economist‘s thoughtful piece on the Nordic economic model.

Labour leads the Conservatives in the United Kingdom by 12 points, according to a new poll.

Romanian prime minister Victor Ponta gets saddled into the horsemeat scandal.

Is fascism making a comeback in Italy?

Serbian prime minister Ivica Dačić is still taking heat from alleged ties to a drug lord.

You should be prepared to check early and often at Rocco Palmo’s Vatican blog over the next six weeks.

The take on Benedict from Poland (where, predictably, he remains most fully in the shadow of his Polish predecessor, John Paul II).

The Czech left doesn’t seem set to merge anytime soon.

Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov is placed under house arrest.

A political science approach to the upcoming papal enclave.

Speigel previews the upcoming Austrian election year.

The Cyprus bailout will likely come in March after the presidential election.

Middle East and North Africa

Violence hits Yemen on the two-year anniversary of the 2011 protests.

The latest over a potential new unity government in Tunisia.

Racing against time in Lebanon to craft a new elections law.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition possibilities tighten.

Turkey reaches out to Europe to help it stop the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Oceania

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd wants you (or Julia Gillard, perhaps) to call him, maybe.

A New Zealand MP wants to ban Muslims from flights.

Vatican City

Benedict’s resignation sets stage for upcoming papal conclave

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UPDATE: Duck of Minerva considers the political science aspects of choosing a new pope here, and here‘s an even more comprehensive guide to the perceive papabili.

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Just days after the Italian electorate picks a new prime minister, the Vatican City will feature different kind of election that could well dwarf global interest in the Italian election — the selection of a new pope.vatican flag

With today’s shock announcement that he will step down on February 28 as the head of the Catholic Church,  Benedict XVI (pictured above) is also stepping down as the head of state of the Vatican City, a sovereign city-state wholly contained within the city of Rome in Italy.

Benedict, the Bavaria-born former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected pope in April 2005 upon the death of his predecessor, John Paul II, is the first pope to resign the papacy since Gregory XII in 1415.

His resignation, however, is certain to initiate a consideration of his nearly eight-year pontificate, including what’s been seen as a somewhat conservative view within an already-conservative institution with regard to homosexuality and the advent of same-sex marriage, the use of condoms to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, the role of women in the Church and the role of the Church in the secular world.  In addition, Benedict has overseen the fallout from widespread emergence of sexual abuse scandals within the Church, including his own supervisory conduct involving a German priest who committed abuses in the 1980s.

The College of Cardinals — the group of 209 top officials of the Catholic Church — will assemble in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to choose Benedict’s successor, although under canonical law, only those cardinals who have not reached the age of 80 at the time of the papal conclave are eligible to vote.

Currently, that means the body of electors for the next pope totals 118 cardinals — and on February 26, that group will shrink to just 117 upon the 80th birthday of Ukrainian bishop Lubomyr Husar.

Theoretically, the College of Cardinals may choose anyone as the next pope; realistically, however, they are almost certain to choose someone from within their own ranks, and speculation over Benedict’s successor begins with Italian cardinal Angelo Scola.

Scola, who was born in Lombardy in north-central Italy and is the son of a truck driver, would be the first Italian pope since the elevation of John Paul II to the papacy in 1979.

Scola, currently the archbishop of Milan, was from 2002 to 2011 the patriarch of Venice — notably, three previous popes in the 20th century (Pius X, John XXIII and John Paul I) previously served as patriarch of Venice prior to their own elevations to the papacy.  At age 71, Scola is old enough to have been considered as a potential successor to John Paul II in 2005, but relatively young enough today to remain the papal frontrunner.

Close to the Communion and Liberation movement within the Church, Scola has been a vigorous proponent of the Church’s internationalization efforts, and his elevation as pope would mean a learned scholar with the intellectual and stylistic gifts to promote the Church’s role in an increasingly secular Europe.

Given that Benedict appointed 22 new cardinals in January 2012 — 16 of whom were European and seven of whom were Italian — it seems likely that the next pope will once again be Italian and, indeed, each pope from 1522 until 1979 was Italian.

Additional candidates — in the sense that they have been discussed prominently as papabili include Tarcisio Bertone, former archbishop of Genoa and the cardinal secretary of state (essentially the ‘prime minister’ of the Vatican); Angelo Bagnasco, the current archbishop of Genoa; and cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, a scholar who serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be non-Italian candidates, and the inescapable fact is that the Church is becoming less European and more global — with an increasingly large profile in Africa and Latin America.

Two African cardinals — Peter Turkson of Ghana and Francis Arinze of Nigeria — are often at the top of lists to succeed Benedict.  But at age 80, Arinze may be a little too old (Benedict was 78 upon his election, the oldest person to be elevated to the papacy in nearly three centuries), and his uncompromising conservatism may not wear incredibly well.  Turkson, at age 64, became a cardinal only in 2003 and is a more tantalizing possibility — he speaks six languages and has been a voice in the past for reforming the international financial system in a way that’s more equitable for developing countries.

The former archbishop of Québec, Marc Ouellet, at age 68, is also mentioned as a top choice and like Scola, is seen as close to Benedict and would certainly bring a more (relatively) youthful and cheery countenance to the papacy in an era of increasingly sophisticated communications.

Additional non-Italian candidates discussed as papabili include Argentine cardinals Leonardo Sandri and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the latter serving as the current archbishop of Buenos Aires, and Honduran cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, a moderate who has spoken out vigorously on the issue of human rights and the elimination of debt for the developing world.

Continue reading Benedict’s resignation sets stage for upcoming papal conclave →