Tag Archives: catholic church

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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popeacabana

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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Bergoglio1

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.

argentinavatican flag

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

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 →