Pope Francis - and who will be next? - podcast episode cover

Pope Francis - and who will be next?

Feb 23, 202513 min
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Episode description

The legacy of a Pope who infuriated many traditionalists and disappointed some progressives - and the most likely candidates to replace him. 

Find out more about The Front podcast here. You can read about this story and more on The Australian's website or on The Australian’s app.

This episode of The Front is presented by Claire Harvey, produced by Kristen Amiet, and edited by Lia Tsamoglou. Our team includes Tiffany Dimmack, Joshua Burton, Stephanie Coombes and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, February twenty four. All eyes are on Rome, where eighty eight year old Pope Francis is critically ill with pneumonia. Today we look at the complex legacy of Francis born Joge Becoglo in Argentina, and who's positioning to replace him as the leader of one and a quarter billion Catholics around the world. Looking right now, that smoke is now coming out of the chimney. It is oh

very much. Wait, we have a new pope and you can hear the cheers from Saint Peter's Square out there. Let's listen. In has the protos reactor secretive? Yes, melodramatic, absolutely. This is how a new pope is chosen, not by a ray of light from heaven, but in a long, slow election by secret ballot, surrounded by politicking and lobbying for the highest stakes, the guidance of more than one

point three billion Catholics. Only men may vote the most senior cardinals from around the world, who must be under eighty to get into the conclave. That's Latin for lockable room. The conclave takes place in the Vatican City's Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo's hi Renaissance fresco on the ceiling shows God touching the hand of Adam, the sacred and the mundane,

just like the work of the cardinals below. The latest cinematic iagining of all this is in the movie Conclave, starring Ray Fines, Stanley Tucci, and Isabella Rossellini, all swishing around in robes with no makeup but still managing to look glamorous.

Speaker 2

What happened, they say, a heart attack?

Speaker 1

Based on a Robert Harris novel. The movie is appropriately thrilling.

Speaker 3

This is a conclave, alder, it's not a war.

Speaker 4

It is a war, and you have to comment to a.

Speaker 1

Side on screen and in real life. The factions lobby for their candidates in the open, but the vote is taken in strict secrecy under threat of excommunication. As each round of voting concludes, ballots accounted, threaded together and then burned in a stove inside the chapel for centuries. Thick soot produced by these stoves caked that exquisite work by Michelangelo above. Black smoke means the vote is split and the cardinals must vote again, repeating the process up to

four times a day until a victor emerges. White smoke means a new pope has been elected by a majority of at least two thirds.

Speaker 2

After four rounds of voting. Carnal Jorge Mario Brigoglio was selected as the new pope of the Roman Catholic Church, succeeding pulp Benedicta sixteenth.

Speaker 1

When he was elevated to the papacy in twenty thirteen, Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Begoglio became the first non European pope to serve in more than a millennium. He adopted the papal name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi. To the church's progressives, he represented a new era, someone who understood the challenging modern lives of its congregation. He had worked as a nightclub bouncer. After all, Francis wasn't into lavish accommodation.

He slept not in the paper palace, but in a simple motel style room, and he made the embraceive immigrants and refugees a foundation of his papacy. My people are poor, he said more than once, and I am one of them, an nod to his modest upbringing in the suburbs of Buenos Aire's. Still, progressives have been largely disappointed Francis didn't push it.

Speaker 3

More.

Speaker 1

To some Catholic traditionalists, Francis went too far when you interview. Pope Francis has discussed the possibility of relaxing the discipline of priestly celibacy, recommending the church ordine married men to service priests.

Speaker 2

Pope Francis met with the Vatican department that he created himself nine years ago.

Speaker 1

It is the office of the Auditor.

Speaker 2

General in charge of fighting corruption and keeping tabs on finances.

Speaker 1

Ope Francis says Catholic priests can now bless same sex couples, but not for marriage, but no one expects this will lead the Pope to reconsider women priests. Francis has said that to the war is closed. In the almost twelve years since Pope Francis was elected, there have been controversies.

Speaker 4

The claim is explosive that Pope Francis covered up sexual abuse in the American.

Speaker 1

Church, and contradictions. Francis acknowledged people have a right to be outraged by the Church's response to what he called repulsive crimes against children. Popularity, Francis knew is fleeting shortly after that white smoke rose into the air in Saint Peter's Square. In twenty thirteen, he told an Argentinian radio station Jesus also for a certain time was very popular, and look how that turned out.

Speaker 4

I think there will be a lot of people that remember him as a reformist, someone who is very liberal, somebody who took the church in a direction that others may not have wished it to go to.

Speaker 1

Jacqueline Magnet is the Australia's Europe correspondent, and she's had her bags packed for days, ready to rush from her home in London to Rome.

Speaker 4

On my computer screen at the moment, I actually have the hotel booking ready to go, so that I just presend, unfortunately, anyone wanting to go to Rome.

Speaker 5

At the moment.

Speaker 4

It is the jubilee here, which is of course a year long celebration for the church, and a lot of pilgrims are going to Rome at the moment. So accommodation is very tight, and so it's very difficult to find something that's one affordable and two available.

Speaker 1

From the moment, Francis was admitted to hospital. Thoughts turned to how he might be remembered, whether he survived this battle with illness or not.

Speaker 4

Will he be considered a man of his time? I'm not sure. It's a very extreme position he's had for the leader of the Catholic Church, and I think people felt that he delved into politics more than he needed to, and that he went where the church wouldn't normally go. Where we're talking issues of immigration, of the environment, of

aspects of life that are outside of religious instructions. So I think it will be interesting to see how he's remembered, isn't it in the next few years, especially when politically we've got so much upheaval in the world. And I think that could also play a part in the election of the new pope, that maybe they do want somebody that's not quite so dramatic or is willing to put the church in an extreme position. They really want someone to take it down the middle road.

Speaker 1

I think yeah. In the recent US election, he was critical of both Kamala Harris for herst and on abortion and Donald Trump for his stand on immigration, and in fact has really slated the president for mass deportations. For example of undocumented people from the United States. That's an unusual level of political involvement for a pope in our modern times. But of course the archetype of the scheming pope being very much involved in politics is something from history, isn't it.

Speaker 4

Yes, But I think in modern days people are looking for religious instruction, not a lecture, and so they're seeking guidance rather than a blanket signpost. And so I just think in Rome that there really is a sweech or a mood at the moment to not be following Pope Francis with someone in the same vein, and some of the people that Pope Francis elected have a more conservative bent than what perhaps he may have expected.

Speaker 1

Coming up what a new leader could mean for the church. About fourteen days after the death or resignation of a pope, a conclave is called okay jack. So who's next?

Speaker 4

Well, there's about a dozen front runners, but I think that the main one at the moment. In Italy they're called papabilli as well, so all the papabilly are maneuvering at the moment. So there's an Italian cardinal and Pietro Paroline now he's the Vatican Secretary of State, and so he knows all the secrets for some significant amount of time, all the skeletons, and there's a reason that he's a front runner because he's considered to be a steady hand.

Speaker 1

Pietro Paoline is Pope Francis's chief advisor and he's been his mistry advocating for climate change mitigation around the world.

Speaker 3

We have to really to change our way of living, and this is the task interested by God to the human kind when he created him.

Speaker 4

And it's also the Philippines Cardinal Louis Antonio Tagel, he's also fairly moderate.

Speaker 2

Children.

Speaker 4

What do you see in your parents? A gift or an atm card?

Speaker 5

Parents?

Speaker 4

Parents, what do you see in your children? A gift or a burden?

Speaker 5

Priests and deacons, what do you see in your bishops?

Speaker 4

I'm sorry. We've got Cardinal Peter Urdo from Hungary. Now he was a very close friend of Cardinal George pell he's very pop pillar amongst all of the cardinals. And then you've got people like will the church go and elect someone who's from the Congo Fridolin and Bongo is somebody who's he's the president of the African and Madagascar Symposium. So he has control or authority of a significant area

of the world. But he's also quite politically outspoken, so I don't know whether the cardinals will turn to him. I'm not sure he is being named as someone who's one of the front runners. And then Robert Sarah of Guinea. He's also very conservative.

Speaker 1

Cardinal Sarah has railed against gender ideology, abortion and euphanasia.

Speaker 5

If we pass laws destroy an innocence shaild in the womb, or to cut sorts the distance of a def Angeles elder person, what are you there to stop men from taking the life of someone considered to be an enemy or a fat And.

Speaker 4

So if the church was to go swing from the left to the right in quite a violent way, he might also be a consideration.

Speaker 1

Jacqueline Magne is The Australian's europe correspondent. You can get all the lattest from the Vatican and the rest of the world right now at the Australian dot com do AU

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