Pope Leo XIV

Leo the fourteenth, what he could represent. So first, let's talk a little bit about how Pope Leo was formed, because I think background is really important for popes. So the milieu out of which Leo rose, there's several different kind of contexts that we have to look at. He was born in Chicago, he was born and raised in Chicago. He went to Villanova University for college. Some people are like, oh, he went to liberal Villanova, and oh he went to

this liberal place for seminary. We should note, though, a couple of things. I feel this immediate kind of kinship with Pope Leo in that when he was an undergraduate at Villanova, he founded their student pro life organization and was the president of it. I was the president of Notre Dame Right to Life when I was an undergrad. And this is one thing that gives me a ton of hope, is because it's something I understand. He clearly has a d deep connection with the American pro life cause.

He's also the first pope to have had a pre existing Twitter account when elected, which has resulted in people just crawling through it and scouring it to find evidence of what he thinks about things. They found one tweet kind of critical of JD. Vance, and everyone blew that up into saying, oh, he hates JD. Van See, he hates He's a big fat lefty COMI but when you go through it, look, let me just I'll just cut

through this. There's not going to be any pope elected who is like yeah, kung ho to pour them all like, that's not going to happen, all right. No pope's gonna get elected who talks or things like that about immigration. Okay, And even if you listen to this show, you'll note

that's not necessarily the way I talk. I think that American immigration has its own very specific kinds of problems that if you are commenting on it as the pope or papal advisors, like you know the letter that Pope that was sent that had Pope Francis's name signed at the bottom of it, that was issued in response to to JD. Vance's comments about the ordering of how much what are what are the duties of society towards immigrants?

Blah blah blah. There's no way that Pope Francis, at age eighty eight or whatever he was, I refuse to have the confidence that Pope Francis A was physically fit enough to have really thoroughly engaged in the ins and outs of the specifics of the American immigration system, the asylum system, the way in which the asylum system was abused,

and bupah bu blah blah blah blah. All right, anyway, point being Catholic politicians look at immigration kind of on this global perspective and take this global sort of posture, many of them rightly or wrongly, that we should be globally speaking, generally speaking, accommodating to immigrants. And they see Donald Trump not being accommodating to immigrants, and they think that's bad. Okay, So you're not going to get a cardinal elected who's like, yeah, deport them all like that.

That's never going to happen. So they find one thing

that Cardinal Prevost retweeted about JD. Vance and all that, But what people also found were a bunch of things that he retweeted, reposted, and has said over the course of time that were phenomenal regarding pro life issues, even down to the level of criticizing his own state government in Illinois, where he occasionally would vote when he wasn't, you know, out of the country, his own state government in Illinois for doing horrible things for you know, the

Illinois state legislature does all kinds of horrible things, like the California legislature does to further facilitate abortion access, fund abortion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really encouraged by the fact that he is coming from the American pro life world and the kinds of thinkers he is citing and thinkers he is retweeting are people whom I know of and like and care for. That gives me hope. A couple of other things about him that I think

are encouraging. He's a lawyer. He's not a normal lawyer. He's a canon lawyer. Okay, So for those who don't know, canon law is the field of law by which the Catholic Church and other kinds of ecclesial bodies Eastern Catholic

churches have their own body of canon law. Canon law was very important, especially historically prior to the Reformation in a lot of places and have to the Reformation, historically Catholic countries where canon law and civil law would intersect in the law and rights of the Church as opposed

to the law rights of the state. Anyway, Cardinal Prevost is a canon lawyer, and as much as a lot of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops, and he is a Boomer he was born in nineteen fifty five, as much as a lot of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops were very loosey goosey. The one group of people that at least retain a certain level of non lucy goosiness about the faith, people who actually have a sense of order within the Catholic religion are canon lawyers. I've never met

a canon lawyer that I didn't like. I've never met a canon lawyer who didn't have his head screwed on right at least on really fundamental things, and so that actually gives me a ton of hope. He you know, he has also been able to administer and govern people in a lot of different capacities in different countries. So for those, let me give a sort of sketch out his career. He grows up in America, he studies in Rome, gets his doctor and ken in law, and he is

an Augustinian friar. So this is a community of priests who follow the rule of life developed by Saint Augustine, and they live lives of poverty, so they don't own any property in common. Their community owns all their property. They all of their property is owned in common. So within their community, no individual person owns any individual stuff.

So poverty, chastity and obedience. So he served as a superior within his Augustinian community, and most of his life as a priest was spent in South America in Peru, and eventually he was named a bishop of a diocese in Peru, which is very odd to have someone from another country move to a country, work there as a priest and be named a bishop there. It's kind of

an odd thing. I guess the most high profile example that is Archbishop Gomez, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who I think was born and raised in Mexico, and as a result, Cardinal Privost had joint Peruvian and American citizenship because he'd lived and worked in Peru for so long, so he had worked very often in Peru. Then he works a lot in Rome. When he's made a cardinal by Pope Francis, he's prefect of he's head of what's called the Dicastro for bishops, so he was the chief

guy helping advise the Pope about naming new bishops. Now I don't know how empowered he was in that role, so it's a little hard for me to look at individual bishop appointments and say, Aha, yes, that was him. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to picking who a new bishop is going to be. But the thing that I kind of am struck by is that he seems to be a pretty rooted, humble guy, even down to little things that I don't want to blow them up into big things, but I will say this.

I will say this about Pope Francis and you don't want to speak ill of the dead. But people talked a lot about how humble Pope Francis was. Francis, though, didn't really want to kind of conform and kind of go with the flow with a lot of things. Again, maybe personal humility, I don't know, but he really stuck out like a sore thumb as far as how he conducted himself as pope, and you could see it like even in ways that became actually quite inconvenient for everybody.

He was like, I don't want to live in the Vatican apartments and the palace is like a king. I'm just going to live at the Casa Santa Marta, which is like a hotel that cardinals stay at when they visit Rome. Well, that was actually a really expensive and it was built it's like, oh, look, the pope's a man of the people, he wants to hang out with everybody. Well, that was actually a really expensive and really inconvenient thing for him to have done. It required basically, all right,

you're like a world leader. For security purposes, we can't just have have you live in a hotel with guests. Oh, new guests up pop in right next to you. No, so they had to basically take give him a whole floor. They had to do all this security stuff. It was actually quite expensive and quite difficult and et cetera. H France has sort of refused to wear certain elements of papal clothing, which the Pope Leo woar on day one he refused to and even down to the level of

so so basically, here's my point. Francis was temperamentally a prickly kind of person. I think I kind of get the sense of that. I don't want to trash the guy. I think he had a lot of good qualities, but I can really see. So I'm not trying to do this like massive contrast, but I do see with Leo, I understand him. He's a guy from South Chicago. I got to meet a lot of guys like that when I was at Notre Dame. He is. I got to meet a lot of priests like that when I was

at Notre Dame. He's While he's very, very intelligent, I'm sure he's much more intelligent than me. I mean I read some stuff he wrote, like some like academic stuff he wrote, and I could barely make head or tails of it. He was a math major at Villanova, and then he goes on to be a canon lawyer. I mean, I wrote read some philosophy stuff he wrote. But I can see this sort of basic bedrock, simple South Chicago

Catholic kind of humility. I know that I understand that, whereas Pope Francis was coming out of something totally foreign to me that I had no way of understanding. Even even as far as like politics and stuff like, I mean South American politics and some of the South American political ideas and Argentinean political ideas that Pope France has brought to his work and viewpoints on the papacy were extremely weird and complex, and they sometimes manifested themselves and

these very unpleasant wit Anyway, I understand this guy. I think he's very down to earth. He seems very simple in good ways. And this is one thing about being the Pope, that there's temperament. Temperament makes a big deal. Pope Francis made two kind of big tidle waves as

far as is he diluting Catholic teaching. He issued one document that said that seemed to kind of maybe indicate in some circumstances divorced and remarried Catholics could receive communion, which seemed to have been a break from his predecessor, John Paul the Second. I should say three things he did. That he sort of rewrote what was in the Catechism about the death penalty again in a way that seemed to maybe like it was breaking with John Paul the Second.

And he had one of his flunkies issue a document largely retracted, thank God, that seemed to maybe indicate again breaking with John Paul the Second, breaking with Benedict the sixteenth, breaking with himself from a prior document he had issued to allow gay couples to be blessed, not their union, but just these two people. And this is the thing. You might have a pope who's a little more liberal leaning, but it takes a real kind of temperament to decide

I am going to do this. That is clearly going to seem at least to be a break. Whether it authentically is I don't think so, but it's going to seem to be a break with the prior tradition. There's temperament involved there. I think if Pope Francis were a different kind of person, maybe a person who was a little less stubborn, maybe a person who was a little less kind of insistent, and maybe a bit more deferential to tradition, deferential to the office that maybe that would

never have happened. I see in Pope Leo a personality that is you know, this is the thing about Americans. When we go to Rome, we're all overwhelmed. I mean, you walk around in Fresno, there's barely a single building that's more than one hundred years old. When someone from America goes to Rome, they're floored because everything they look

at is older than our country. If you're from Presno and you go to Rome, you're you're overwhelmed by the enormity of the history and the tradition, and the beauty and the grandeur of what you're seeing. And I see in Pope Leo. Again, I'm not like some grand oracle or anything. And by the way, I'm trying to say this out of all deference to Pope Francis, who, again I try to remind people, is more conservative than Donald

Trump on abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism. I think the liberalizing case for Pope Francis is overblown, and the most he did to screw around with Catholic doctrine was stuff that was ambiguous at worst. But for all that chaotic and chaos inducing. But I think, basically, I'll say this, I feel better under I feel better about the prospects for the church under Pope Leo. I think he is a better I think he is temperamentally, maybe in some ways a little better suited to the job. And and I'm

very hopeful. And he's someone whose motivations I feel I can understand when we return other catholic y stuff. The scuttle butt is he actually the stealth candidate of the Conservatives. That's next on the John Girardi Show. Now, one thing that pious Catholic commentators love to do is they love to say, well, it's too simplistic to chart the cardinals in the Catholic Church along the spectrum of conservative and liberal. That is a simplistic American political category that has no

place in the church. The focus of the cardinals is on Jesus Christ and his church, and it is that like you're a bad person, and it doesn't even make sense. Only it kind of does. If you're gonna sit there and with a straight face, tell me that Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Who is this American cardinal who celebrates the traditional Latin Mass I suspect every single day, which is the right of mass that was in use in the Catholic Church for hundreds of years prior to the nineteen sixties, celebrated entirely in Latin, who wears antique investments from the seventeenth

century on a regular basis. Who is the only it is the most staunchly pro life, anti LGBT outside of res You're going to tell me that he isn't more conservative than you know some random than you know Cardinal McElroy from the United States, for example, who is writing trying to revivify left wing moral theologians that we thought John Paul the second had absolutely buried. Give me a break. Obviously, there are differences between the cardinals and the human mind

likes to categorize things along a spectrum. So sometimes that spectrum we use labels like left and right for it. Yes, I understand that the labels left and right are used mostly in American political context to mean certain kinds of things, and it's not one hundred percent. Apples to apples makes exactly the same thing. When it comes to applying the

analysis to the Catholic Church. Yes, I realized that the left right distinction originated from the French Revolution and the Estates General and all the people who were the most radically wanting to get rid of the monarchy sat on the left side, and the people who were more eh, maybe let's slow it down a bit, sat on the

right side. Nonetheless, there's some I'm kind of wondering a little bit if Robert Privos, the new Pope Leo, if he was kind of a bit the candidate of the Conservatives, or at the very least if he was open to the Conservatives. So one of the dynamic that exists within the election of a pope is there's one hundred and thirty five cardinals who are electors. Basically, you have to be a cardinal and you have to be under the age of eighty, So there are one hundred and thirty

five guys like that. You need a two thirds majority to win. So I think there are some people who are super kind of very hardcore conservative, some people who were very hardcore liberal, and then a lot of cardinals who just didn't really know anybody. A lot of cardinals who got named cardinal who were from far flung corners of the world and hadn't really come to Rome to meet with all the other cardinals because Francis, as this

was another kind of weird Francis thing. He got upset because when he had cardinals meeting early on in his pontificate, some of them like disagreed with him and stuff, and he didn't really convene all the cardinals together very often. So a lot of the cardinals just didn't really know each other at all. And so basically, I don't think there was any chance that a super super conservative cardinal was going to get elected or super left wing cardinal

was going to get elected. There was going to have to be some kind of compromise and some kind of coalition building within that body. And it appears that Cardinal Prevost met with Cardinal Burke, who was like the most conservative cardinal in the whole Catholic Church. And I think there's a lot of and also there was this more

so than just meeting at Cardinal Burke's apartment. One of the seismic things that happened a few years ago, not two years ago, was this document got issued under Pope Francis by one of his a newly appointed person of his to authorize blessing same sex couples, not blessing their union, but just to bless them as persons. And people thought, well, oh gosh, are we opening the door to gay marriage? And the African Cardinals through a fit. They caused an

uproar and basically forced the Pope to retract it. Now, I think it's ambiguous, as was that actually changing Catholic doctrine. I don't know. I think it was ambiguous, but more or less, the African Cardinals said absolutely not, We absolutely are not even going to broach this subject. I think, you know, Pope Leo, he got two thirds of these

guys to vote for him. Presumably a lot of African Cardinals voted for him, So I think he needs to be responsive to conservatives, and this is sort of my hope. My hope is for a papacy that is boring. My hope is for a papacy that is open and kind and accepting to conservative groups within the Catholic Church who faced a lot of frankly just persecution is maybe a little strong under Pope Francis. I just want peace. I want a boring pope who says boringly Catholic stuff and

appoints boringly good, decent, competent bishops worldwide. That's what I want, and that's my hope, and if that is your standard, I have some hope for Pope Leo. I don't know that he's going to be quite the titan that John Paul the Second or Benedict the sixteenth the sixteenth were, but I have hope. I do have hope. I have hope for him. Temperamentally, I have hope for him. As

far as understanding his background, I have hope. So when we return, some live Catholic issues that Pope Leo may decide over the course of his probably quite long papacy. Next on the John Jrardy Show, there's a bunch of live Catholic controversy that now that we have a healthy pope re installed within the Catholic Church, there's a lot of issues that he's going to have to deal with. So a couple of big hot button topics that I think at some point he is going to rule on.

And let's remember this, he's a relatively young pope. Pope Leo is sixty nine years old. Let's remember that Pope Francis was seventy seven when he was elected, and Pope Benedict was seventy eight when he was elected. Benedict only served for eight years. Francis served for twelve years. So you know, this guy's sixty nine years old. Popes have good health care. This guy looks relatively healthy, So I mean not inconceivable this guy could be pope for you know,

twenty years. So what are some of the live controversies that are existing right now within the Catholic Church. Certain surely new things will have developed and the landscape will look much different ten years from now. What are the live controversies to deal with right now? Okay, so one of the big things is honestly competent administration of the Vatican and money, Like it's boring to think about, but the Vatican has been running a deficit year every year.

They have a massive pension liability that they're facing, and they got to figure out how to get the money situation right. Stuff got worse and worse and worse under Pope Francis. Pope Francis got elected on the idea that he was an administrator. He had very specific ideas for how he wanted to do things, not very clear how successful they were. So that's a big deal, and it's

probably a non zero reason why Prevost got picked. He seems to not engage in factionalism, and seems to work well with lots of people in a lot of contexts, and is a good administrator. So that's a non zero reason to pick somebody to be pope. So that's the

boring stuff. Let's talk about some doctrinal stuff though. So one of the questions to deal with is this thing called sinnodality s Y n O D A l I T Y. Now, synods were a part of the life of the church going back all the way to the beginning and in the early Roman you know, after the legalization of Christianity under Constantine, synods were a thing that would happen. Sentods were usually kind of localized gatherings of bishops to discuss x, Y or Z. I wouldn't say

that they are a constitutive element of the church. It's a little different from say, what we would call an ecumenical council where you get all the bishops together to talk about stuff. From the Council of Jerusalem, the gathering of all the apostles together in Jerusalem, that's described in the Acts of the Apostles, in which they ultimately decided, yes, the Gospel is open to non Jews. To the Second Vatican Council, which happened in nineteen sixty two, which was

again a gathering of all the world's bishops. Sinnidality is sort of in the middle, and obviously it's not necessarily attested to in the New Testament. It's just a thing that would happen that bishops would gather to discuss stuff.

Smaller groups of bishops would gather to discuss stuff, and Pope Francis his pontificate was now that the church, the Catholic Church, has been having synods on and off since the nineteen sixties, So a gathering of maybe not all the world's bishops, but maybe a select group of the world's bishops to help talk about a certain topic and help advise the pope, and the Pope writes a document

and they go on. Under Francis, these things took on way outsized importance because it seemed like Francis was leaving up to debate and discussion stuff that you would have thought was not really up for debate or discussion. You know, here's a synod allegedly about this topic where all of a sudden, we're talking about whether we should have female deacons, Like, what the heck does that have to do with anything.

Here's a synod on the family and we're talking about should we give communion to people who are divorced and remarried? And these synods had these like felt like they had these big high stakes attached to them. People were angry, and Francis just loved this crap, and he just kept having a sinnate after sinnate after senate to the point that I think what was maybe the high point of where I would imagine if you're an outside non Catholic observer looking at this, you think these people are just

staring at their navels. We had a synod on the topic of synodality, that was the most recent thing. And the question is are we going to keep on doing this whole Senate thing? So I don't know exactly know where pop Leo stands on it. He mentioned being a synodyl church in his opening statements from the Balcony of Saint Peter's, But whether that means yes, I want to keep having synods at this level constantly all the time.

The word synod means on the road with comes from the Greek words soon, which means with and hodos, which means wrote. So the idea is, well, we want to be a church that listens to everybody, you know, listen to everybody, hear everyone's perspectives before we act, which is fine, but it seems like it's just these never ending discussions and then at the end of the day the pope

can kind of do what he wants. I mean that, you know, there was one critique about when the pope issues, when the Pope issued this document that was seemed to sort of open the door to blessing gay couples, which got really retracted after the African bishops had an uproar about it. And I think the document was at worst ambiguous. It was after it had no connection whats ever, had

any sinate. It was just the Pope just issued it on his own without really seemingly without consulting very many people. So I again, i'm i'm there is a definitely a non zero amount of the world's bishops who are really tired of this constant synod you know, posture that the church is in. So are we going to keep doing that.

There are other sort of live issue controversies. I think there's a question of are some of the more controversial theological points that were raised during Pope Francis's papacy and kind of left Danglin as far as okay, well, he has this document where he kind of sort of thinks, sort of maybe there might be some circumstances where divorced and remarried people might be able to receive fully communion. How how does that square with what John Paul the

second said, which is, no, what are the circumstances? Can you show that there's consistency with the Catholic faith? And Pope france Is basically just said no, I don't need to show that. He had actually a group of cardinals who submitted what we're called dubia, which means questions asking about well, how do we square that? And Pope Francis just refused to answer. So will he will will he answer? Will Pope Leo answer those dubia? Will he ask that

these things be clarified? Will he ask that these things be clarified to show well, no, we're not definitively crossing that bridge or whatever it is. I think the fact that Cardinal Burke is so Cardinal Burke, who is this American cardinal super conservative who was a big time critic of Pope Francis issuing some of his more i'll say

ambiguous theological statements. Cardinal Burke seems very happy with Pope Leo's election, and Cardinal Burke was one of the guys who wrote these dubia to ask for clarification on these theological points. There's also a sort of close to me the question of the Latin mass. So Catholics had a certain way of offering the Mass for hundreds and hundreds of years, and in nineteen sixty nine this was radically changed.

The modern rite of mass the most Roman Catholics attend, is usually offered in the vernacular language of the local people rather than in Latin, although sometimes when you go to some places you'll hear some parts of the mass in Latin. But it's totally up to the priest's discretion. And there are a lot of other changes that happened.

There was a sort of a break with sort of the literature that was embodied in the older Missile, some of which was ancient and weighted with really beautiful historic theological language. A lot of that got kind of pitched out or cut and snipped and edited in the modern missile.

And there was a lot of richness and beauty, especially musical, this whole musical tradition that the Catholic Church has developed over the course of you know, two thousand years, much of which sat poorly within the context of the modern right of mass, or was just pitched out of the modern righte of mass. So Paul Benedict had said about the older right of mass, every priest is allowed to do it. Just do it. It's fine, there's nothing harmful about it. If in your context, in your Paris, you

think you want to do it, just do it. And Pope Francis sort of aligned with, kind of more aligned with, I think, sort of the boomer sympathies of older churchmen alive today. He hated the Latin Mouth. Well, I shouldn't say he hated it. He did not seem to like the Latin mass very much, and so he massively restricted it. And not just like if he had just said, okay, individual bishops have to govern it within their die, so they have to give an okay. It's not at the

level of individual priests. It has to be individual bishops. If he had just said that, that's more reasonable, but instead he had all this stuff that was even restraining bishops. The bishops had to write the Vatican to say, hey, can we have like one Sunday Mass with the Latin Mass offered at you know, Saint Michael's parish in you know, Waukegan, Illinois on First Saturdays. Like, they had to write the Vatican about it. Hey, this younger priest wants to off

the Latin Mass. You know, it was really important to him. He was a Latin major in college. Hey, Vatican two thousand miles away, do you guys think it's okay if Father McGillicutty offers Matt So. I think there was pretty widespread non enthusiasm for this after Pope Francis instituted it. It seems like it was something that was pushed by a bunch of Italian liturgical liberals and they sort of convinced Pope Francis to do this. And the situation feels

fairly unstable. So I would imagine Pope Leo will do something. I hope. My guess is that he will say this is just a bad working arrangement where a lot of these bishops are not even following the rules because it's so difficult to comply with and it's so silly. So I would imagine, I would guess that Pope Leo will leave us in those of us who like the Latin mask like I do, will leave us in a better situation and say, you know, maybe individual bishops just run

this and that's it. Now there's also the question of, you know, the ongoing questions of how are we going to handle abuse scandals. I think there were high profile things that Pope Francis didn't handle great, that he himself admitted later on he didn't handle great, not that he was placing abusers places, but that he was trying to be supportive of people who he thought were wrongly accused but actually turned out they were fairly rightly accused. And

this culture of protecting people. I really hope as an American, Pope Leo will be more clear eyed about that. So we'll wait and see. I mean, I think the reforms that were introduced under Pope Benedict were for the most part quite good and quite effective, especially in the United States, but a lot of countries didn't really have the reckoning with sex abuse that the United States had, so I could see problems with a lot of other countries when it comes to that. So I think those are some

of the live issues with the papacy. When we return the fact that the Pope is from Chicago. Just some funny nonsense about that. That's next on the John Jerrardi Show. Okay, some funny things coming out of the election of Pope Francis of Pope Leo. Rather, excuse me a couple of funny things. First, we had the spectacle of so when the pope is elected, they set up this chimney coming out of the Sistine Chapel with a sort of chimney spout. And after the cardinals have a ballot, an electoral ballot.

If they don't get two thirds votes, they burn their ballots and they put in some kind of chemicals to ensure this is the case, because sometimes it's been kind of ambiguous. They put in chemicals so that if they haven't elected a pope, the smoke comes out black. But if they do elect a pope, they burn their ballots and the smoke that comes out because chemicals they add in, or the kind of material whatever the materials are that

they're putting in the smoke comes out white. So you had this spectacle of Catholics worldwide looking at YouTube live video feeds of the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel, and there was a seagull who just kept hanging out there, and at one point there were three seagulls. It was a mom, a dad, and a baby seagull, and everyone's staring at this seagull. It was like the most famous seagull in the whole world. My daughter Lizzie did a water color painting of it without telling my wife, five

year old Lizzie, which was really funny. Anyway, that's hilarious. The other funny thing is that this is the first pope to have saved big money at Minards. Minards is a big Midwest general store and this is probably the only pope who was eating deep dish pizza. So God bless Pope Leo eat some deep dish pizza to celebrate tonight. That'll do it. John's already showee next time on Power Talk