From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Tuesday, May 13th. The Pope may seem like a distant figure, but the newest one has wasted no time making waves. It's not just the social media posts riffing on what vibe a pope who originally hails from the South Side
of Chicago might bring to the Vatican. Because even before Pope Leo the 14th slid that papal ring on his finger on Friday, he launched something of an attack on American Vice President J.D. Vance, angering many within the MAGA movement. And in Australia, many Catholics have already begun questioning how the pope's personal views will impact our churches and even
school curricula. Today, chief reporter Jordan Baker, on what we can expect from Pope Leo the 14th and whether he may or may not intervene in our local religious stashes, as the Vatican has done in the past. So, Jordan, we have a new pope. So tell me, who is Pope Leo the 14th and why is he perhaps something of a controversial choice?
So he's an American, which is very interesting in and of itself. Generally, people have thought that Americans have effectively been out of contention because America was powerful enough already. You know, like the president was effectively the leader of the free world. And I think there was always a reluctance to, you know, have that A12 act with the Pope as well. And there's also there's traditionally been like a European dominance with the Pope, particularly Italians. So this
is a highly unusual choice. But it says a lot, I think, about some of the broader issues that the church at the moment and some of the geopolitical issues that the pope is going to have to navigate during his time as the infallible leader of the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost has chosen the name.
Con tutti voi.
So short biography of Pope Leo the 14th. He was born in Chicago. He is from the Order of Saint Augustine. He's got a Bachelor of Science in mathematics, which has led to quite a few jokes about how he's not just interested in sin, but also cos, which is a calculus joke. And he spent a long time in Peru working as a missionary. So he has multiple languages under his belt. He's seen as not just an American cardinal because of his experience in Latin America.
Clear message of peace coming from Pope Leo the 14th. On his first address, He called for an end to all wars across the world, and he specifically mentioned the war in Ukraine.
So he's seen as a sort of person who can bridge the developing world with the developed world of the church. And there's this sense, too, that the church is growing most in the developing world. So it really needs to be represented in the Vatican.
And so tell us, what else do we know, I guess, about Pope Leo and whether he leans progressive or whether he leans conservative, because obviously there was so much discussion. Okay. Is he going to follow in Pope Francis's footsteps? He was considered, I think, you know, significantly progressive in many ways. So just tell me a bit about where he stands on other issues, whether it's same sex marriage or abortion.
So when you look at where the Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost stood before he was elected pope, we can see that he is against ordaining female deacons. Cons. It's not really clear on what he thinks of blessing same sex couples, but he's in favor of promoting a synodal church. And effectively, what that means is it's this sense of how the church interacts with the rest of the world. And this
was a big progressive Conservative split. And again, the thing about progressive and conservative in the Catholic Church, I mean, the teaching is the teaching, right? Like, you know, the sanctity of life is the teaching. So when people are perceived as progressive or conservative, it's often about what they the issues that they see as a priority within that particular topic area. So some people are very much see
the priority is to fight abortion. Others might say the priority is, you know, human dignity for people like refugees, etc., etc., etc..
Now he has used his social media to share views on immigration and racism, and he has also been critical of Vice President JD Vance Online. The new Pope reposted an article titled J.D. Vance is Wrong. Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.
And with a sense of how the church interacts in the world, there is this debate between sort of sitting there and going, well, this is what we think. Like us or love, you know, lump us, you know, a more kind of outreach perspective going, you know, we we welcome the, you know, fallen and the sinners. And, you know, we're not going to sit here and judge you. Please
come in and join us. So it seems according to this anyway, that that Cardinal Provost before he became pope, was a strong supporter of synodality, which is a process that Francis began. So it looks like he will continue Francis's work there.
And I really want to ask you about, I guess, what impact this new pope might have on us here in Australia, because, you know, we've all just seen the pomp and ceremony in Rome. It seems an absolute world away from our lives here on the streets of our cities. But the Pope does actually have a fair bit of influence here. So tell us about that.
I mean, the thing about the Catholic Church is that it's not like a parliament or even the Anglicans. The Anglicans actually publish a lot of information about from their various kind of meetings and that sort of stuff. And the Catholics are just not like that at all. So everything is very secretive, you know, very kind of. It's a lot of reading the tea leaves about where the,
the Vatican kind of reaches into the Australian world. But there's a couple of elements where the Pope is quite important. One of them is the choice of bishops and cardinals. But the other thing that the Vatican does is it keeps a very close eye on our schools and universities. Now, Australia is an absolute world outlier in the way that it publicly Funds, religious schools and universities. So basically the Australian Catholic University students are publicly funded. But, you know,
the government is paying a lot of their fees. Similarly, with the Catholic diocesan schools, these are schools that are run by the various dioceses, but also the Catholic congregational schools. And these are schools that are run by the various orders like the Marists, the Augustines, Pope Leo and Augustine. They get a significant amount of public funding. So the
Vatican loves this. It really sees this as a, you know, a global plan for what they would love to see in other countries, but they also keep a very close eye on it to make sure that everything's going well and that that, you know, that, that what is being taught in these publicly funded Catholic schools is very much what,
you know, the Catholic Church would want to teach. So occasionally we have had situations in which there have been complaints to the Vatican Him dicastery for education over what is going on in Australian schools and universities. In the last few years, we've had two quite controversial examples of those.
I mean, I'll never forget the article you wrote about the the walkout, the very scandalous walkout that took place at Australian Catholic University. This was last year, and I think there was some intervention from the Vatican. So tell us what happened there.
Late last year, there was a gentleman called Joe de Bruyn, who was a former Australian MP and former a very significant union leader in the shop workers union, who basically gave a resoundingly pro-life speech at the end of a graduation at ACU.
So as to endorse same sex marriage.
Now, remember that ACU is a Catholic university, but it is publicly funded, and a lot of the students who go there do not go there because it's Catholic or that they're Catholic. They go there because it's a publicly funded university at which they can get a degree. And I see you as very big, particularly on teaching and nursing degrees. So there's a lot of women. So this speech did not go down well with a lot of people who were graduating that day and their families. And there was a one.
By one students and staff rose to their feet filing out of their graduation ceremony hijacked by an anti-abortion speech.
This was meant to be a celebration and that was taken away.
Now, this set the cat among the pigeons. You know, you then had a situation in which it created a sort of momentum and lots of, you know, people sort of saying, well, is is the Australian Catholic University Catholic enough? And then you had the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, write to the Dicastery of Education in the Vatican saying, look,
we think you guys should investigate this. Me and my Melbourne counterpart think that, you know, it's time for the dicastery to have a look at what's going on at ACU because we're concerned there were some very senior Catholic lawyers who put out a joint letter saying that, you know, perhaps they should consider taking the Catholic designation out of
the Australian Catholic University if it wasn't Catholic enough. But of course, the dicastery from the Vatican does not put out a press release saying that it is investigating Aicu. So we don't really know if it has or not. Some people say that the vice chancellor of ACU was brought over to Rome in November for some meetings. The ACU management says that that just happens all the time. They routinely meet the people from the dicastery a few times a year.
We'll be right back. Now, I know you have reported a lot in the education space. And also, you know, in the space of the Catholic Church, are many parents sort of upset that what their children are being taught really is, you know, it is so changeable and so opaque in terms of what's being done, I guess, about the curricula. It's sort of so out of their hands. Like, is this something that parents express frustration about?
I mean, the thing is, the thing about parents is that there's never one view.
Yes.
And oftentimes, particularly in independent Catholic schools, a lot of people choose independent high schools for their children, be they Catholic or Anglican, on the prestige of the school and the educational offerings it has, and kind of don't quite think about the fact that these are religious schools, and they get a bit of a shock when these religious
schools start asserting their religious viewpoints. This was particularly an issue in the Anglican churches a few years ago where the Anglican, the Anglican Synod basically said that they wanted the principals of these schools and the chairs of the board to affirm that they believe that marriage was between a man and a woman and a lot of parents like, well, wait a minute. What? You know, we don't believe that.
And it's like, well, yeah, you might not, but this isn't Anglican school effectively run by the Anglican Church.
You might want.
To.
Read the fine print. The not so fine print.
Buyer beware when you're sending your kid to a religious school.
And I believe the Vatican also got involved in something of a small town matter at a Parramatta religious school in Sydney. Right?
There was a complaint to the Vatican by some parents. Now Parramatta is a huge melting pot, as we know in Sydney. Right. You've got. And that is no different in terms of religion. So you've got some Maronite Catholics who are quite sort of conservative Catholics. You've got, you know, quite progressive Catholics. Vincent Long is quite a progressive bishop. He was appointed by Pope Francis. He himself is a refugee from Vietnam. He himself was a victim of clergy
abuse as an adult. So, you know, he very much understands some of these issues from a personal perspective. So you've got a very, very wide range of viewpoints there. And a few years ago there were two things that came up as issues, which kind of got conflated in terms of the complaints to the Vatican. One was Mark Latham, who was then a One Nation MP in the New South Wales upper house, put forward a bill to prohibit
the promotion of gender fluidity in schools. And this went to a committee, but the Parramatta Education Office opposed the bill in a submission, basically saying look, this is going to subject LGBTQ students to harassment and it's going to be an unacceptable incursion into the schools professional judgement. Now, that upset a lot of much more conservative Catholics in
the Parramatta district. The other issue was a religious education curriculum, which was unveiled in mid 2020 and basically said it would teach students about different sexual identities, it would teach them about atheism and would teach them about social media relationships. And again, some parents in the Catholic dioceses got upset about that, and they were like, why send our kids to a Catholic school to be, you know, catechized in the Catholic religion? You know, we don't want all this
namby pamby stuff. Also in the religious education curriculum. So my understanding is that the Vatican did get involved and they were involved in a rewriting of the religious education curriculum in Parramatta, which is now only gone into operation this year. So this is now very much a Vatican approved religious education curriculum.
And Jordan, I want to ask you what Catholics here are thinking about. You know, how much the new pope, Pope Leo, will be representing their own concerns and their own issues, or how much he might not be doing so, because you've written that there was some concern that perhaps the Australian perspective was not represented in the conclave that actually chose this new pope. So can you tell us a bit about that?
So everyone expected that if Australia got a new cardinal, that new cardinal would most likely be Anthony Fisher, who is the Archbishop of Sydney. but it wasn't so late last year. Cardinal Francis appointed Mykola Bitok. So he is a Ukrainian from the Ukrainian church. He came to Melbourne in 2021 and has a Ukrainian church parish in Melbourne. So his appointment late last year ruffled a lot of feathers because there was this sense that, well, Australia has
one cardinal's hat. It's gone to a guy who's just come here and will probably return to the Ukraine at some point, perhaps in the not too distant future, and that it wasn't really an Australian red hat. It was Ukrainian red hat by a guy who just happened to be living here. Now, I'm sure Mykola, you know, absolutely represented Australian Catholics in good faith. The complaint was a that it was a a kind of, um, snub of
Archbishop Fisher. Some people say it was even punishment for, for Pell, although Francis was quite a supporter of Pell during the allegations that George Pell faced.
We are, of course, talking about the former Australian archbishop, George Pell.
Yes. So George Pell, of course, was a very high profile cardinal in Australia who from 2002 faced a lot of, uh, recurring accusations of sexual abuse against two victims, although his conviction was then quashed on appeal to the High Court. He was also quite involved and quite senior in the Vatican in a lot of like the sort of Vatican bureaucracy. But Francis was quite supportive of George Pell, so it's unlikely that he was doing it in any way to
kind of punish Australia for Pell. Uh, but there was this expectation that Australia would have a home grown cardinal in the sense somebody who had had spent significant amount of time in Australia understood the issues facing the Australian church, including some of those, you know, social tensions that we have here, particularly around, uh, differing views on how the church should conduct itself. A differing views on what sort
of issues the church should prioritise. And, you know, some, some of the issues that are very much at play in the sort of developed world churches such as pushes for women to be more involved, even to become priests. And the issues in terms of losing a lot of Catholics to, as we know from various censuses, you know, the number of people who subscribe to our various churches
is dropping quite significantly between every census. So these are some of the issues that are particularly facing the Australian church. And there was this view that, well, you know, while Cardinal BioShock, great cardinal, you know, a very beloved man of the cloth would be more representing Ukraine's interests in the conclave rather than Australia's.
Well, thank you so much, Jordan, for your time.
My pleasure.
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carcasole with technical assistance by Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is our head of audio. To listen to our episodes as soon as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newsrooms are powered by subscriptions, so
to support independent journalism, visit The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe and to stay up to date, sign up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. Thanks for listening.