Speaker 1: As soon as the new pope got announced, my phone
Speaker 1: goes insane. What do you think, Johnny? What do you think? Johnny?
Speaker 1: What do you think? Johnny? What do you think? Johnny?
Speaker 1: All Right, I'm going to tell you what I think.
Speaker 1: I've had a day to digest it. I'm happy, I
Speaker 1: am pleasantly. I am feeling optimistic. I feel like we
Speaker 1: are trending in a good direction. And I want to
Speaker 1: talk about some of the tensions from the Francis papacy
Speaker 1: and what Robert Prevost, the new Pope of the Catholic Church,
Speaker 1: Leo the fourteenth, what he could represent. So first, let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about how Pope Leo was formed,
Speaker 1: because I think background is really important for popes. So
Speaker 1: the milieu out of which Leo rose, there's several different
Speaker 1: kind of contexts that we have to look at. He
Speaker 1: was born in Chicago, he was born and raised in Chicago.
Speaker 1: He went to Villanova University for college. Some people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: he went to liberal Villanova, and oh he went to
Speaker 1: this liberal place for seminary. We should note, though, a
Speaker 1: couple of things. I feel this immediate kind of kinship
Speaker 1: with Pope Leo in that when he was an undergraduate
Speaker 1: at Villanova, he founded their student pro life organization and
Speaker 1: was the president of it. I was the president of
Speaker 1: Notre Dame Right to Life when I was an undergrad.
Speaker 1: And this is one thing that gives me a ton
Speaker 1: of hope, is because it's something I understand. He clearly
Speaker 1: has a d deep connection with the American pro life cause.
Speaker 1: He's also the first pope to have had a pre
Speaker 1: existing Twitter account when elected, which has resulted in people
Speaker 1: just crawling through it and scouring it to find evidence
Speaker 1: of what he thinks about things. They found one tweet
Speaker 1: kind of critical of JD. Vance, and everyone blew that
Speaker 1: up into saying, oh, he hates JD. Van See, he
Speaker 1: hates He's a big fat lefty COMI but when you
Speaker 1: go through it, look, let me just I'll just cut
Speaker 1: through this. There's not going to be any pope elected
Speaker 1: who is like yeah, kung ho to pour them all like,
Speaker 1: that's not going to happen, all right. No pope's gonna
Speaker 1: get elected who talks or things like that about immigration. Okay,
Speaker 1: And even if you listen to this show, you'll note
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily the way I talk. I think that
Speaker 1: American immigration has its own very specific kinds of problems
Speaker 1: that if you are commenting on it as the pope
Speaker 1: or papal advisors, like you know the letter that Pope
Speaker 1: that was sent that had Pope Francis's name signed at
Speaker 1: the bottom of it, that was issued in response to
Speaker 1: to JD. Vance's comments about the ordering of how much
Speaker 1: what are what are the duties of society towards immigrants?
Speaker 1: Blah blah blah. There's no way that Pope Francis, at
Speaker 1: age eighty eight or whatever he was, I refuse to
Speaker 1: have the confidence that Pope Francis A was physically fit
Speaker 1: enough to have really thoroughly engaged in the ins and
Speaker 1: outs of the specifics of the American immigration system, the
Speaker 1: asylum system, the way in which the asylum system was abused,
Speaker 1: and bupah bu blah blah blah blah. All right, anyway,
Speaker 1: point being Catholic politicians look at immigration kind of on
Speaker 1: this global perspective and take this global sort of posture,
Speaker 1: many of them rightly or wrongly, that we should be
Speaker 1: globally speaking, generally speaking, accommodating to immigrants. And they see
Speaker 1: Donald Trump not being accommodating to immigrants, and they think
Speaker 1: that's bad. Okay, So you're not going to get a
Speaker 1: cardinal elected who's like, yeah, deport them all like that.
Speaker 1: That's never going to happen. So they find one thing
Speaker 1: that Cardinal Prevost retweeted about JD. Vance and all that,
Speaker 1: But what people also found were a bunch of things
Speaker 1: that he retweeted, reposted, and has said over the course
Speaker 1: of time that were phenomenal regarding pro life issues, even
Speaker 1: down to the level of criticizing his own state government
Speaker 1: in Illinois, where he occasionally would vote when he wasn't,
Speaker 1: you know, out of the country, his own state government
Speaker 1: in Illinois for doing horrible things for you know, the
Speaker 1: Illinois state legislature does all kinds of horrible things, like
Speaker 1: the California legislature does to further facilitate abortion access, fund abortion,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really encouraged
Speaker 1: by the fact that he is coming from the American
Speaker 1: pro life world and the kinds of thinkers he is
Speaker 1: citing and thinkers he is retweeting are people whom I
Speaker 1: know of and like and care for. That gives me hope.
Speaker 1: A couple of other things about him that I think
Speaker 1: are encouraging. He's a lawyer. He's not a normal lawyer.
Speaker 1: He's a canon lawyer. Okay, So for those who don't know,
Speaker 1: canon law is the field of law by which the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church and other kinds of ecclesial bodies Eastern Catholic
Speaker 1: churches have their own body of canon law. Canon law
Speaker 1: was very important, especially historically prior to the Reformation in
Speaker 1: a lot of places and have to the Reformation, historically
Speaker 1: Catholic countries where canon law and civil law would intersect
Speaker 1: in the law and rights of the Church as opposed
Speaker 1: to the law rights of the state. Anyway, Cardinal Prevost
Speaker 1: is a canon lawyer, and as much as a lot
Speaker 1: of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops, and he is a
Speaker 1: Boomer he was born in nineteen fifty five, as much
Speaker 1: as a lot of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops were
Speaker 1: very loosey goosey. The one group of people that at
Speaker 1: least retain a certain level of non lucy goosiness about
Speaker 1: the faith, people who actually have a sense of order
Speaker 1: within the Catholic religion are canon lawyers. I've never met
Speaker 1: a canon lawyer that I didn't like. I've never met
Speaker 1: a canon lawyer who didn't have his head screwed on
Speaker 1: right at least on really fundamental things, and so that
Speaker 1: actually gives me a ton of hope. He you know,
Speaker 1: he has also been able to administer and govern people
Speaker 1: in a lot of different capacities in different countries. So
Speaker 1: for those, let me give a sort of sketch out
Speaker 1: his career. He grows up in America, he studies in Rome,
Speaker 1: gets his doctor and ken in law, and he is
Speaker 1: an Augustinian friar. So this is a community of priests
Speaker 1: who follow the rule of life developed by Saint Augustine,
Speaker 1: and they live lives of poverty, so they don't own
Speaker 1: any property in common. Their community owns all their property.
Speaker 1: They all of their property is owned in common. So
Speaker 1: within their community, no individual person owns any individual stuff.
Speaker 1: So poverty, chastity and obedience. So he served as a
Speaker 1: superior within his Augustinian community, and most of his life
Speaker 1: as a priest was spent in South America in Peru,
Speaker 1: and eventually he was named a bishop of a diocese
Speaker 1: in Peru, which is very odd to have someone from
Speaker 1: another country move to a country, work there as a
Speaker 1: priest and be named a bishop there. It's kind of
Speaker 1: an odd thing. I guess the most high profile example
Speaker 1: that is Archbishop Gomez, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who
Speaker 1: I think was born and raised in Mexico, and as
Speaker 1: a result, Cardinal Privost had joint Peruvian and American citizenship
Speaker 1: because he'd lived and worked in Peru for so long,
Speaker 1: so he had worked very often in Peru. Then he
Speaker 1: works a lot in Rome. When he's made a cardinal
Speaker 1: by Pope Francis, he's prefect of he's head of what's
Speaker 1: called the Dicastro for bishops, so he was the chief
Speaker 1: guy helping advise the Pope about naming new bishops. Now
Speaker 1: I don't know how empowered he was in that role,
Speaker 1: so it's a little hard for me to look at
Speaker 1: individual bishop appointments and say, Aha, yes, that was him.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it
Speaker 1: comes to picking who a new bishop is going to be.
Speaker 1: But the thing that I kind of am struck by
Speaker 1: is that he seems to be a pretty rooted, humble guy,
Speaker 1: even down to little things that I don't want to
Speaker 1: blow them up into big things, but I will say this.
Speaker 1: I will say this about Pope Francis and you don't
Speaker 1: want to speak ill of the dead. But people talked
Speaker 1: a lot about how humble Pope Francis was. Francis, though,
Speaker 1: didn't really want to kind of conform and kind of
Speaker 1: go with the flow with a lot of things. Again,
Speaker 1: maybe personal humility, I don't know, but he really stuck
Speaker 1: out like a sore thumb as far as how he
Speaker 1: conducted himself as pope, and you could see it like
Speaker 1: even in ways that became actually quite inconvenient for everybody.
Speaker 1: He was like, I don't want to live in the
Speaker 1: Vatican apartments and the palace is like a king. I'm
Speaker 1: just going to live at the Casa Santa Marta, which
Speaker 1: is like a hotel that cardinals stay at when they
Speaker 1: visit Rome. Well, that was actually a really expensive and
Speaker 1: it was built it's like, oh, look, the pope's a
Speaker 1: man of the people, he wants to hang out with everybody. Well,
Speaker 1: that was actually a really expensive and really inconvenient thing
Speaker 1: for him to have done. It required basically, all right,
Speaker 1: you're like a world leader. For security purposes, we can't
Speaker 1: just have have you live in a hotel with guests. Oh,
Speaker 1: new guests up pop in right next to you. No,
Speaker 1: so they had to basically take give him a whole floor.
Speaker 1: They had to do all this security stuff. It was
Speaker 1: actually quite expensive and quite difficult and et cetera. H
Speaker 1: France has sort of refused to wear certain elements of
Speaker 1: papal clothing, which the Pope Leo woar on day one
Speaker 1: he refused to and even down to the level of
Speaker 1: so so basically, here's my point. Francis was temperamentally a
Speaker 1: prickly kind of person. I think I kind of get
Speaker 1: the sense of that. I don't want to trash the guy.
Speaker 1: I think he had a lot of good qualities, but
Speaker 1: I can really see. So I'm not trying to do
Speaker 1: this like massive contrast, but I do see with Leo,
Speaker 1: I understand him. He's a guy from South Chicago. I
Speaker 1: got to meet a lot of guys like that when
Speaker 1: I was at Notre Dame. He is. I got to
Speaker 1: meet a lot of priests like that when I was
Speaker 1: at Notre Dame. He's While he's very, very intelligent, I'm
Speaker 1: sure he's much more intelligent than me. I mean I
Speaker 1: read some stuff he wrote, like some like academic stuff
Speaker 1: he wrote, and I could barely make head or tails
Speaker 1: of it. He was a math major at Villanova, and
Speaker 1: then he goes on to be a canon lawyer. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wrote read some philosophy stuff he wrote. But I
Speaker 1: can see this sort of basic bedrock, simple South Chicago
Speaker 1: Catholic kind of humility. I know that I understand that,
Speaker 1: whereas Pope Francis was coming out of something totally foreign
Speaker 1: to me that I had no way of understanding. Even
Speaker 1: even as far as like politics and stuff like, I
Speaker 1: mean South American politics and some of the South American
Speaker 1: political ideas and Argentinean political ideas that Pope France has
Speaker 1: brought to his work and viewpoints on the papacy were
Speaker 1: extremely weird and complex, and they sometimes manifested themselves and
Speaker 1: these very unpleasant wit Anyway, I understand this guy. I
Speaker 1: think he's very down to earth. He seems very simple
Speaker 1: in good ways. And this is one thing about being
Speaker 1: the Pope, that there's temperament. Temperament makes a big deal.
Speaker 1: Pope Francis made two kind of big tidle waves as
Speaker 1: far as is he diluting Catholic teaching. He issued one
Speaker 1: document that said that seemed to kind of maybe indicate
Speaker 1: in some circumstances divorced and remarried Catholics could receive communion,
Speaker 1: which seemed to have been a break from his predecessor,
Speaker 1: John Paul the Second. I should say three things he did.
Speaker 1: That he sort of rewrote what was in the Catechism
Speaker 1: about the death penalty again in a way that seemed
Speaker 1: to maybe like it was breaking with John Paul the Second.
Speaker 1: And he had one of his flunkies issue a document
Speaker 1: largely retracted, thank God, that seemed to maybe indicate again
Speaker 1: breaking with John Paul the Second, breaking with Benedict the sixteenth,
Speaker 1: breaking with himself from a prior document he had issued
Speaker 1: to allow gay couples to be blessed, not their union,
Speaker 1: but just these two people. And this is the thing.
Speaker 1: You might have a pope who's a little more liberal leaning,
Speaker 1: but it takes a real kind of temperament to decide
Speaker 1: I am going to do this. That is clearly going
Speaker 1: to seem at least to be a break. Whether it
Speaker 1: authentically is I don't think so, but it's going to
Speaker 1: seem to be a break with the prior tradition. There's
Speaker 1: temperament involved there. I think if Pope Francis were a
Speaker 1: different kind of person, maybe a person who was a
Speaker 1: little less stubborn, maybe a person who was a little
Speaker 1: less kind of insistent, and maybe a bit more deferential
Speaker 1: to tradition, deferential to the office that maybe that would
Speaker 1: never have happened. I see in Pope Leo a personality
Speaker 1: that is you know, this is the thing about Americans.
Speaker 1: When we go to Rome, we're all overwhelmed. I mean,
Speaker 1: you walk around in Fresno, there's barely a single building
Speaker 1: that's more than one hundred years old. When someone from
Speaker 1: America goes to Rome, they're floored because everything they look
Speaker 1: at is older than our country. If you're from Presno
Speaker 1: and you go to Rome, you're you're overwhelmed by the
Speaker 1: enormity of the history and the tradition, and the beauty
Speaker 1: and the grandeur of what you're seeing. And I see
Speaker 1: in Pope Leo. Again, I'm not like some grand oracle
Speaker 1: or anything. And by the way, I'm trying to say
Speaker 1: this out of all deference to Pope Francis, who, again
Speaker 1: I try to remind people, is more conservative than Donald
Speaker 1: Trump on abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism. I think the liberalizing
Speaker 1: case for Pope Francis is overblown, and the most he
Speaker 1: did to screw around with Catholic doctrine was stuff that
Speaker 1: was ambiguous at worst. But for all that chaotic and
Speaker 1: chaos inducing. But I think, basically, I'll say this, I
Speaker 1: feel better under I feel better about the prospects for
Speaker 1: the church under Pope Leo. I think he is a
Speaker 1: better I think he is temperamentally, maybe in some ways
Speaker 1: a little better suited to the job. And and I'm
Speaker 1: very hopeful. And he's someone whose motivations I feel I
Speaker 1: can understand when we return other catholic y stuff. The
Speaker 1: scuttle butt is he actually the stealth candidate of the Conservatives.
Speaker 1: That's next on the John Girardi Show. Now, one thing
Speaker 1: that pious Catholic commentators love to do is they love
Speaker 1: to say, well, it's too simplistic to chart the cardinals
Speaker 1: in the Catholic Church along the spectrum of conservative and liberal.
Speaker 1: That is a simplistic American political category that has no
Speaker 1: place in the church. The focus of the cardinals is
Speaker 1: on Jesus Christ and his church, and it is that
Speaker 1: like you're a bad person, and it doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 1: Only it kind of does. If you're gonna sit there
Speaker 1: and with a straight face, tell me that Cardinal Raymond Burke.
Speaker 1: Who is this American cardinal who celebrates the traditional Latin
Speaker 1: Mass I suspect every single day, which is the right
Speaker 1: of mass that was in use in the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years prior to the nineteen sixties, celebrated
Speaker 1: entirely in Latin, who wears antique investments from the seventeenth
Speaker 1: century on a regular basis. Who is the only it
Speaker 1: is the most staunchly pro life, anti LGBT outside of
Speaker 1: res You're going to tell me that he isn't more
Speaker 1: conservative than you know some random than you know Cardinal
Speaker 1: McElroy from the United States, for example, who is writing
Speaker 1: trying to revivify left wing moral theologians that we thought
Speaker 1: John Paul the second had absolutely buried. Give me a break. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there are differences between the cardinals and the human mind
Speaker 1: likes to categorize things along a spectrum. So sometimes that
Speaker 1: spectrum we use labels like left and right for it. Yes,
Speaker 1: I understand that the labels left and right are used
Speaker 1: mostly in American political context to mean certain kinds of things,
Speaker 1: and it's not one hundred percent. Apples to apples makes
Speaker 1: exactly the same thing. When it comes to applying the
Speaker 1: analysis to the Catholic Church. Yes, I realized that the
Speaker 1: left right distinction originated from the French Revolution and the
Speaker 1: Estates General and all the people who were the most
Speaker 1: radically wanting to get rid of the monarchy sat on
Speaker 1: the left side, and the people who were more eh,
Speaker 1: maybe let's slow it down a bit, sat on the
Speaker 1: right side. Nonetheless, there's some I'm kind of wondering a
Speaker 1: little bit if Robert Privos, the new Pope Leo, if
Speaker 1: he was kind of a bit the candidate of the Conservatives,
Speaker 1: or at the very least if he was open to
Speaker 1: the Conservatives. So one of the dynamic that exists within
Speaker 1: the election of a pope is there's one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty five cardinals who are electors. Basically, you have to
Speaker 1: be a cardinal and you have to be under the
Speaker 1: age of eighty, So there are one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: five guys like that. You need a two thirds majority
Speaker 1: to win. So I think there are some people who
Speaker 1: are super kind of very hardcore conservative, some people who
Speaker 1: were very hardcore liberal, and then a lot of cardinals
Speaker 1: who just didn't really know anybody. A lot of cardinals
Speaker 1: who got named cardinal who were from far flung corners
Speaker 1: of the world and hadn't really come to Rome to
Speaker 1: meet with all the other cardinals because Francis, as this
Speaker 1: was another kind of weird Francis thing. He got upset
Speaker 1: because when he had cardinals meeting early on in his pontificate,
Speaker 1: some of them like disagreed with him and stuff, and
Speaker 1: he didn't really convene all the cardinals together very often.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the cardinals just didn't really know
Speaker 1: each other at all. And so basically, I don't think
Speaker 1: there was any chance that a super super conservative cardinal
Speaker 1: was going to get elected or super left wing cardinal
Speaker 1: was going to get elected. There was going to have
Speaker 1: to be some kind of compromise and some kind of
Speaker 1: coalition building within that body. And it appears that Cardinal
Speaker 1: Prevost met with Cardinal Burke, who was like the most
Speaker 1: conservative cardinal in the whole Catholic Church. And I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of and also there was this more
Speaker 1: so than just meeting at Cardinal Burke's apartment. One of
Speaker 1: the seismic things that happened a few years ago, not
Speaker 1: two years ago, was this document got issued under Pope
Speaker 1: Francis by one of his a newly appointed person of
Speaker 1: his to authorize blessing same sex couples, not blessing their union,
Speaker 1: but just to bless them as persons. And people thought, well,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, are we opening the door to gay marriage?
Speaker 1: And the African Cardinals through a fit. They caused an
Speaker 1: uproar and basically forced the Pope to retract it. Now,
Speaker 1: I think it's ambiguous, as was that actually changing Catholic doctrine.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it was ambiguous, but more
Speaker 1: or less, the African Cardinals said absolutely not, We absolutely
Speaker 1: are not even going to broach this subject. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, Pope Leo, he got two thirds of these
Speaker 1: guys to vote for him. Presumably a lot of African
Speaker 1: Cardinals voted for him, So I think he needs to
Speaker 1: be responsive to conservatives, and this is sort of my hope.
Speaker 1: My hope is for a papacy that is boring. My
Speaker 1: hope is for a papacy that is open and kind
Speaker 1: and accepting to conservative groups within the Catholic Church who
Speaker 1: faced a lot of frankly just persecution is maybe a
Speaker 1: little strong under Pope Francis. I just want peace. I
Speaker 1: want a boring pope who says boringly Catholic stuff and
Speaker 1: appoints boringly good, decent, competent bishops worldwide. That's what I want,
Speaker 1: and that's my hope, and if that is your standard,
Speaker 1: I have some hope for Pope Leo. I don't know
Speaker 1: that he's going to be quite the titan that John
Speaker 1: Paul the Second or Benedict the sixteenth the sixteenth were,
Speaker 1: but I have hope. I do have hope. I have
Speaker 1: hope for him. Temperamentally, I have hope for him. As
Speaker 1: far as understanding his background, I have hope. So when
Speaker 1: we return, some live Catholic issues that Pope Leo may
Speaker 1: decide over the course of his probably quite long papacy.
Speaker 1: Next on the John Jrardy Show, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: live Catholic controversy that now that we have a healthy
Speaker 1: pope re installed within the Catholic Church, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of issues that he's going to have to deal with.
Speaker 1: So a couple of big hot button topics that I
Speaker 1: think at some point he is going to rule on.
Speaker 1: And let's remember this, he's a relatively young pope. Pope
Speaker 1: Leo is sixty nine years old. Let's remember that Pope
Speaker 1: Francis was seventy seven when he was elected, and Pope
Speaker 1: Benedict was seventy eight when he was elected. Benedict only
Speaker 1: served for eight years. Francis served for twelve years. So
Speaker 1: you know, this guy's sixty nine years old. Popes have
Speaker 1: good health care. This guy looks relatively healthy, So I
Speaker 1: mean not inconceivable this guy could be pope for you know,
Speaker 1: twenty years. So what are some of the live controversies
Speaker 1: that are existing right now within the Catholic Church. Certain
Speaker 1: surely new things will have developed and the landscape will
Speaker 1: look much different ten years from now. What are the
Speaker 1: live controversies to deal with right now? Okay, so one
Speaker 1: of the big things is honestly competent administration of the
Speaker 1: Vatican and money, Like it's boring to think about, but
Speaker 1: the Vatican has been running a deficit year every year.
Speaker 1: They have a massive pension liability that they're facing, and
Speaker 1: they got to figure out how to get the money
Speaker 1: situation right. Stuff got worse and worse and worse under
Speaker 1: Pope Francis. Pope Francis got elected on the idea that
Speaker 1: he was an administrator. He had very specific ideas for
Speaker 1: how he wanted to do things, not very clear how
Speaker 1: successful they were. So that's a big deal, and it's
Speaker 1: probably a non zero reason why Prevost got picked. He
Speaker 1: seems to not engage in factionalism, and seems to work
Speaker 1: well with lots of people in a lot of contexts,
Speaker 1: and is a good administrator. So that's a non zero
Speaker 1: reason to pick somebody to be pope. So that's the
Speaker 1: boring stuff. Let's talk about some doctrinal stuff though. So
Speaker 1: one of the questions to deal with is this thing
Speaker 1: called sinnodality s Y n O D A l I
Speaker 1: T Y. Now, synods were a part of the life
Speaker 1: of the church going back all the way to the
Speaker 1: beginning and in the early Roman you know, after the
Speaker 1: legalization of Christianity under Constantine, synods were a thing that
Speaker 1: would happen. Sentods were usually kind of localized gatherings of
Speaker 1: bishops to discuss x, Y or Z. I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: that they are a constitutive element of the church. It's
Speaker 1: a little different from say, what we would call an
Speaker 1: ecumenical council where you get all the bishops together to
Speaker 1: talk about stuff. From the Council of Jerusalem, the gathering
Speaker 1: of all the apostles together in Jerusalem, that's described in
Speaker 1: the Acts of the Apostles, in which they ultimately decided, yes,
Speaker 1: the Gospel is open to non Jews. To the Second
Speaker 1: Vatican Council, which happened in nineteen sixty two, which was
Speaker 1: again a gathering of all the world's bishops. Sinnidality is
Speaker 1: sort of in the middle, and obviously it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: attested to in the New Testament. It's just a thing
Speaker 1: that would happen that bishops would gather to discuss stuff.
Speaker 1: Smaller groups of bishops would gather to discuss stuff, and
Speaker 1: Pope Francis his pontificate was now that the church, the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church, has been having synods on and off since
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, So a gathering of maybe not all
Speaker 1: the world's bishops, but maybe a select group of the
Speaker 1: world's bishops to help talk about a certain topic and
Speaker 1: help advise the pope, and the Pope writes a document
Speaker 1: and they go on. Under Francis, these things took on
Speaker 1: way outsized importance because it seemed like Francis was leaving
Speaker 1: up to debate and discussion stuff that you would have
Speaker 1: thought was not really up for debate or discussion. You know,
Speaker 1: here's a synod allegedly about this topic where all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, we're talking about whether we should have female deacons, Like,
Speaker 1: what the heck does that have to do with anything.
Speaker 1: Here's a synod on the family and we're talking about
Speaker 1: should we give communion to people who are divorced and remarried?
Speaker 1: And these synods had these like felt like they had
Speaker 1: these big high stakes attached to them. People were angry,
Speaker 1: and Francis just loved this crap, and he just kept
Speaker 1: having a sinnate after sinnate after senate to the point
Speaker 1: that I think what was maybe the high point of
Speaker 1: where I would imagine if you're an outside non Catholic
Speaker 1: observer looking at this, you think these people are just
Speaker 1: staring at their navels. We had a synod on the
Speaker 1: topic of synodality, that was the most recent thing. And
Speaker 1: the question is are we going to keep on doing
Speaker 1: this whole Senate thing? So I don't know exactly know
Speaker 1: where pop Leo stands on it. He mentioned being a
Speaker 1: synodyl church in his opening statements from the Balcony of
Speaker 1: Saint Peter's, But whether that means yes, I want to
Speaker 1: keep having synods at this level constantly all the time.
Speaker 1: The word synod means on the road with comes from
Speaker 1: the Greek words soon, which means with and hodos, which
Speaker 1: means wrote. So the idea is, well, we want to
Speaker 1: be a church that listens to everybody, you know, listen
Speaker 1: to everybody, hear everyone's perspectives before we act, which is fine,
Speaker 1: but it seems like it's just these never ending discussions
Speaker 1: and then at the end of the day the pope
Speaker 1: can kind of do what he wants. I mean that,
Speaker 1: you know, there was one critique about when the pope issues,
Speaker 1: when the Pope issued this document that was seemed to
Speaker 1: sort of open the door to blessing gay couples, which
Speaker 1: got really retracted after the African bishops had an uproar
Speaker 1: about it. And I think the document was at worst ambiguous.
Speaker 1: It was after it had no connection whats ever, had
Speaker 1: any sinate. It was just the Pope just issued it
Speaker 1: on his own without really seemingly without consulting very many people.
Speaker 1: So I again, i'm i'm there is a definitely a
Speaker 1: non zero amount of the world's bishops who are really
Speaker 1: tired of this constant synod you know, posture that the
Speaker 1: church is in. So are we going to keep doing that.
Speaker 1: There are other sort of live issue controversies. I think
Speaker 1: there's a question of are some of the more controversial
Speaker 1: theological points that were raised during Pope Francis's papacy and
Speaker 1: kind of left Danglin as far as okay, well, he
Speaker 1: has this document where he kind of sort of thinks,
Speaker 1: sort of maybe there might be some circumstances where divorced
Speaker 1: and remarried people might be able to receive fully communion.
Speaker 1: How how does that square with what John Paul the
Speaker 1: second said, which is, no, what are the circumstances? Can
Speaker 1: you show that there's consistency with the Catholic faith? And
Speaker 1: Pope france Is basically just said no, I don't need
Speaker 1: to show that. He had actually a group of cardinals
Speaker 1: who submitted what we're called dubia, which means questions asking
Speaker 1: about well, how do we square that? And Pope Francis
Speaker 1: just refused to answer. So will he will will he answer?
Speaker 1: Will Pope Leo answer those dubia? Will he ask that
Speaker 1: these things be clarified? Will he ask that these things
Speaker 1: be clarified to show well, no, we're not definitively crossing
Speaker 1: that bridge or whatever it is. I think the fact
Speaker 1: that Cardinal Burke is so Cardinal Burke, who is this
Speaker 1: American cardinal super conservative who was a big time critic
Speaker 1: of Pope Francis issuing some of his more i'll say
Speaker 1: ambiguous theological statements. Cardinal Burke seems very happy with Pope
Speaker 1: Leo's election, and Cardinal Burke was one of the guys
Speaker 1: who wrote these dubia to ask for clarification on these
Speaker 1: theological points. There's also a sort of close to me
Speaker 1: the question of the Latin mass. So Catholics had a
Speaker 1: certain way of offering the Mass for hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 1: of years, and in nineteen sixty nine this was radically changed.
Speaker 1: The modern rite of mass the most Roman Catholics attend,
Speaker 1: is usually offered in the vernacular language of the local
Speaker 1: people rather than in Latin, although sometimes when you go
Speaker 1: to some places you'll hear some parts of the mass
Speaker 1: in Latin. But it's totally up to the priest's discretion.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of other changes that happened.
Speaker 1: There was a sort of a break with sort of
Speaker 1: the literature that was embodied in the older Missile, some
Speaker 1: of which was ancient and weighted with really beautiful historic
Speaker 1: theological language. A lot of that got kind of pitched
Speaker 1: out or cut and snipped and edited in the modern missile.
Speaker 1: And there was a lot of richness and beauty, especially musical,
Speaker 1: this whole musical tradition that the Catholic Church has developed
Speaker 1: over the course of you know, two thousand years, much
Speaker 1: of which sat poorly within the context of the modern
Speaker 1: right of mass, or was just pitched out of the
Speaker 1: modern righte of mass. So Paul Benedict had said about
Speaker 1: the older right of mass, every priest is allowed to
Speaker 1: do it. Just do it. It's fine, there's nothing harmful
Speaker 1: about it. If in your context, in your Paris, you
Speaker 1: think you want to do it, just do it. And
Speaker 1: Pope Francis sort of aligned with, kind of more aligned with,
Speaker 1: I think, sort of the boomer sympathies of older churchmen
Speaker 1: alive today. He hated the Latin Mouth. Well, I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say he hated it. He did not seem to like
Speaker 1: the Latin mass very much, and so he massively restricted it.
Speaker 1: And not just like if he had just said, okay,
Speaker 1: individual bishops have to govern it within their die, so
Speaker 1: they have to give an okay. It's not at the
Speaker 1: level of individual priests. It has to be individual bishops.
Speaker 1: If he had just said that, that's more reasonable, but
Speaker 1: instead he had all this stuff that was even restraining bishops.
Speaker 1: The bishops had to write the Vatican to say, hey,
Speaker 1: can we have like one Sunday Mass with the Latin
Speaker 1: Mass offered at you know, Saint Michael's parish in you know, Waukegan,
Speaker 1: Illinois on First Saturdays. Like, they had to write the
Speaker 1: Vatican about it. Hey, this younger priest wants to off
Speaker 1: the Latin Mass. You know, it was really important to him.
Speaker 1: He was a Latin major in college. Hey, Vatican two
Speaker 1: thousand miles away, do you guys think it's okay if
Speaker 1: Father McGillicutty offers Matt So. I think there was pretty
Speaker 1: widespread non enthusiasm for this after Pope Francis instituted it.
Speaker 1: It seems like it was something that was pushed by
Speaker 1: a bunch of Italian liturgical liberals and they sort of
Speaker 1: convinced Pope Francis to do this. And the situation feels
Speaker 1: fairly unstable. So I would imagine Pope Leo will do something.
Speaker 1: I hope. My guess is that he will say this
Speaker 1: is just a bad working arrangement where a lot of
Speaker 1: these bishops are not even following the rules because it's
Speaker 1: so difficult to comply with and it's so silly. So
Speaker 1: I would imagine, I would guess that Pope Leo will
Speaker 1: leave us in those of us who like the Latin
Speaker 1: mask like I do, will leave us in a better
Speaker 1: situation and say, you know, maybe individual bishops just run
Speaker 1: this and that's it. Now there's also the question of,
Speaker 1: you know, the ongoing questions of how are we going
Speaker 1: to handle abuse scandals. I think there were high profile
Speaker 1: things that Pope Francis didn't handle great, that he himself
Speaker 1: admitted later on he didn't handle great, not that he
Speaker 1: was placing abusers places, but that he was trying to
Speaker 1: be supportive of people who he thought were wrongly accused
Speaker 1: but actually turned out they were fairly rightly accused. And
Speaker 1: this culture of protecting people. I really hope as an American,
Speaker 1: Pope Leo will be more clear eyed about that. So
Speaker 1: we'll wait and see. I mean, I think the reforms
Speaker 1: that were introduced under Pope Benedict were for the most
Speaker 1: part quite good and quite effective, especially in the United States,
Speaker 1: but a lot of countries didn't really have the reckoning
Speaker 1: with sex abuse that the United States had, so I
Speaker 1: could see problems with a lot of other countries when
Speaker 1: it comes to that. So I think those are some
Speaker 1: of the live issues with the papacy. When we return
Speaker 1: the fact that the Pope is from Chicago. Just some
Speaker 1: funny nonsense about that. That's next on the John Jerrardi Show. Okay,
Speaker 1: some funny things coming out of the election of Pope
Speaker 1: Francis of Pope Leo. Rather, excuse me a couple of
Speaker 1: funny things. First, we had the spectacle of so when
Speaker 1: the pope is elected, they set up this chimney coming
Speaker 1: out of the Sistine Chapel with a sort of chimney spout.
Speaker 1: And after the cardinals have a ballot, an electoral ballot.
Speaker 1: If they don't get two thirds votes, they burn their
Speaker 1: ballots and they put in some kind of chemicals to
Speaker 1: ensure this is the case, because sometimes it's been kind
Speaker 1: of ambiguous. They put in chemicals so that if they
Speaker 1: haven't elected a pope, the smoke comes out black. But
Speaker 1: if they do elect a pope, they burn their ballots
Speaker 1: and the smoke that comes out because chemicals they add in,
Speaker 1: or the kind of material whatever the materials are that
Speaker 1: they're putting in the smoke comes out white. So you
Speaker 1: had this spectacle of Catholics worldwide looking at YouTube live
Speaker 1: video feeds of the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel,
Speaker 1: and there was a seagull who just kept hanging out there,
Speaker 1: and at one point there were three seagulls. It was
Speaker 1: a mom, a dad, and a baby seagull, and everyone's
Speaker 1: staring at this seagull. It was like the most famous
Speaker 1: seagull in the whole world. My daughter Lizzie did a
Speaker 1: water color painting of it without telling my wife, five
Speaker 1: year old Lizzie, which was really funny. Anyway, that's hilarious.
Speaker 1: The other funny thing is that this is the first
Speaker 1: pope to have saved big money at Minards. Minards is
Speaker 1: a big Midwest general store and this is probably the
Speaker 1: only pope who was eating deep dish pizza. So God
Speaker 1: bless Pope Leo eat some deep dish pizza to celebrate tonight.
Speaker 1: That'll do it. John's already showee next time on Power
Speaker 1: Talk