←back to thread

First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV

(www.cnn.com)
606 points saikatsg | 4 comments | 08 May 25 16:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
afavour ◴[08 May 25 17:54 UTC] No.43929124[source]▶
> "Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: 'Look, until America goes into political decline, there won't be an American pope.' And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don't want America running the world religiously. So, I think there's some truth to that, that we're such a superpower and so dominant, they don't wanna give us, also, control over the church."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-pope-could-it-be-american-c...

replies(6): >>43929272 #>>43930430 #>>43930746 #>>43932503 #>>43932802 #>>43934298 #
snickerbockers ◴[08 May 25 23:52 UTC] No.43932503[source]▶
That's an interesting thought but if they're actually that concerned about it then they'd wait longer than four months. It probably has more to do with America's predominant religion being protestantism by a very wife margin for most of the country's existence. We didn't have a Catholic president until Kennedy and even then proving to the common American that Catholics aren't insane Vatican mindslaves was considered a hurdle he had to overcome.

If there's a political motive in not choosing an American pope until now it's that for most of American history it wouldn't have granted them any influence over American politics. If there's a personal motive it's that until recently they felt insulted that America went for almost 200 years before finally electing a Catholic president.

replies(5): >>43932661 #>>43932792 #>>43934802 #>>43934811 #>>43940259 #
scheme271 ◴[09 May 25 00:21 UTC] No.43932661[source]▶
OTOH, 6 of the 9 supreme court justices are catholic so there might be some influence there although I think the influence is probably more from the somewhat uniquely American brand of conservative Catholicism.
replies(3): >>43934056 #>>43934468 #>>43935181 #
1. petesergeant ◴[09 May 25 07:04 UTC] No.43934468[source]▶
‘The next Pope is from Chicago’ sounds like the kind of thing 1800s American nativists would panic about
replies(1): >>43934526 #
2. w0de0 ◴[09 May 25 07:18 UTC] No.43934526[source]▶
Give Twitter another 24 hours to stew over his past ministry and his Peruvian citizenship, and one will find our modern Know Nothings making similar hullabaloo.
replies(1): >>43940388 #
3. snickerbockers ◴[09 May 25 19:57 UTC] No.43940388[source]▶
Is it even viable to run for pope as a priest who spent his whole life in a first-world country? I can't imagine somebody who has spent a significant portion of his life doing charity work or spreading the church to some new population losing out to some guy who spends his whole career preaching to a crowd of predominantly-white bourgeois Americans in a boring midwestern suburb where the biggest problem is either too many DEI programs in local schools or not enough DEI programs in local schools.
replies(1): >>43944588 #
4. w0de0 ◴[10 May 25 10:31 UTC] No.43944588{3}[source]▶
There is no shortage of the downtrodden and dispossessed in the USA, if you seek them. The problem in this hypothetical would rather be that acknowledging and prioritizing such people in America is likely to be, for many fellow first worlders (to include parts of the American Catholic hierarchy) an inherently radical, polarizing, and political act. I doubt such a priest would be so rapidly promoted as was Leo XIV.

Acknowledging and prioritizing similarly marginalized people in poor countries, or at least in countries less tetchy about their failings and political pieties, carries less political risk. (Which is not to claim Prevost cynically avoided American ministry to the poor.)

That said, that such ministry is qualification at all seems to me more a product of Francis’s remaking of the college of cardinals with a notably Franciscan philosophy. The majority of post-WW2 popes have been European, of the first or second world. Benedict was German and John Paul Polish.