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606 points saikatsg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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afavour ◴[] 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...

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bbor ◴[] No.43929272[source]
For what it’s worth, I was just reading that Leo wasn’t seen as “completely” American due to his many years in Peru — he’s even a citizen. Take that as you will.
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javiramos[dead post] ◴[] No.43931541[source]
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losvedir ◴[] No.43932740[source]
Not in English. I know in the Spanish speaking world there's a single American continent, but as far as I know across the English speaking world it's taught as two continents, North and South America. We have the term "the Americas" to refer to both.
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1. skissane ◴[] No.43935426[source]
I really think this is a failure of education, teaching kids that there are N continents as if that were some kind of objective truth, as opposed to the reality that the definition of “continent” is at least partially conventional, so there are several different values of N which are arguably correct - anything from 4 to 7 is mainstream (at a global level)

Wikipedia is helping, though.

It says (I didn’t know this) that the “single American continent” model was mainstream in the US prior to WW2, so even if there is now a single definition in the Anglosphere, that’s a relatively recent development.

I remember as a kid believing that the Americas contained three continents-North, Central and South. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have ever thought that, and given how conventional these definitions are, can it really be said to be wrong?