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606 points saikatsg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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mvieira38 ◴[] No.43930642[source]
Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there
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GuB-42 ◴[] No.43931943[source]
GP is right, he is not "completely" American in the sense that he is both American and Peruvian because of his dual citizenship. He also spent most of his life outside of the USA.

Which I think is a great thing as the representative of a worldwide religion. Born in the US, an English-speaking country in North America, lived in Peru, a Spanish-speaking country in the South America, then in Italy, an Italian-speaking country in Europe.

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kashunstva ◴[] No.43932986[source]
> he is not "completely" American

As for being completely American: dual citizen of U.S. and another country here. On each April 15, the U.S. still considers me completely American even though I haven’t earned a cent there in over a decade. So in an official sense, that moniker sticks to you like Super Glue.

Granted, the new pope may have a wider scope of cultural influences than many, if not a majority of Americans, it sounds like his formative years were spent in the U.S. so I’d call him American.

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User23 ◴[] No.43934125[source]
There’s a really interesting question here. Will the USA claim the right to tax the new pontiff? Likely answer is no, but legally the statute suggests yes. But who knows? There’s never before been a US citizen who is also a foreign sovereign.
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skissane ◴[] No.43934260[source]
> There’s never before been a US citizen who is also a foreign sovereign.

Éamon de Valera was born in New York City in 1882, and served as President of Ireland from 1959 to 1973

Bhumibol Adulyadej was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1927, and served as King of Thailand from 1946 until his death in 2016

That’s just two US-born individuals who became head of state of another country, there may be more.

I assume both were US citizens at birth (de Valera was born into poverty, abandoned by his Spanish father, reputedly an artist; Bhumibol‘s father was a student at Harvard)-whether or not they ever formally renounced their US citizenship, I don’t know

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1. madcaptenor ◴[] No.43936240[source]
I was wondering whether Wikipedia would comment. They don't, but somebody already edited Bhumibol's article to say that "His father was enrolled in the public health program at Harvard University, which is why Bhumibol was the only monarch to be born in the US until the 2025 papal conclave elected Pope Leo XIV."

There are some sources indicating that children of foreign sovereigns would be exempt from automatic citizenship, but Bhumibol's father wasn't the king, just the king's brother.

Éamon de Valera's case is unambiguous.

There are surely other world leaders who spent significant time in the US - Benjamin Netanyahu spent some time in the Philadelphia area as a child, for example. And a little bit of research turns up Naftali Bennett, prime minister of Israel in 2021-22 - he was a US citizen (born in Israel to US citizen parents) until he had to renounce his US citizenship when elected to the Knesset.

Famously Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel (which is a largely ceremonial post), which presumably would have come with Israeli citizenship, but he turned it down.