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606 points saikatsg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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snickerbockers ◴[] 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.

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netdevphoenix ◴[] No.43934802[source]
> America's predominant religion being Protestantism

Tangent: Protestantism is not a religion. The religion is called Christianity. I have seen this trend for quite a while of Protestants (or people born in Protestant countries) of referring to Christianity branches as religions. I find it very segregational. The whole point of all the branches is the same guy whose name begins with C.

But yes, given the state of America today, having an American pope will definitely be an interesting development in the context of many lobbying groups wishing for a vaticanised America.

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1. snickerbockers ◴[] No.43939240[source]
I don't consider myself part of any organized religion at this point, but I grew up going to this really iconoclastic presbyterian church where we only ever talked about the two testaments of the Bible and the only formal rituals we had were eucharism and the baptism (which, IIRC is because those are the only two rituals with a basis in the gospel) and from that perspective it's always seemed like whatever catholicism is, it's not the same religion as our relgion because they have all sorts of extra stories and tradition that seemed entirely foreign. We didn't even have an antagonistic relationship with them, our pastor never talked about other religions during sermons because he wanted to avoid our church getting involved in any of the negative aspects of christianity and focus only on the sort of positive community-building that jesus does in the gospels. The catholics have a massive canon of saints who they pray to instead of god, a church that claims to derive its authority from jesus himself via claiming one of the disciples to be their first pope, and a tendency to put mary the virgin at the forefront of everything (not that protestants ever had anything against her, but the catholic preoccupation with her really is bewildering from a protestant point-of-view) that seems irreconcilable from the the viewpoint that the religion begins with the old testament and ends with the new testament. I don't even consider myself a christian anymore and yet I still sometimes find myself feeling like Catholicism is no less alien than islam.

That said, looking back there were a couple problems with the protestant viewpoint: one is that there's no attempt at explaining god's apparent 2000-year vacation and another being that the bible was effectively nonexistent until the council at Nicaea and I'm not sure what legitimacy there is in them having any authority to decide what is and is not canon unless you accept the catholic church's authority.