Pope Francis, Death & the Next Pope

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I woke up this morning to the text from my
mom that Pope Francis had passed away, and I thought, well,
who's going to comment on this in local media as
much as I am, Probably not too many people. I'm
not sure how many other local radio hosts or Catholics

(00:20):
or anything or have thought about Pope Francis as much
as I have. So I want to spend the first
part of the show talking about him and talking about
the legacy that Francis leaves behind, which is a complicated one,
I would say, So I want to start. I'll try

(00:41):
and go through, you know, the good, the bad, and
the indifferent. Pope Francis was elected in twenty thirteen on
the heels of Pope Benedict and Pope Benedict the sixteenth
had a very odd papacy, a very odd ending. Benedict
was a giant. Joseph Ratzinger Benedict the sixteenth was a giant.

(01:09):
When John Paul the second died in two thousand and five,
and this is reported from other cardinals sort of talked
about that papal election, and by the way, for those
who don't know the way it works in the Catholic churches,
when a pope dies, this group of bishops, called the

(01:32):
College of Cardinals, gets together. Cardinals are sort of form
in name, they are the clergy of the city of Rome,
and they are there to elect the new Bishop of Rome,
the person who succeeds Saint Peter. Now, in practice, the

(01:55):
cardinals are usually senior archbishops from big cities all over
the world, and then a couple of archbishops who work
directly in Rome and directly help the pope in the
administration of the church. So you have cardinals in what's
called the Roman Curia, cardinals who live in Rome and
help the pope, and then cardinals who are bishop archbishops

(02:16):
of big cities all over the world. Cardinal Dolan is
the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Soupitch is the Archbishop
of Chicago, Cardinal McElroy is the Archbishop of Washington, d c. Etc. So,
And sometimes a pope will be picked from some random

(02:39):
city where he's an archbishop. Pope Francis was like that.
He had been the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Pope Benedict,
on the other hand, was a pope who worked in
the Roman Curia and he directly assisted John Paul the
Second for about twenty five years before he was Pope.
Benedict was a giant. I think we can't understand sort

(03:02):
of the the change of what Francis's papacy represented without
understanding Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul the Second before him.
Both John Paul and Benedict were intellectual giants. John Paul
the Second was a giant in the fields, especially of

(03:25):
moral theology and ethics. Pope Benedict was a giant of
theology in general, systematic theology. The two men put together
probably wrote like eighty books between each other. I don't
think I'm exaggerating. I know Pope Benedict had written like

(03:49):
forty books like before he was elected pope. He was
one of the foremost theologians in the world. Pope Benedict
was before he was elected pope. And when John Paul
the Second died, the cardinals I think they were like, well,
we have an obvious choice. Do we pick Ratzinger, Joseph

(04:09):
Ratzinger Benedict the sixteenth, or do we pick somebody else?
That was the obvious. It was the gorilla in the room.
It was the elephant in the room. Okay, well, he
is obviously the one singular person. Because Pope Benedict had
worked directly with John Paul the Second, he had one
of the most important roles within the Roman Curia, where

(04:33):
he was overseeing doctrinal questions and helping continue to explain
and defend the Catholic faith, including in very specific ethical
questions that would come before the church dealing with disciplinary things.
Pope Bennett. It was Pope Benedict, both as Joseph Ratzinger
the Cardinal and then as Pope Benedict, that I think

(04:54):
did every every good thing that the Catholic Church did
in response to the revelations about sex abuse crisis, the
crises in the church. All of that, much of that, anyway,
was Joseph Ratzinger's work, both as a cardinal and then
as Pope, including ways in which John Paul the Second

(05:15):
I think failed to act. There's some evidence that John
Paul the Second a lot of the sex abuse stuff
broke when John Paul the Second was very, very elderly
and had, you know, very advanced Parkinson's disease, and that
he was slow to believe reports different kinds of reports

(05:38):
of clergy sex abuse coming from the perspective of having
grown up in communist controlled Poland, where the communist authorities,
if they wanted to sort of detract from the moral
authority of leaders in the church, would accuse them of
various forms of sexual impropriety without any basis. They would

(05:59):
just lie about church leaders sorted to undermine their standing
with the people. So JP two, Saint John Paul the
Second was kind of not always very swift, to believe it,
and Benedict, when he came in in two thousand and five,
immediately took swift action to correct all these things. Benedict
was helping bring the Church out of really what was

(06:21):
a very low point in the seventies. You had this
very low point following what's called the Second Vatican Council.
This was a gathering of all the world's bishops that
happened in the nineteen sixties that resulted in a lot
of changes in sort of the way in which the
church worshiped, the way in which the Church was sort

(06:41):
of presenting its teaching to the world, and a lot
of bad outcomes came after the Second Vatican Council. People
argue furiously about whether Vatican Two caused all the bad outcomes.
But for example, we see in the United States a
huge percentage of American athletics just stopped going to church.

(07:02):
People did not like a lot of the things that
changed in the church Following the Second Patican Council, Mass
attendants dropped worldwide. Priestly ordinations, which is usually a pretty
good indicator of the vitality of Catholicism, dropped enormously. And
so John Paul the Second had this herculean task of,
you know, cleaning out the stables of a church that

(07:25):
was riddled with bishops who were extremely liberal, and he
and Pote Benedict, I think helped with sort of this
worldwide revitalization of the global body of bishops. I think
bishops today and priests today are on the whole far
better than they were thirty years ago. So you had

(07:50):
these two men who were giants, intellectual giants. Benedict, who
was always had this sort of reputation in the media
God's Rottweiler, and because he was German, no he was,
But in reality Pope Benedict was actually this bookish, very

(08:11):
gentle man who was very kind and went about his
work as pope with enormous genuine humility, I would say
so so much humility that Benedict in twenty thirteen becomes
the first pope in like four hundred years to resign
the office. He just resigned. Almost every pope prior to

(08:37):
Pope Benedict died in office. Now a lot of that is,
you know, people didn't live as long in the you know,
prior to I don't know twentieth century, twenty first century medicine.
But Pope Benedict just decided he was going to resign.

(08:57):
And I think part of it was he under John
Paul the second the way that you know, JP two
had this very long, extended period of convalesce of illness
with his Parkinson's and I think Paul Benedict thought it
wasn't good for the governance of the church to have
a pope who was you know, was he at a commission?

(09:20):
Was he completely out of commission? And I think Benedict
just didn't want that. So in twenty thirteen he just
resigned and a very different pope got elected after him,
Pope Francis Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Uh. There's apparently a Roman
saying after a fat pope a thin pope, which it's

(09:44):
not literal necessarily, it just means every pope's different. You
know what, You get something very different every time you
elect a new pope, and Cardinal Bergoglio was certainly different.
He didn't have the kind of intellectual standing that Pope

(10:04):
Benedict had. I don't think even he would argue. He
wouldn't argue that. I think even he would acknowledge Pope
Benedict was was a far more important thinker and a
more a far more important theologian, et cetera. And he
clearly had certain things he really wanted to do that

(10:27):
I think were quite unsuccessful and led to sort of
a muddled magisterium. As we call it in the Catholic Church.
The magisterium means the teaching, the deposit of what you taught. Okay,
comes from the Latin word magister, which means teacher or maestro.

(10:49):
You know, maestro comes from magister or master. Pope Francis's
magisterium was complicated and not sitting very comfortably within the
broader body of Catholic tradition, particularly in the area of
sexual ethics. In the area of sexual ethics, Pope Francis

(11:12):
had a document called Amoris Letitia the Joy of love
is what it means. Some people rudely joke that as
so the way that when a pope issues a teaching document,
the title of the document is always just like the
first few words of the document. So amoris leticia means

(11:36):
the joy of love. However, there are different ways of
translating amour and leatiticia. Some rude commenters said, oh, doesn't
mean the pleasure of sex. Okay, Now, that was basically
what this document did. It was talking about the situation
of people who are divorced and remarried. In Catholicism, our

(11:58):
teaching is that marriage is life long and we don't
respect divorce and remarriage. The only way one can get
divorced within the Catholic concept is if there's a determination
that your original marriage was never valid to begin with.
If one can have a declaration of nullity that your
original marriage was null and void. For some reason, there

(12:22):
were a lot of people agitating for the idea that
people who are divorced and remarried and never had any
sort of declaration that their first marriage was null, that
they should be allowed to receive Holy communion. Holy communion
the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, which we believe is
the body and blood of Christ. Pope Francis, in this
document Memoris Letitia gave this sort of ambiguous footnote saying,

(12:48):
maybe there are circumstances where people can receive Holy Communion
if they're divorced and remarried, and it just doesn't sit
very well within the broader body of Catholic moral theology,
particularly the moral theology of John Paul the Second. And
it's clear with something that very liberal bishops were pushing
him to allow, pushing, pushing, pushing him to allow, and

(13:11):
it just sort of sat there like this sort of
awkward It's a square peg in a round hole. Similarly,
in the area of church discipline, Pope Francis very famously
decided in twenty twenty one to undo the various permissions

(13:34):
that Pope Benedict had provided for priests to offer the
older right of the Catholic Mass, the traditional Latin Mass.
Now you can so, Pope Benedict had said, every priest
in the world can offer this older form of mass,
the form of Mass that existed prior to the nineteen sixties.

(13:55):
There's nothing harmful about it. A lot of people like it.
It allowed to have it continued to be a part
of the Church's life, allows us to have a connection
with our history. There's nothing harmful about it. And Pope
Francis said, no, we're not doing that, and he very
largely restricted how and when and who could offer this

(14:16):
form of the Catholic Mass in a way that was
very unpopular I think with many many bishops throughout the world.
In fact, many many bishops throughout the world just basically
sort of ignored it and thought it was an unworkable
micromanaging system, Like priests had to personally write to Rome

(14:37):
to ask if they could have permission off from Mass
once or something. Bishops would have to write Rome, hey,
can we allow one Latin Mass to happen at Saint
Peter's parish in Valparaiso, Indiana, or you know, something like that,
And again it seemed like it was something that was
driven by left wing ideologues within the Vatican who hated
the old Mass who I don't know why. I guess

(15:01):
they wanted the modern right of Mass to be this
sort of whole theological revolution that completely changes what we
believe as Catholics, which is not what the modern right
of Mass should be. I would hope that the Catholic
faith is the same today as it was one hundred
years ago, as it once two hundred years ago, as

(15:23):
it was three hundred years ago, as it was two
thousand years ago. I mean, that's genuinely what I believe.
So he has also, in various ways antagonized different groups.
One of the big ways in which one of the
big reasons Pope Francis was elected was this idea that

(15:43):
he would reform the Roman Curia, that basically the apparatus
of bishops and priests who help the Pope in the Vatican,
to reform the way in which that works. There had
been a scandal of someone leaking the pope's private documents
under Pope Benedict, and I think it's a mixed bag

(16:04):
of whether people think Pote Francis actually accomplished that there
was this desire to reform the financial state of the Vatican.
At first, Pote Francis appointed Cardinal George Pell from Australia
to do all kinds of auditing work. Cardinal Pell was
getting somewhere, and then Cardinal Pell gets sidelined. Cardinal Pell
was hit with one of the most patently ridiculous claims

(16:26):
of sex abuse, and I genuinely mean that. I think
his claim was ridiculous, and he was ultimately vindicated in
court and the court found that unanimously. No, he did
not engage in that, but it derailed his I think
really excellent efforts to help with an audit of Vatican finances,
and the Vatican is in terrible financial shape right now.

(16:48):
But Francis also did some good things. He issued an
excellent document that was very clear, called Dignitas Infinita, which
very clearly and concisely condemned gender ideology and all of
its expressions, transgenderism, gener is, transgender, all the whole panoply

(17:10):
of transgender issues. However, about six months prior to that,
he had ordered one of his new cardinal appointees, an
appointee that a lot of people, a lot of bishops,
were not thrilled about, to issue some document about the
possibility of blessing gay persons, blessing gay couples, not not

(17:33):
their union, but the couple, the two of gay people together,
which seemed like it was an attempt again by left
wing theologians who want gay marriage to be recognized by
the Church and want some sort of halfway house in
to say, oh, well, priests can give blessings to gay couples.
And after that document was issued by the Vatican, there

(17:56):
was a total uproar. The bishops of Africa said, abso
flippin' we're not even sure what this is saying, but
we are absolutely not doing this, and both Francis pretty
much totally backed down. And I think that this might
be the legacy that I don't know how successful to

(18:17):
France's papacy was. I think in comparison to the giants
that were John Paul the Second and Benedict the sixteenth,
I don't know that Francis will stand at their levels.
It's not to say he's a terrible person. I think
he wanted to reach out to people he viewed his marginalized,

(18:40):
divorced and remarried people, to have them feel like they're
part of the church in some way, people who have
same sex attraction but want to be part of the church.
He wanted them to people he viewed as put upon,
like migrants. He wanted to express care for them. But
in so doing, I think he just wasn't the clearest

(19:01):
kind of moral theology, ethics thinker, and so I think
his papacy sits in this very awkward place historically, and
a lot will be determined by the next pote when
we return. More thoughts on Pope Francis. This is the
John Gerardy show on Power Talk. You know. One last

(19:22):
thought on Pope Francis. One of the big aspects of
his papacy that he pushed and again is a thing
where it's unclear how stable this will be, was his
idea of quote synodality. Throughout the Francis papacy, he would
hold these things called synods s yno d synod, which

(19:46):
was basically a gathering of a group of the world's
bishops to discuss something or other. Pope Benedict had done these,
but John Paul the Second had done these synods every
couple of years. That was basically a gathering of bishops
to talk about some specific topic. They would meet, they
would talk, they would issue some document, and the Pope
would have a document that he wrote after the fact,

(20:11):
and it was usually very low stakes. You know, no
one was really too hyped up about them. Francis's synods were,
especially early in his papacy, the subject of huge scrutiny,
huge media attention, he had a whole senate about this
idea of persons who are divorced and remarried and whether
they should receive communion, and people yelling at each other

(20:33):
during the Senate, and manipulation of the process to make
sure that talk about divorce and remarried people was in
the final document, and changing the rules of the last
all kinds of intrigue and stuff like that, And eventually
Pope Francis kept doing these synods where every basically every
liberal in the Church was trying to use these synods
as some forum for instituting some new liberal desired outcome,

(20:59):
to the point where Pope Francis had a I'm not
making this up a synod on synodality where we were
talking about the process of having synods in the church
and how important it is this thing that is is
not really an essential thing, that we Catholics don't even
think it's an essential thing. So and I think the

(21:25):
response of a lot of bishops throughout the world to
it has been not a ton of enthusiasm that this
is the greatest idea in the world. So it's another
thing where if a new pope is elected who is
not crazy about such an idea does it all go away?

(21:49):
I mean, it was this huge cornerstone project of Francis's
entire papacy, but it's not clear to me how popular
it really is among the broader body of bishops. And ultimately,
over time the synods became more and more sort of
moderating because well, you have to have African bishops there,
and god knows they're they're all a bunch of right wingers.

(22:12):
They don't want any big changes. So anyway, I thought
it was it's interesting the way in which you have
these cardinals. While Francis is alive, you have these cardinals. Oh,
the citidelity is an essential feature of the Catholic Church,
and it's here. Well, you know, one pope dies and
that can change, and it will be very interesting to see.

(22:36):
All Right, when we return, I'm going to talk about
some of the guys who might be elected the next pope.
We'll see that's next on the John Girardi Show. All right,
I'm going to go through a list of cardinals who
might be elected the next pope. All right, Now, there
is no guarantee that anyone on this list is in

(22:59):
fact going to be elected pope. One of the funny
things about the process of papal elections. So the way
it works, the cardinals are, for the most part, senior
bishops who run big cities. Who are the bishops administering

(23:23):
a large diocese as we call it, basically the unit
of organization that oversees all the churches of a city
or a region. So for example, Bishop Brennan is the
Bishop of Fresno, which includes everything from Livingston up north
to Bishop in the South, Okay and Barstow. So you
have two kinds of cardinals. You have cardinals who are

(23:44):
senior archbishops in big cities around the world. So for example,
the Archbishop of New York is a cardinal. The Archbishop
of Chicago is a cardinal. The Archbishop of Washington, d C.
Is a cardinal. I think Houston has a cardinal. Los
Angeles had a cardinal for years, but for some reason
Francis never made Archbishop Gomez a cardinal. And then you

(24:06):
have some cardinals who work directly in the Vatican, live
in Rome and they assist the pope. So there are
two hundred and fifty two cardinals in the Catholic Church.
You only get to vote if you're under age eighty.
I forget if the line is when you turn eighty
you become ineligible or when you turn eighty one. But anyway,

(24:26):
of the two hundred and fifty two cardinals in the
Catholic Church, one hundred and thirty five of them are
eligible to vote. So the Pope is almost certainly going
to be picked from that group of one hundred and
thirty five cardinals who are of voting age. Presumably you
don't want to elect a pope who's over the age

(24:47):
of eighty, So that's the group. So how old is
the pope going to be? Probably about seventy that's my guess.
Maybe late sixties, early seventies. The last two popes have
been actually a good bit older than that. Pope Benedict

(25:10):
was seventy eight when he was elected Pope. Pope Francis
was seventy seven when he was elected. Pope. Popes live
a lot longer now than they used to, So you
might have a pope then I might be a little
too early, maybe a pope around age seventy five. So

(25:30):
and part of that is I don't know that the
cardinals are crazy about the idea of a twenty eight
year long a thirty year long papacy. John Paul the
Second was a real outlier. He was only I think
he was like fifty eight or fifty nine when he
was elected pope, and you know, consequently he wound up
serving nineteen seventy eight to two thousand and five, so
I think about twenty seven years. It's not clear that

(25:55):
the pope that the cardinals want another pope who's going
to live that long, So probably you'll get a pope
a little older. The funny thing is that literally any
single Catholic man can be elected pope, and it's happened
before that someone who wasn't even a priest got elected pope.
Mostly that happened in like you know, the Middle Ages
and stuff, and then the guy would be ordained a priest,

(26:17):
and then ordained a bishop and then made a pope.
But in all likelihood, one of the one hundred and
thirty five cardinals who are picked to elect the pope
will be chosen as the next pope. So I have
here a list. I don't know who published this stupid thing,
but it's there's one name on it that's completely stupid,

(26:39):
but the others make sense. So I'm going to use
this list as sort of who do people think are
the leading candidates to be the next Pope. I'll give
you some of their names and a little bit of
their backgrounds. So the first name on the list is stupid.
It's Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, whom I really like. He's the

(27:00):
former Archbishop of Genoa, Italy. He's a great man and
it would I think would have been a great pope
in prior years. The problem is he's eighty two years old.
I don't know who put this list together. Probably they're
sort of Italian centric, and Cardinal Bandangasco's a very significant
figure in Italian catholic in the world of Italian Catholicism,
but he's eighty two years old. He can't even vote

(27:22):
for Pope let alone. I highly doubt he's going to
be elected Pope, so that's probably not happening all right.
Cardinal Matteo Zupi Cardinal Zupi is currently the Archbishop of
Bologna in Italy. He had been an auxiliary bishop of

(27:45):
the City of Rome before that. He's very close to
Pope Francis. Francis has utilized him as his personal envoy
to Ukraine for trying to help broker different peace talks
in Ukraine. Unclear how successful he's actually been in those ventures.

(28:05):
He's thought to be a bit more of a moral
theology liberal. He was very friendly though, and open to
people who wanted to celebrate the older Latin right of Mass.
He's thought to be more of a liberal Pope. Cardinal
Robert Sarah spelled like Sarah Sarah, but I guess it's

(28:28):
pronounced Sarah. He is from Guinea, the country of Guinea,
and he worked in the Vatican as the chief Bishop
in charge of overseeing the liturgy the church's public worship.
He is a huge proponent of the old Latin Mass.

(28:50):
He's seventy seven years old, which frankly is a I
think he's seventy seven. He's either seventy seven or seventy eight.
Pope Francis was seventy seven when he was elected, but
Benedict was seventy eight when he was elected. Cardinal Sarrah
is thought to be the leading conservative or the most
conservative person, sort of the desired person for the most

(29:14):
conservative people. If Cardinal Sarrah was elected Pope, I would
probably cry, okay, like with happiness. He's extremely conservative. I
think he's actually personally, very holy person, a very pious person,
and he's a pretty deep thinker. He's written several books

(29:35):
that I've that I have. I think he studied, he
did a lot of biblical theology study. I think in
Jerusalem they have like a biblical institute there that he
got like two master's degrees from there. So I would
love if Cardinal Sorah was elected. He's seventy seven, but
he's a healthy seventy seventy, skinny as a rail, looks

(29:56):
like he's in great shape. So I'm I mean, that
would be the best case scenario in my eyes. Cardinal
Luis Tagle, he's a former Archbishop of Manila. He has
sort of bopped around in different jobs in the in

(30:16):
Pope Francis's curia, Cardinal Tagle was sort of thought to
be like early on, he was thought to be Pope
Francis's anointed successor, like not annoying, not literally annoys I
recognized with the Catholic Church, you might think that's literal. No,
Pope Francis obviously really liked him early and he kind

(30:38):
of seemed to have fell fallen out of favor with
Pope Francis. He had a more important job and kind
of got kicked to a less important job. He's only
let's see, how old is he. He's only sixty seven,
so in pope year, that's pretty young. So you could

(31:01):
be looking at a twenty year papacy with him. Do
the College of Cardinals want a twenty year papacy? Seems unclear.
He kind of had a real sort of media profile.
Cardinals don't seem to like people who are flashy. He's
a very smart guy, sort of thought to be a
little bit more liberal. He had been made a cardinal

(31:22):
under Pope Benedict, so, but some people think he's more
aligned with sort of Pope Francis's ways of thinking. He
studied in the United States. He got a doctor in
theology from Catholic University of America. So I don't know.

(31:45):
I think he's a little too young, a little too flashy,
sort of lost favor under Pope Francis, So I don't
think that's happening. All right, I'm gonna go a little
faster here. Cardinal Pietro Pauoline, he might be one of
the leading candidates. He's currently the papal Sectioncretary of State,
and I think he's been sort of trying to position
himself as less kind of chaotic than Pope Francis, but

(32:07):
kind of aligned with his more liberal thinking. He's sort
of an institutionalist again, he's the Secretary of State. Not
not clear though, how great he's been in relations with
other countries. One of the very popular candidates to write
and think and talk about is Cardinal Pierre Battista Pizza Bala. Yes,

(32:29):
that's actually his name. He has the most Italian name
of any cardinal ever, Pierre Battista Pizzabala. Yes, his name
is Pizza Bala. So he is the Patriarch of Jerusalem,
the main Roman Catholic bishop in Jerusalem. So it's not

(32:50):
a very large diocese. Not too many Roman Catholics in
Jerusalem and in Israel basically, but there's a significant number there.
And Cardinal Pizza Bala has sort of stood out for
his sort of presence and his desire to help assuage

(33:13):
the Israel Palestine conflict. He actually offered himself. He said
that he would willingly exchange himself in exchange for the
hostages that Hamas took. On October seventh, he made that
offer to Hamas to exchange himself for some of the victims,

(33:38):
which was a very sort of noble thing. He is
himself a former Franciscan. He was a Franciscan priest before
he was made a bishop, and he's a very intelligent man,
seems very conservaive. A lot of Conservatives actually really really
like him. Another cardinal that I really like is the

(34:02):
Archbishop of Utrecht or Utrecht, I don't know how you
pronounce it in the Netherlands, Cardinal villem Ike. I really
like him. He's actually a former he was a doctor.
He was a medical doctor. He was an internal medicine
doc before he became a Catholic priest. And he's a
great bioethicist. He's very much kind of aligned with Pope Benedict.

(34:25):
He reportedly pushed Pope Francis to issue what I think
was the best sort of teaching document of the Francis papacy.
This was the document about transgenderism. It touched on transgenderism
along with a number of other issues. That was really clear.
And I think Cardinal Ike would be a great pope.

(34:46):
I really hope. I mean, if he were elected, I
would be quite happy. The Archbishop of Sri Lanka, Malcolm
Ranjieth is another possibility would be our first sort of
South Asian pope. Ever, we've had popes from like Asia
minor like you know, Roman, Roman controlled Turkey, but I believe,

(35:11):
but I don't think we've uh, you know, had a
pope from you know, South Asia before. He used to
be in charge of the church's sort of liturgical office
or or he sort of oversaw liturgical things. So he's
had experience in Rome, he's had experience as a diocesan bishop,
I think, and overseeing some very hairy stuff in Sri Lanka.

(35:33):
Relations between Catholics and non Catholics there are dicey, So
I think he would also be a great pick as pope.
So who is the most likely pick? Hard to say.
I think the most likely pick it could be someone
completely not on that list. Okay, that's I. You know,

(35:56):
John Paul the Second when he was elected, was completely
to left field. Nobody knew who he was and basically
nobody knew how to pronounce his name. Apparently, one of
the funny stories about John Paul the Second was that
Billy Graham had happened to had met to have met him.
Billy Graham happened to have met him before he was

(36:19):
elected pope, when John Paul the Second was the Archbishop
of Krakov in Poland, and so Billy Graham was on
TV or something and was like the only person who
knew how to pronounce his name. His name was pronounced
Voi tiwa, but it spelled wojtyla. So anyway, Billy Graham

(36:40):
was like the only person in America who knew how
to pronounce the new pope's name. John Paul the Second
was completely out of left field, a pope from behind
the iron curtain, totally unexpected fifty eight years old, not
when anyone thought Boe Benedict, on the other hand, was
totally expected the obvious successor to John Paul the Second,
so much so that apparently some people had nicknamed Cardinal

(37:02):
rat singer John Paul the Third. So I'm not exactly sure.
I think it could be one of the people on
this list, but we will see when we return. Jd
Vance just can't catch a break. Next on the John
Girardi Show, jd Vance just can't catch a break. So
Jade Vance. First, he meets with Ohio State with the

(37:25):
national championship team because he's an Ohio State grad and
he holds and drops the national Championship trophy. Then literally
literally yesterday, he meets Pope Francis, he has an audience
with Pope Francis, and Pope Francis dies the next day.

(37:47):
Maybe it's him, Maybe he's the problem. Good Lord, I
will say though, for Jadvan jade Vance is a recent
Catholic convert must have been. I mean, that's gonna be experience.
He's never gonna forget to go to the Vatican for
Holy Week to get to meet Pope Francis like the
day before he died. Quite the thing for Jdvans, I'm

(38:08):
a little envious. That'll do it, John J already show
see you next time on Power Talk