Pope Leo XIV

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
As soon as the new pope got announced, my phone
goes insane. What do you think, Johnny? What do you think? Johnny?
What do you think? Johnny? What do you think? Johnny?
All Right, I'm going to tell you what I think.
I've had a day to digest it. I'm happy, I
am pleasantly. I am feeling optimistic. I feel like we

(00:23):
are trending in a good direction. And I want to
talk about some of the tensions from the Francis papacy
and what Robert Prevost, the new Pope of the Catholic Church,
Leo the fourteenth, what he could represent. So first, let's
talk a little bit about how Pope Leo was formed,

(00:47):
because I think background is really important for popes. So
the milieu out of which Leo rose, there's several different
kind of contexts that we have to look at. He

(01:09):
was born in Chicago, he was born and raised in Chicago.
He went to Villanova University for college. Some people are like, oh,
he went to liberal Villanova, and oh he went to
this liberal place for seminary. We should note, though, a
couple of things. I feel this immediate kind of kinship

(01:29):
with Pope Leo in that when he was an undergraduate
at Villanova, he founded their student pro life organization and
was the president of it. I was the president of
Notre Dame Right to Life when I was an undergrad.
And this is one thing that gives me a ton

(01:53):
of hope, is because it's something I understand. He clearly
has a d deep connection with the American pro life cause.
He's also the first pope to have had a pre
existing Twitter account when elected, which has resulted in people

(02:14):
just crawling through it and scouring it to find evidence
of what he thinks about things. They found one tweet
kind of critical of JD. Vance, and everyone blew that
up into saying, oh, he hates JD. Van See, he
hates He's a big fat lefty COMI but when you
go through it, look, let me just I'll just cut
through this. There's not going to be any pope elected

(02:37):
who is like yeah, kung ho to pour them all like,
that's not going to happen, all right. No pope's gonna
get elected who talks or things like that about immigration. Okay,
And even if you listen to this show, you'll note
that's not necessarily the way I talk. I think that

(02:57):
American immigration has its own very specific kinds of problems
that if you are commenting on it as the pope
or papal advisors, like you know the letter that Pope
that was sent that had Pope Francis's name signed at
the bottom of it, that was issued in response to

(03:18):
to JD. Vance's comments about the ordering of how much
what are what are the duties of society towards immigrants?
Blah blah blah. There's no way that Pope Francis, at
age eighty eight or whatever he was, I refuse to
have the confidence that Pope Francis A was physically fit

(03:41):
enough to have really thoroughly engaged in the ins and
outs of the specifics of the American immigration system, the
asylum system, the way in which the asylum system was abused,
and bupah bu blah blah blah blah. All right, anyway,
point being Catholic politicians look at immigration kind of on
this global perspective and take this global sort of posture,
many of them rightly or wrongly, that we should be

(04:03):
globally speaking, generally speaking, accommodating to immigrants. And they see
Donald Trump not being accommodating to immigrants, and they think
that's bad. Okay, So you're not going to get a
cardinal elected who's like, yeah, deport them all like that.
That's never going to happen. So they find one thing
that Cardinal Prevost retweeted about JD. Vance and all that,

(04:24):
But what people also found were a bunch of things
that he retweeted, reposted, and has said over the course
of time that were phenomenal regarding pro life issues, even
down to the level of criticizing his own state government
in Illinois, where he occasionally would vote when he wasn't,

(04:48):
you know, out of the country, his own state government
in Illinois for doing horrible things for you know, the
Illinois state legislature does all kinds of horrible things, like
the California legislature does to further facilitate abortion access, fund abortion,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really encouraged

(05:10):
by the fact that he is coming from the American
pro life world and the kinds of thinkers he is
citing and thinkers he is retweeting are people whom I
know of and like and care for. That gives me hope.

(05:31):
A couple of other things about him that I think
are encouraging. He's a lawyer. He's not a normal lawyer.
He's a canon lawyer. Okay, So for those who don't know,
canon law is the field of law by which the
Catholic Church and other kinds of ecclesial bodies Eastern Catholic

(05:51):
churches have their own body of canon law. Canon law
was very important, especially historically prior to the Reformation in
a lot of places and have to the Reformation, historically
Catholic countries where canon law and civil law would intersect
in the law and rights of the Church as opposed
to the law rights of the state. Anyway, Cardinal Prevost
is a canon lawyer, and as much as a lot

(06:14):
of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops, and he is a
Boomer he was born in nineteen fifty five, as much
as a lot of Boomer priests and Boomer bishops were
very loosey goosey. The one group of people that at
least retain a certain level of non lucy goosiness about
the faith, people who actually have a sense of order

(06:38):
within the Catholic religion are canon lawyers. I've never met
a canon lawyer that I didn't like. I've never met
a canon lawyer who didn't have his head screwed on
right at least on really fundamental things, and so that

(06:58):
actually gives me a ton of hope. He you know,
he has also been able to administer and govern people
in a lot of different capacities in different countries. So
for those, let me give a sort of sketch out
his career. He grows up in America, he studies in Rome,

(07:22):
gets his doctor and ken in law, and he is
an Augustinian friar. So this is a community of priests
who follow the rule of life developed by Saint Augustine,
and they live lives of poverty, so they don't own
any property in common. Their community owns all their property.

(07:44):
They all of their property is owned in common. So
within their community, no individual person owns any individual stuff.
So poverty, chastity and obedience. So he served as a
superior within his Augustinian community, and most of his life
as a priest was spent in South America in Peru,
and eventually he was named a bishop of a diocese

(08:06):
in Peru, which is very odd to have someone from
another country move to a country, work there as a
priest and be named a bishop there. It's kind of
an odd thing. I guess the most high profile example
that is Archbishop Gomez, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, who

(08:26):
I think was born and raised in Mexico, and as
a result, Cardinal Privost had joint Peruvian and American citizenship
because he'd lived and worked in Peru for so long,
so he had worked very often in Peru. Then he
works a lot in Rome. When he's made a cardinal

(08:48):
by Pope Francis, he's prefect of he's head of what's
called the Dicastro for bishops, so he was the chief
guy helping advise the Pope about naming new bishops. Now
I don't know how empowered he was in that role,
so it's a little hard for me to look at
individual bishop appointments and say, Aha, yes, that was him.
There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it

(09:08):
comes to picking who a new bishop is going to be.
But the thing that I kind of am struck by
is that he seems to be a pretty rooted, humble guy,

(09:29):
even down to little things that I don't want to
blow them up into big things, but I will say this.
I will say this about Pope Francis and you don't
want to speak ill of the dead. But people talked
a lot about how humble Pope Francis was. Francis, though,

(09:50):
didn't really want to kind of conform and kind of
go with the flow with a lot of things. Again,
maybe personal humility, I don't know, but he really stuck
out like a sore thumb as far as how he
conducted himself as pope, and you could see it like

(10:11):
even in ways that became actually quite inconvenient for everybody.
He was like, I don't want to live in the
Vatican apartments and the palace is like a king. I'm
just going to live at the Casa Santa Marta, which
is like a hotel that cardinals stay at when they
visit Rome. Well, that was actually a really expensive and
it was built it's like, oh, look, the pope's a
man of the people, he wants to hang out with everybody. Well,

(10:33):
that was actually a really expensive and really inconvenient thing
for him to have done. It required basically, all right,
you're like a world leader. For security purposes, we can't
just have have you live in a hotel with guests. Oh,
new guests up pop in right next to you. No,
so they had to basically take give him a whole floor.
They had to do all this security stuff. It was

(10:54):
actually quite expensive and quite difficult and et cetera. H
France has sort of refused to wear certain elements of
papal clothing, which the Pope Leo woar on day one
he refused to and even down to the level of
so so basically, here's my point. Francis was temperamentally a

(11:21):
prickly kind of person. I think I kind of get
the sense of that. I don't want to trash the guy.
I think he had a lot of good qualities, but
I can really see. So I'm not trying to do
this like massive contrast, but I do see with Leo,
I understand him. He's a guy from South Chicago. I

(11:43):
got to meet a lot of guys like that when
I was at Notre Dame. He is. I got to
meet a lot of priests like that when I was
at Notre Dame. He's While he's very, very intelligent, I'm
sure he's much more intelligent than me. I mean I
read some stuff he wrote, like some like academic stuff
he wrote, and I could barely make head or tails

(12:05):
of it. He was a math major at Villanova, and
then he goes on to be a canon lawyer. I mean,
I wrote read some philosophy stuff he wrote. But I
can see this sort of basic bedrock, simple South Chicago
Catholic kind of humility. I know that I understand that,

(12:30):
whereas Pope Francis was coming out of something totally foreign
to me that I had no way of understanding. Even
even as far as like politics and stuff like, I
mean South American politics and some of the South American
political ideas and Argentinean political ideas that Pope France has
brought to his work and viewpoints on the papacy were
extremely weird and complex, and they sometimes manifested themselves and

(12:53):
these very unpleasant wit Anyway, I understand this guy. I
think he's very down to earth. He seems very simple
in good ways. And this is one thing about being
the Pope, that there's temperament. Temperament makes a big deal.

(13:18):
Pope Francis made two kind of big tidle waves as
far as is he diluting Catholic teaching. He issued one
document that said that seemed to kind of maybe indicate
in some circumstances divorced and remarried Catholics could receive communion,
which seemed to have been a break from his predecessor,

(13:40):
John Paul the Second. I should say three things he did.
That he sort of rewrote what was in the Catechism
about the death penalty again in a way that seemed
to maybe like it was breaking with John Paul the Second.
And he had one of his flunkies issue a document
largely retracted, thank God, that seemed to maybe indicate again

(14:03):
breaking with John Paul the Second, breaking with Benedict the sixteenth,
breaking with himself from a prior document he had issued
to allow gay couples to be blessed, not their union,
but just these two people. And this is the thing.
You might have a pope who's a little more liberal leaning,

(14:24):
but it takes a real kind of temperament to decide
I am going to do this. That is clearly going
to seem at least to be a break. Whether it
authentically is I don't think so, but it's going to
seem to be a break with the prior tradition. There's

(14:45):
temperament involved there. I think if Pope Francis were a
different kind of person, maybe a person who was a
little less stubborn, maybe a person who was a little
less kind of insistent, and maybe a bit more deferential

(15:06):
to tradition, deferential to the office that maybe that would
never have happened. I see in Pope Leo a personality
that is you know, this is the thing about Americans.
When we go to Rome, we're all overwhelmed. I mean,

(15:28):
you walk around in Fresno, there's barely a single building
that's more than one hundred years old. When someone from
America goes to Rome, they're floored because everything they look
at is older than our country. If you're from Presno
and you go to Rome, you're you're overwhelmed by the

(15:50):
enormity of the history and the tradition, and the beauty
and the grandeur of what you're seeing. And I see
in Pope Leo. Again, I'm not like some grand oracle
or anything. And by the way, I'm trying to say
this out of all deference to Pope Francis, who, again
I try to remind people, is more conservative than Donald

(16:11):
Trump on abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism. I think the liberalizing
case for Pope Francis is overblown, and the most he
did to screw around with Catholic doctrine was stuff that
was ambiguous at worst. But for all that chaotic and

(16:34):
chaos inducing. But I think, basically, I'll say this, I
feel better under I feel better about the prospects for
the church under Pope Leo. I think he is a
better I think he is temperamentally, maybe in some ways

(16:56):
a little better suited to the job. And and I'm
very hopeful. And he's someone whose motivations I feel I
can understand when we return other catholic y stuff. The
scuttle butt is he actually the stealth candidate of the Conservatives.
That's next on the John Girardi Show. Now, one thing

(17:19):
that pious Catholic commentators love to do is they love
to say, well, it's too simplistic to chart the cardinals
in the Catholic Church along the spectrum of conservative and liberal.
That is a simplistic American political category that has no

(17:39):
place in the church. The focus of the cardinals is
on Jesus Christ and his church, and it is that
like you're a bad person, and it doesn't even make sense.
Only it kind of does. If you're gonna sit there
and with a straight face, tell me that Cardinal Raymond Burke.

(18:04):
Who is this American cardinal who celebrates the traditional Latin
Mass I suspect every single day, which is the right
of mass that was in use in the Catholic Church
for hundreds of years prior to the nineteen sixties, celebrated
entirely in Latin, who wears antique investments from the seventeenth

(18:24):
century on a regular basis. Who is the only it
is the most staunchly pro life, anti LGBT outside of
res You're going to tell me that he isn't more
conservative than you know some random than you know Cardinal
McElroy from the United States, for example, who is writing

(18:45):
trying to revivify left wing moral theologians that we thought
John Paul the second had absolutely buried. Give me a break. Obviously,
there are differences between the cardinals and the human mind
likes to categorize things along a spectrum. So sometimes that

(19:06):
spectrum we use labels like left and right for it. Yes,
I understand that the labels left and right are used
mostly in American political context to mean certain kinds of things,
and it's not one hundred percent. Apples to apples makes
exactly the same thing. When it comes to applying the
analysis to the Catholic Church. Yes, I realized that the

(19:27):
left right distinction originated from the French Revolution and the
Estates General and all the people who were the most
radically wanting to get rid of the monarchy sat on
the left side, and the people who were more eh,
maybe let's slow it down a bit, sat on the
right side. Nonetheless, there's some I'm kind of wondering a

(19:48):
little bit if Robert Privos, the new Pope Leo, if
he was kind of a bit the candidate of the Conservatives,
or at the very least if he was open to
the Conservatives. So one of the dynamic that exists within
the election of a pope is there's one hundred and
thirty five cardinals who are electors. Basically, you have to
be a cardinal and you have to be under the

(20:08):
age of eighty, So there are one hundred and thirty
five guys like that. You need a two thirds majority
to win. So I think there are some people who
are super kind of very hardcore conservative, some people who
were very hardcore liberal, and then a lot of cardinals
who just didn't really know anybody. A lot of cardinals

(20:31):
who got named cardinal who were from far flung corners
of the world and hadn't really come to Rome to
meet with all the other cardinals because Francis, as this
was another kind of weird Francis thing. He got upset
because when he had cardinals meeting early on in his pontificate,
some of them like disagreed with him and stuff, and
he didn't really convene all the cardinals together very often.

(20:54):
So a lot of the cardinals just didn't really know
each other at all. And so basically, I don't think
there was any chance that a super super conservative cardinal
was going to get elected or super left wing cardinal
was going to get elected. There was going to have

(21:14):
to be some kind of compromise and some kind of
coalition building within that body. And it appears that Cardinal
Prevost met with Cardinal Burke, who was like the most
conservative cardinal in the whole Catholic Church. And I think

(21:35):
there's a lot of and also there was this more
so than just meeting at Cardinal Burke's apartment. One of
the seismic things that happened a few years ago, not
two years ago, was this document got issued under Pope
Francis by one of his a newly appointed person of
his to authorize blessing same sex couples, not blessing their union,

(21:59):
but just to bless them as persons. And people thought, well,
oh gosh, are we opening the door to gay marriage?
And the African Cardinals through a fit. They caused an
uproar and basically forced the Pope to retract it. Now,
I think it's ambiguous, as was that actually changing Catholic doctrine.
I don't know. I think it was ambiguous, but more

(22:20):
or less, the African Cardinals said absolutely not, We absolutely
are not even going to broach this subject. I think,
you know, Pope Leo, he got two thirds of these
guys to vote for him. Presumably a lot of African
Cardinals voted for him, So I think he needs to
be responsive to conservatives, and this is sort of my hope.

(22:43):
My hope is for a papacy that is boring. My
hope is for a papacy that is open and kind
and accepting to conservative groups within the Catholic Church who
faced a lot of frankly just persecution is maybe a
little strong under Pope Francis. I just want peace. I

(23:07):
want a boring pope who says boringly Catholic stuff and
appoints boringly good, decent, competent bishops worldwide. That's what I want,
and that's my hope, and if that is your standard,
I have some hope for Pope Leo. I don't know
that he's going to be quite the titan that John

(23:27):
Paul the Second or Benedict the sixteenth the sixteenth were,
but I have hope. I do have hope. I have
hope for him. Temperamentally, I have hope for him. As
far as understanding his background, I have hope. So when
we return, some live Catholic issues that Pope Leo may

(23:50):
decide over the course of his probably quite long papacy.
Next on the John Jrardy Show, there's a bunch of
live Catholic controversy that now that we have a healthy
pope re installed within the Catholic Church, there's a lot
of issues that he's going to have to deal with.
So a couple of big hot button topics that I

(24:13):
think at some point he is going to rule on.
And let's remember this, he's a relatively young pope. Pope
Leo is sixty nine years old. Let's remember that Pope
Francis was seventy seven when he was elected, and Pope
Benedict was seventy eight when he was elected. Benedict only
served for eight years. Francis served for twelve years. So

(24:36):
you know, this guy's sixty nine years old. Popes have
good health care. This guy looks relatively healthy, So I
mean not inconceivable this guy could be pope for you know,
twenty years. So what are some of the live controversies
that are existing right now within the Catholic Church. Certain

(24:57):
surely new things will have developed and the landscape will
look much different ten years from now. What are the
live controversies to deal with right now? Okay, so one
of the big things is honestly competent administration of the
Vatican and money, Like it's boring to think about, but
the Vatican has been running a deficit year every year.
They have a massive pension liability that they're facing, and

(25:21):
they got to figure out how to get the money
situation right. Stuff got worse and worse and worse under
Pope Francis. Pope Francis got elected on the idea that
he was an administrator. He had very specific ideas for
how he wanted to do things, not very clear how
successful they were. So that's a big deal, and it's

(25:43):
probably a non zero reason why Prevost got picked. He
seems to not engage in factionalism, and seems to work
well with lots of people in a lot of contexts,
and is a good administrator. So that's a non zero
reason to pick somebody to be pope. So that's the
boring stuff. Let's talk about some doctrinal stuff though. So

(26:06):
one of the questions to deal with is this thing
called sinnodality s Y n O D A l I
T Y. Now, synods were a part of the life
of the church going back all the way to the
beginning and in the early Roman you know, after the

(26:28):
legalization of Christianity under Constantine, synods were a thing that
would happen. Sentods were usually kind of localized gatherings of
bishops to discuss x, Y or Z. I wouldn't say
that they are a constitutive element of the church. It's
a little different from say, what we would call an
ecumenical council where you get all the bishops together to
talk about stuff. From the Council of Jerusalem, the gathering

(26:52):
of all the apostles together in Jerusalem, that's described in
the Acts of the Apostles, in which they ultimately decided, yes,
the Gospel is open to non Jews. To the Second
Vatican Council, which happened in nineteen sixty two, which was
again a gathering of all the world's bishops. Sinnidality is
sort of in the middle, and obviously it's not necessarily

(27:12):
attested to in the New Testament. It's just a thing
that would happen that bishops would gather to discuss stuff.
Smaller groups of bishops would gather to discuss stuff, and
Pope Francis his pontificate was now that the church, the
Catholic Church, has been having synods on and off since
the nineteen sixties, So a gathering of maybe not all
the world's bishops, but maybe a select group of the

(27:33):
world's bishops to help talk about a certain topic and
help advise the pope, and the Pope writes a document
and they go on. Under Francis, these things took on
way outsized importance because it seemed like Francis was leaving
up to debate and discussion stuff that you would have
thought was not really up for debate or discussion. You know,
here's a synod allegedly about this topic where all of

(27:55):
a sudden, we're talking about whether we should have female deacons, Like,
what the heck does that have to do with anything.
Here's a synod on the family and we're talking about
should we give communion to people who are divorced and remarried?
And these synods had these like felt like they had
these big high stakes attached to them. People were angry,
and Francis just loved this crap, and he just kept

(28:18):
having a sinnate after sinnate after senate to the point
that I think what was maybe the high point of
where I would imagine if you're an outside non Catholic
observer looking at this, you think these people are just
staring at their navels. We had a synod on the

(28:38):
topic of synodality, that was the most recent thing. And
the question is are we going to keep on doing
this whole Senate thing? So I don't know exactly know
where pop Leo stands on it. He mentioned being a
synodyl church in his opening statements from the Balcony of

(29:02):
Saint Peter's, But whether that means yes, I want to
keep having synods at this level constantly all the time.
The word synod means on the road with comes from
the Greek words soon, which means with and hodos, which
means wrote. So the idea is, well, we want to
be a church that listens to everybody, you know, listen

(29:25):
to everybody, hear everyone's perspectives before we act, which is fine,
but it seems like it's just these never ending discussions
and then at the end of the day the pope
can kind of do what he wants. I mean that,
you know, there was one critique about when the pope issues,
when the Pope issued this document that was seemed to
sort of open the door to blessing gay couples, which

(29:47):
got really retracted after the African bishops had an uproar
about it. And I think the document was at worst ambiguous.
It was after it had no connection whats ever, had
any sinate. It was just the Pope just issued it
on his own without really seemingly without consulting very many people.
So I again, i'm i'm there is a definitely a

(30:13):
non zero amount of the world's bishops who are really
tired of this constant synod you know, posture that the
church is in. So are we going to keep doing that.
There are other sort of live issue controversies. I think
there's a question of are some of the more controversial
theological points that were raised during Pope Francis's papacy and

(30:34):
kind of left Danglin as far as okay, well, he
has this document where he kind of sort of thinks,
sort of maybe there might be some circumstances where divorced
and remarried people might be able to receive fully communion.
How how does that square with what John Paul the
second said, which is, no, what are the circumstances? Can
you show that there's consistency with the Catholic faith? And

(30:56):
Pope france Is basically just said no, I don't need
to show that. He had actually a group of cardinals
who submitted what we're called dubia, which means questions asking
about well, how do we square that? And Pope Francis
just refused to answer. So will he will will he answer?

(31:16):
Will Pope Leo answer those dubia? Will he ask that
these things be clarified? Will he ask that these things
be clarified to show well, no, we're not definitively crossing
that bridge or whatever it is. I think the fact
that Cardinal Burke is so Cardinal Burke, who is this

(31:37):
American cardinal super conservative who was a big time critic
of Pope Francis issuing some of his more i'll say
ambiguous theological statements. Cardinal Burke seems very happy with Pope
Leo's election, and Cardinal Burke was one of the guys
who wrote these dubia to ask for clarification on these

(31:59):
theological points. There's also a sort of close to me
the question of the Latin mass. So Catholics had a
certain way of offering the Mass for hundreds and hundreds
of years, and in nineteen sixty nine this was radically changed.

(32:22):
The modern rite of mass the most Roman Catholics attend,
is usually offered in the vernacular language of the local
people rather than in Latin, although sometimes when you go
to some places you'll hear some parts of the mass
in Latin. But it's totally up to the priest's discretion.
And there are a lot of other changes that happened.
There was a sort of a break with sort of
the literature that was embodied in the older Missile, some

(32:44):
of which was ancient and weighted with really beautiful historic
theological language. A lot of that got kind of pitched
out or cut and snipped and edited in the modern missile.
And there was a lot of richness and beauty, especially musical,
this whole musical tradition that the Catholic Church has developed
over the course of you know, two thousand years, much

(33:05):
of which sat poorly within the context of the modern
right of mass, or was just pitched out of the
modern righte of mass. So Paul Benedict had said about
the older right of mass, every priest is allowed to
do it. Just do it. It's fine, there's nothing harmful
about it. If in your context, in your Paris, you

(33:26):
think you want to do it, just do it. And
Pope Francis sort of aligned with, kind of more aligned with,
I think, sort of the boomer sympathies of older churchmen
alive today. He hated the Latin Mouth. Well, I shouldn't
say he hated it. He did not seem to like
the Latin mass very much, and so he massively restricted it.
And not just like if he had just said, okay,

(33:50):
individual bishops have to govern it within their die, so
they have to give an okay. It's not at the
level of individual priests. It has to be individual bishops.
If he had just said that, that's more reasonable, but
instead he had all this stuff that was even restraining bishops.
The bishops had to write the Vatican to say, hey,
can we have like one Sunday Mass with the Latin
Mass offered at you know, Saint Michael's parish in you know, Waukegan,

(34:15):
Illinois on First Saturdays. Like, they had to write the
Vatican about it. Hey, this younger priest wants to off
the Latin Mass. You know, it was really important to him.
He was a Latin major in college. Hey, Vatican two
thousand miles away, do you guys think it's okay if
Father McGillicutty offers Matt So. I think there was pretty

(34:36):
widespread non enthusiasm for this after Pope Francis instituted it.
It seems like it was something that was pushed by
a bunch of Italian liturgical liberals and they sort of
convinced Pope Francis to do this. And the situation feels
fairly unstable. So I would imagine Pope Leo will do something.

(35:00):
I hope. My guess is that he will say this
is just a bad working arrangement where a lot of
these bishops are not even following the rules because it's
so difficult to comply with and it's so silly. So
I would imagine, I would guess that Pope Leo will
leave us in those of us who like the Latin
mask like I do, will leave us in a better
situation and say, you know, maybe individual bishops just run

(35:22):
this and that's it. Now there's also the question of,
you know, the ongoing questions of how are we going
to handle abuse scandals. I think there were high profile
things that Pope Francis didn't handle great, that he himself
admitted later on he didn't handle great, not that he

(35:44):
was placing abusers places, but that he was trying to
be supportive of people who he thought were wrongly accused
but actually turned out they were fairly rightly accused. And
this culture of protecting people. I really hope as an American,
Pope Leo will be more clear eyed about that. So

(36:07):
we'll wait and see. I mean, I think the reforms
that were introduced under Pope Benedict were for the most
part quite good and quite effective, especially in the United States,
but a lot of countries didn't really have the reckoning
with sex abuse that the United States had, so I
could see problems with a lot of other countries when
it comes to that. So I think those are some

(36:27):
of the live issues with the papacy. When we return
the fact that the Pope is from Chicago. Just some
funny nonsense about that. That's next on the John Jerrardi Show. Okay,
some funny things coming out of the election of Pope
Francis of Pope Leo. Rather, excuse me a couple of
funny things. First, we had the spectacle of so when

(36:48):
the pope is elected, they set up this chimney coming
out of the Sistine Chapel with a sort of chimney spout.
And after the cardinals have a ballot, an electoral ballot.
If they don't get two thirds votes, they burn their
ballots and they put in some kind of chemicals to

(37:10):
ensure this is the case, because sometimes it's been kind
of ambiguous. They put in chemicals so that if they
haven't elected a pope, the smoke comes out black. But
if they do elect a pope, they burn their ballots
and the smoke that comes out because chemicals they add in,
or the kind of material whatever the materials are that
they're putting in the smoke comes out white. So you

(37:33):
had this spectacle of Catholics worldwide looking at YouTube live
video feeds of the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel,
and there was a seagull who just kept hanging out there,
and at one point there were three seagulls. It was
a mom, a dad, and a baby seagull, and everyone's
staring at this seagull. It was like the most famous
seagull in the whole world. My daughter Lizzie did a

(37:57):
water color painting of it without telling my wife, five
year old Lizzie, which was really funny. Anyway, that's hilarious.
The other funny thing is that this is the first
pope to have saved big money at Minards. Minards is
a big Midwest general store and this is probably the
only pope who was eating deep dish pizza. So God
bless Pope Leo eat some deep dish pizza to celebrate tonight.

(38:19):
That'll do it. John's already showee next time on Power
Talk