DAYTON, Ohio: Cardinal Robert Prevost of the USA has been picked to be the new chief of the Roman Catholic Church; he will probably be referred to as Pope Leo XIV.
Consideration now turns to what imaginative and prescient the primary US pope will carry.
Change is difficult to result in within the Catholic Church. Throughout his preach, Francis typically gestured towards change with out truly altering church doctrines.
He permitted dialogue of ordaining married males in distant areas the place populations have been tremendously underserved attributable to a scarcity of monks, however he didn’t truly enable it. On his personal initiative, he arrange a fee to review the potential for ordaining girls as deacons, however he didn’t comply with it by.
Nonetheless, he did enable monks to supply the Eucharist, an important Catholic sacrament of the physique and blood of Christ, to Catholics who had divorced and remarried with out being granted an annulment.
Likewise, Francis didn’t change the official educating {that a} sacramental marriage is between a person and a lady, however he did enable for the blessing of homosexual {couples}, in a way that did look like a sanctioning of homosexual marriage.
To what diploma will the brand new pope stand or not stand in continuity with Francis? As a scholar who has studied the writings and actions of the popes because the time of the Second Vatican Council, a collection of conferences held to modernise the church from 1962 to 1965, I’m conscious that each pope comes along with his personal imaginative and prescient and his personal agenda for main the church.
Nonetheless, the popes who instantly preceded them set sensible limits on what adjustments may very well be made. There have been limitations on Francis as properly; nonetheless, the brand new pope, I argue, can have extra leeway due to the alerts Francis despatched.
