It might seem ghoulish to outsiders, but the media have a duty to closely monitor news personalities’ retirement plans, health woes, aging processes and impending deaths, whether that of a British queen, U.S. president, Supreme Court justices, tycoons or even Hollywood superstars.
Or a pontiff.
Currently, there’s a season of speculation about Pope Francis’s future and whether his newly chosen cardinals to be installed August 27 are his final bid to shape the conclave that will elect the next pope.
Careful. If you figure he’s making sure it will be a fellow liberal, don’t forget that the conservative Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI named the cardinals who elected Francis.
Speaking of successors, AP Correspondent Nicole Winfield follows the Rome bureau’s legendary Victor Simpson, who covered four popes across 41 years. On Sunday, she knowledgeably sifted some Francis scenarios.
Francis has just announced that when the cardinals gather in August he’ll visit the Italian hometown of Celestine V, the pope who famously resigned in A.D. 1294.
Surprisingly, Benedict did the same in 2013. So, is this trip a signal, or only a trip? Francis has remarked that Benedict was “opening the door” for resignation by future popes, hinting he might consider the idea. But Vaticanologists figure Francis will not resign so long as another ex-pope is alive.
At age 95, Benedict is alert but frail. Francis, age 85, appears reasonably healthy but underwent colon surgery last year and recently appeared in public in a wheelchair for the first time due to chronic knee pain.
Then there’s this. The cardinals elected Francis partly in hopes he’d reform the perpetually troubled Roman Curia (as in the sprawling Vatican bureaucracy). Restructure is now set in a Francis edict that took effect on Sunday. But fully implementing the scheme may be thorny and Francis may feel a responsibility to pursue his project.
Surveying the batch of incoming cardinal electors, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego stands out as the only American and as a mere bishop, not an archbishop (see this tmatt “On Religion” column about this drama). Francis again snubbed nearby Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the Mexico-born head of the nation’s largest archdiocese and the elected president of the U.S. bishops. Did membership in the Opus Dei organization count against him?