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Friday, March 29, 2024
NEWS  |  CAMPUS

Smoke Monster: Papal conclave party has just begun

That’s right, folks. The papal conclave, the selection process of the world’s new pope, started this week. As of Tuesday evening, the college of cardinals had not selected a new pope.

Pardon our glib tone comparing this medieval ceremony with Tyra Banks’ franchise, but the pageantry of the event always seems odd in these modern times.

Here in America, we’re used to things being out in the open.

We just love our social media. Heck, it was Mitt Romney’s birthday this week, and his son posted an Instagram photo of him eating a cupcake with a birthday hat on. We share everything.

It’s a little weird and mysterious that these 115 cardinals are behind closed doors until they reach a decision.

Is it a popularity contest? (Pope-ularity! Sorry.) Do the cardinals run smear campaign ads of their opponents on closed-circuit Vatican TV? How are we supposed to know who to vote for from home with a toll-free number, like when we used to pay attention to “American Idol”?

“Italy’s Angelo Scola and Brazil’s Odilo Scherer are spoken of as strong contenders,” according to an article in Reuters. “The former would return the papacy to Italy after 35 years in the hands of Poland’s John Paul II and the German Benedict XVI. Scherer would be the first non-European pope since Syrian-born Gregory III in the 8th century.”

“However, a host of other candidates have also been mentioned as ‘papabili’ — potential popes — including U.S. cardinals Timothy Dolan and Sean O’Malley, Canada’s Marc Ouellet and Argentina’s Leonardo Sandri,” the article goes on to mention.

This is like God’s rose ceremony on “The Bachelor” to the new pope. Instead of a fake TV wedding at the end, this new pope will inherit a laundry list of problems to deal with.

The current state of the Catholic Church is “threatened by secularism, the scandal of clerical sex abuse and a Vatican bureaucracy stippled with corruption,” according to a New York Times article.

“And in a bizarre twist, basketball star Dennis Rodman promised to be in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday in a makeshift popemobile as he campaigns for Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana to become the church’s first black pope,” according to an Associated Press article.

Oh, well. This whole competition will be over soon, right?

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“There is no time limit to reach a decision, the last conclave in 2005 lasted two days but in 1268, it took 33 months to elect Pope Gregory X,” said an article in the Huffington Post.

Oh.

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