Does anybody have any good article links on the new pope, Robert Prevost? I assume he's total right-wing dog shit garbage.

46 comments

from what i've seen? radlib pope. he has a twitter and a blog i think if you want to see his thoughts as he writes them.
- same or worse than francis?
  
  More moderate and fluent in church legalese (doctorate in Canon law and part of the Roman curia), so he has an investment in working within the establishment and caring more about process than about outcomes. While Francis was more of a "fuck around and find out" pope, in that he would say random shit as doctrine and let his aides figure out how to make it work within the church, this guy will spend much more time and energy making sure the ts are crossed and the is are dotted.
  
  he would say random shit as doctrine and let his aides figure out how to make it work within the church, this guy will spend much more time and energy making sure the ts are crossed and the is are dotted
  forgive me if I don't quite understand Catholicism, but I thought whole point of the pope is that he's the one guy in the whole organization who's not fully constrained by the millennia of rules that have built up. Like, Divine Providence, or whatever.
  
  Sort of. The Pope is the head of state of the Holy See as well as the head of the Catholic Church. He technically has absolute power to operate the Church as he sees fit, but because the Church is a gargantuan organization with a fuckload of tetchy old men governing its branches he has to play nice or risk schisms or political opposition. He can decide to create a new diocese for instance, but if he's pissed off the people actually doing that work, it won't get done. Popes also occasionally make divine proclamations, but it's typically about christian canon and not church operations.
  
  It's all that fox said, and the pope is pretty much the ultimate authority when it comes to doctrine (what to believe, and how to interpret scripture and so on), but he's also the head of a massive bureaucracy with hundreds of years of legal codes and institutions that work together to run the catholic church.
  If Francis said "from now on all priests have to wear silly hats", his aids would have to translate that into "what is a hat", "what counts as silly", "who's gonna provide the hats", "who's gonna make sure everyone wears the hats" and "what happens if they don't wear the hat". This new guy seems to be much more in tune with the legal part of the job, and that makes him a much more conservative option than the guy before him in my opinion, because he will try to operate using the tools the church already has.
  The pope is an absolute monarch, but he's like the captain of a large ship: he can't run the thing all by himself, and in order for the church to do what he says, he has to play the game.
  
  He's to the right of Francis overall. But he's to the left of the dems mostly on the poor, but to the right of them on some social stuff.
  
  less lib than francis but pretty much the same thing

46 comments