How Protestants Can Benefit from Selecting the Next Pope

Published on by D. G. Hart

If states in the United States have open primaries that allow members of different political parties to vote in the opposing party’s primary, here is a way for Protestants to have a say in the selection of the next Pope. (By the way, Timothy George already offered his evangelical criteria for the next pope.)

Another benefit is financial profit. Apparently, betting on the next pope has a long history and bookies in Rome have established the odds:

The probabilities for other cardinals (as of March 8) include:

Gianfranco Ravasi, Italy, 14-1
Christoph Schonborn, Austria, 14-1
Peter Erdo, Hungary, 18-1
Luis Tagle, the Philippines, 20-1
Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, Honduras, 33-1
Jao Braz de Aviz, Brazil, 66-1
Gerhard Muller, Germany, 200-1

Among American cardinals, Timothy Dolan of New York leads with 20-1 odds, followed by Sean O’Malley of Boston at 33-1. Raymond Burke, current head of the Apostolic Signatura, comes next at 80-1, with Donald Wuerl of Washington (150-1) and Francis George of Chicago (200-1) as the long-shot Americans.

Ever the front-runner, I’m putting my money on Ravasi. With all the intrigue of late in the Vatican, my sense is that the Italians would like to retake control of a historic Italian institution.

28 thoughts on “How Protestants Can Benefit from Selecting the Next Pope”

  2. Darryl:

    1. I’ll bet on Rivasi (IT) with Dolan (US) a second-up. This much, an ignorant Baptacostalistic like Mahaney, a high school graduate, won’t be in the running.

    2. My justiably cranky views of Old Baldy and, by inference, the “Gospel Allies,” are registered at: http://reformationanglicanism.blogspot.com/2013/03/sgm-mahaneygate-christianity-today.html

    3. At least the Papists have scholarship and history in their behalf, unlike these Anabaptacostalists. Nonetheless, the demons of Rome still stalk the earth also. And, having been stalked by the egregious demons of Anglo-Tractarianism, ain’t goin’ there either. Exile is tough, but invigourating too.

    R/Veitch

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  6. The Curia is tired of the non-ciao’s. But, it depends who got blackballed in the red dossier Ratzinger will be carrying around in the garden.

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  8. Donald Philip Veitch: Darryl: I’ll bet on Rivasi (IT) with Dolan (US) a second-up. This much, an ignorant Baptacostalistic like Mahaney, a high school graduate, won’t be in the running.

    At least the Papists have scholarship and history in their behalf, unlike these Anabaptacostalists.

    RS:
    I Cor 1:26 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; 27 but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,
    28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no man may boast before God.

    1 Corinthians 2:1 And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. 2 For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. 3 I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, 4 and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God… 12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, 13 which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. 14 But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.

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  10. Erik, not good. There’s no legacy, they’re ‘merican, they aren’t ciao and they aren’t priests. god seems to have a real fixation for those italian papi’s. I would say they’re not celibate, just an assumption them being married and all, but knowing what I know about priests, there’s some interpretive wiggle room on what “is” is. Insert the oft repeated Fletch line about the law has changed a lot………..

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  13. What happened to the africans and south americans that were getting so much press in the aftermath of the surprise announcement?

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  14. Once Hart & Muether pass on will we be holding a conclave to elect a successor or will the Old Life movement be going the way of the Shakers? Will Doug receive an invitation to participate?

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  15. Donald Philip Veitch: “At least the Papists have scholarship and history in their behalf”

    Nuh uh:

    A Brief History of the Interpretation of Matthew 16:18

    And this doesn’t begin to skim the surface. The papists have actually got a lot of rot on their own behalf, and not much more. I’d be grateful if some of the historians here, with knowledge of Latin and an ability to check sources, would investigate Thomas Aquinas “Contra Errores Graecorum”, which Kung says “positively wallow[s] in quotations from forgeries”.

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  18. Does the Pope Matter?

    Garry Wills

    The next pope should be increasingly irrelevant, like the last two. The farther he floats up, away from the real religious life of Catholics, the more he will confirm his historical status as a monarch in a time when monarchs are no longer believable. Some people think it a new or even shocking thing that so many Catholics pay no attention to papal fulminations—against, for instance, female contraceptives, male vasectomies, condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, women’s equality, gay rights, divorce, masturbation, and artificial insemination (because it involves masturbation). But it is the idea of truth descending though a narrow conduit, straight from God to the pope, that is a historical invention.

    When Cardinal Ratzinger was asked, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, if he was disturbed that many Catholics ignored papal teaching, he said he was not, since “truth is not determined by a majority vote.” But that is precisely how the major doctrines like those on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection were fixed in creeds: at councils like that of Nicaea, by the votes of hundreds of bishops, themselves chosen by the people, before popes had any monopoly on authority. Belief then rose up from the People of God, and was not pronounced by a single oracle. John Henry Newman, in On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859), argued that there had been periods when the body of believers had been truer to the faith than had the Church hierarchy. He was silenced for saying it, but his historical arguments were not refuted.

    Catholics have had many bad popes whose teachings or acts they could or should ignore or defy. Orcagna painted one of them in hell; Dante assigned three to his Inferno; Lord Acton assured Prime Minister William Gladstone that Pius IX’s condemnation of democracy was not as bad as the papal massacres of Huguenots, which showed that “people could be very good Catholics and yet do without Rome”; and John Henry Newman hoped Pius IX would die during the first Vatican Council, before he could do more harm. Acton’s famous saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” was written to describe Renaissance popes.

    With the election of a new pope, the press will repeat old myths—that Christ made Peter the first pope, and that there has been an “apostolic succession” of popes from his time. Scholars, including great Catholic ones like Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, have long known that Peter was no pope. He was not even a priest or a bishop—offices that did not exist in the first century. And there is no apostolic succession, just the twists and tangles of interrupted, multiple, and contested office holders. It is a rope of sand. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, for instance, there were three popes, none of whom would resign. A new council had to be called to start all over. It appointed Martin V, on condition that he call frequent councils—a condition he evaded after he was in power.

    But didn’t Jesus say, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16.18)? Yes, but he also ordered his disciples not to seek rank among themselves (Mark 9.33-37), and said “Do not call any man on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven” (Matthew 23.9, NEB). How do we reconcile these sayings? G. K. Chesterton gave the best answer. Christ, founding his church, did not choose Peter because he was above others, but because he was not above them:

    He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man… All the empires and the kingdoms have failed because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by a strong man upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

    In the coming election, we do not have to fear Dante’s hell-bound popes, Acton’s mass-murderer popes, or Newman’s in-need-of-death pope. Happily, we can expect the new pope to be a man ordinary and ignorable, like Saint Peter.

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  20. Jack,

    Thanks for the article. I think part of the push back RCers are getting these days are on two fronts; The first and most prominent is; RC institutions and academics are in the forefront of promoting a religiously informed social conscience for consumption by all, RC or no. Public square pontificating invites public square criticism including highlighting instances of hypocrisy(sex abuse, cover up of sex abuse, placarding a celibate priesthood(married to God and the church-you can trust our notions of God and look at our sacrifice-not so much), promoting human rights and equality but then discriminating against homosexuals and women in your religious practice, etc. Then out on the interweb and in anglo-catholic communions you have an aggressive proselytizing for the religious faith and practice of RC, that’s something other that Vat II RC(decentralization, seperated brethren), and again invites criticism and/or defense as you polemically engage other’s religious faith. And then begging off the polemical rebuttal by falling back to Kantian notions of faith and fideistic appeals to truth.(The exciting thing is the confounding thing)

    If Peggy is feeling picked on, she might want to remember we all live in glass houses.

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  21. Catholics Need a Pope for the ‘New Evangelization’

    The next pontiff must nurture Catholicism where it is growing and revive it where it is not.

    By GEORGE WEIGEL

    The challenges facing the successor of Pope Benedict XVI come into sharper focus when we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition. Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council, the most important Catholic event since the 16th century. An ecclesiastical era is ending. What was its character, and to what future has Benedict XVI led Catholicism?

    Vatican II, which met from 1962 to 1965, accelerated a process of deep reform in the Catholic Church that began in 1878 when the newly elected Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity and to explore the possibilities of a critical Catholic engagement with the contemporary world. That reform process, which was not without difficulties, reached a high point of ecclesiastical drama at Vatican II, which has now been given an authoritative interpretation by two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both influential figures at the Council. According to that interpretation, the church must rediscover and embrace its vocation as a missionary enterprise.

    Evangelical Catholicism—or what John Paul II and Benedict XVI dubbed the “New Evangelization”—is the new form of the Catholic Church being born today. The church is now being challenged to understand that it doesn’t just have a mission, as if “mission” were one of a dozen things the church does. The church is a mission. At the center of that mission is the proclamation of the Gospel and the offer of friendship with Jesus Christ. Everyone and everything in the church must be measured by mission-effectiveness. And at the forefront of that mission—which now takes place in increasingly hostile cultural circumstances—is the pope, who embodies the Catholic proposal to the world in a unique way.

    So at this hinge moment, when the door is closing on the Counter-Reformation church in which every Catholic over 50 was raised, and as the door opens to the evangelical Catholicism of the future, what are the challenges facing the new pope?

    Catholicism is dying in its historic heartland, Europe. The new pope must fan the frail flames of renewal that are present in European Catholicism. But he must also challenge Euro-Catholics to understand that only a robust, unapologetic proclamation of the Gospel can meet the challenge of a Christophobic public culture that increasingly regards biblical morality as irrational bigotry.

    The new pope must be a vigorous defender of religious freedom throughout the world. Catholicism is under assault by the forces of jihadist Islam in a band of confrontation that runs across the globe from the west coast of Senegal to the eastern islands of Indonesia.

    Christian communities in the Holy Land are under constant, often violent, pressure. In the West, religious freedom is being reduced to a mere “freedom of worship,” with results like the ObamaCare Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate.

    Thus the new pope must be a champion of religious freedom for all, insisting with John Paul II and Benedict XVI that there can be neither true freedom nor true democracy without religious freedom in full. That means the right of both individuals of conscience and religious communities to live their lives according to their most deeply held convictions, and the right to bring those convictions into public life without civil penalty or cultural ostracism.

    This defense of religious freedom will be one string in the bow of the new pope’s responsibility to nurture the rapidly growing Catholic communities in Africa, calling them to a new maturity of faith. It should also frame the new pope’s approach to the People’s Republic of China, where persecution of Christians is widespread. When China finally opens itself fully to the world, it will be the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Like his two immediate predecessors, the new pope should recognize that the church’s future mission in China will be imperiled by any premature deal-making with the Chinese Communist regime, which would also involve an evangelical betrayal of those Chinese Christians who are making daily sacrifices for fidelity to Jesus Christ.

    The ambient public culture of the West will demand that the new pope embrace some form of Catholic Lite. But that counsel of cultural conformism will have to reckon with two hard facts: Wherever Catholic Lite has been embraced in the past 40 years, as in Western Europe, the church has withered and is now dying. The liveliest parts of the Catholic world, within the United States and elsewhere, are those that have embraced the Catholic symphony of truth in full. In responding to demands that he change the unchangeable, however, the new pope will have to demonstrate that every time the Catholic Church says “No” to something—such as abortion or same-sex marriage—that “No” is based on a prior “Yes” to the truths about human dignity the church learns from the Gospel and from reason.

    And that suggests a final challenge for Gregory XVII, Leo XIV, John XXIV, Clement XV, or whoever the new pope turns out to be: He must help an increasingly deracinated world—in which there may be your truth and my truth, but nothing recognizable as the truth—rediscover the linkage between faith and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, two of the pillars of Western civilization. When those two pillars crumble, the third pillar—Rome, the Western commitment to the rule of law—crumbles as well. And the result is what Benedict XVI aptly styled the dictatorship of relativism.

    What kind of man can meet these challenges? A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life. An experienced pastor with the courage to be Catholic and the winsomeness to make robust orthodoxy exciting. A leader who is not afraid to straighten out the disastrous condition of the Roman Curia, so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.

    The shoes of the fisherman are large shoes to fill.

    Mr. Weigel is the author of “Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church,” just published by Basic Books.

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  22. CBS “Sunday Morning” had a story on priestly celibacy, complete with seminarians saying they would like to get married. Everyone’s piling on at this point.

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  26. CBS is talking about what an agent of change the new pope is going to be, then they showed his age: 76. Yeah, I’m sure he’s gonna change it and rearrange it just like Obama. More like John McCain.

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  27. Best tweet of the day – from Seth Rogan:

    “There’s also white smoke coming out of my office, but nobody seems that excited about it.”

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  28. Hey Todd,

    To every RC who received the blessing of the new pope, they got a plenary indulgence out of the deal. Of course you can’t have any lingering venial sin, IOW, you went to confession. Still, that’s a heck of a deal. What’s Seth offering?!

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