A U.S. pope has long been viewed as a highly unlikely possibility, partly due to the nation’s reputation as too informal in contrast with the heavily ritualized, even mystical Vatican culture. An even larger obstacle, experts on Catholicism say, is the image of the United States as a global superpower reputedly under the sway of Wall Street and the CIA and morally corrupted by Hollywood.
But this year, “it’s a whole new ballgame,” as O’Malley said at a news conference Thursday. The stage has been set, he and others say, by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to eschew convention and retire.
Now, even as a U.S. pope remains a long shot, the fact that it’s such a subject of discussion points to dramatic changes both in the Catholic Church and in the perception of the United States’s place in the world.
U.S. qualities long seen as disqualifiers suddenly look like selling points to some. Brash get-it-done cowboys? Perhaps that’s what’s needed to clean up Vatican corruption. Secularism and the collapse of the traditional family? Those are very familiar topics in the United States, as is clergy sex abuse.
“The American cardinals are very much in touch with the challenges facing the church,” said Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, who was born in India, was raised in Britain and now runs continuing theological education at the Pontifical North American College of Rome, where U.S. seminarians are trained. “We have a very significant number of former Catholics; we have the challenge of bringing people back to the faith; we are facing the great moral questions head-on, from gay marriage to end-of-life issues. These are economic and social issues that concern every country.”
Yet others familiar with the mind-set of cardinals say it will be hard to overcome the perception that the United States already has enough power and that our perspectives on topics such as income inequality and religious freedom are sheltered ones because these aren’t life-and-death matters for us.
“We are viewed with more suspicion than we view ourselves. And you need two-thirds of the cardinals,” said Michael Sean Winters, a fellow at Catholic University who writes on Catholicism. “We’re seen as having a certain decadence in our culture that these [U.S. Catholic] leaders have not arrested. They haven’t beaten back cultural norms that others resent spreading to their own countries.”
The buzz in Rome about a possible U.S. pope has largely focused on Dolan, a historian and Twitterati who leads the U.S. bishops, and O’Malley, a brown-robe-wearing, Spanish-speaking Capuchin friar who has been sent to help straighten out several dioceses following clergy sex-abuse scandals. Dolan is 63; O’Malley is 68.
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