Word: papabilis
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...should become the next Pope. The ultraconservative religious movement Civilta Cristiana plastered Rome with posters demanding "a preacher of crystal-clear doctrine and a custodian of truth against the current heresy." Other right-wingers who follow France's semischismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre drew up a broadside linking certain papabili (possible Popes) with Freemasonry. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the U.S.-based Committee for the Responsible Election of the Pope issued in Rome a list of necessary papal traits, among them happiness, holiness and willingness to "trust others...
...very fact that an African and an Argentine are even being mentioned as papabili is to the credit of Paul, the supposedly timid Pope. It was Paul who appointed the first black and Chicano bishops in the U.S. in this century, 19 black African and Asian Cardinals and, earlier this year, the first black archbishop in South Africa. He made unprecedented papal visitations to honor Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands. In these regions his landmark utterance was not the divisive 1968 Humanae vitae, the birth control encyclical that caused such an uproar in the West...
...Romans have a word for it: papabili - the "possible Popes." In other times and other conclaves, they were at most a handful of men who, because of their holiness or wisdom or political savvy - or some fortuitous combination of such qualities - were deemed worthy of election as Pope. The conclave to choose a successor to Pope Paul VI, however, will be like no other before it. The number of Cardinal-electors, for one thing, is far greater than in any previous conclave, nearly twice the number who voted in 1963 in Pope Paul's election. With that increase...
...contest in Rome this month is by no means confined to these three Italians and two non-Italians: they are simply the early-form leaders in a very open race. There is, for example, a second rank of Italian papabili, led by the able Archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, 57. As Substitute Secretary of State under French Cardinal Jean Villot for a decade, Benelli wielded more power than his boss, acting effectively as the Pope's chief of staff. Paul rewarded him last year with a red hat and the Archdiocese of Florence, but he is still quite...
...defeat for the church, which is precisely what happened. It is, however, unlikely that any Cardinal from a major Western nation, such as France, West Germany or, above all, the U.S., would be chosen, lest the Vatican be identified too closely with big-power politics. No Americans are considered papabili anyway...