The process of selecting a new pope is “ultimately not an election, ultimately it is a discernment,” said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington.
The Sistine Chapel’s transformation from a world-famous tourist site to the prayer-filled space where cardinal electors will choose the next pope is under way.
A major issue facing today’s U.S. Catholic Church is that many people express “absolutely no problem with faith, but they do have a problem with religion,” said New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan.
In their general congregation meetings, in liturgical processions and in the Sistine Chapel, every cardinal has a place and each cardinal knows his place. The Vatican calls it “precedence,” and it has little to do with the importance of the cardinal’s day job, the size of his diocese or his age. But it has everything to do with timing.
Laypeople have a right and duty to offer their ideas to the cardinals who will elect the next pope, one theologian observed as part of a panel of lay Catholics who proposed that characteristics such as joy and diplomacy were important to the selection.
Doustou and fellow seminarians Rhett Williams and Deacons Scott Holmer and Dustin Dought reflects on the pope’s eight-year pontificate and its effect on their lives as young Catholics in interviews at Theological College of The Catholic University of America in Washington.
Seated under Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue “Chair of St. Peter,” which celebrates the teaching authority of the pope, more than 100 cardinals gathered March 6 to pray as they prepared to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI.
Although by March 6 the world’s cardinals had not set a date to begin the conclave to elect a new pope, they had begun discussing “the profile” required of the next pope to meet the needs of the church, the Vatican spokesman said.
After completing their third pre-conclave meeting, the College of Cardinals still had not announced a date for the conclave. Instead, they used the March 4 and 5 meetings to discuss needs of the church.
Two U.S. cardinals who will vote in the upcoming papal election say there is no rush to set a date for voting, which could start as late as March 20.