{"id":294313,"date":"2025-04-28T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=294313"},"modified":"2025-04-28T07:07:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T06:07:04","slug":"a-new-pope-a-new-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/04\/a-new-pope-a-new-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Pope, A New Policy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Apr 2025 <\/em>– Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, from Argentina, died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, ending a 12-year tenure as Pope having been elected in March 2013. The process for the election of a new Pope is underway. The 135 Cardinals under the age of 80 who will elect the new Pope are on their way to Rome for the funeral rites on Saturday 26 April and for the start of the election process.<\/p>\n

Pope Francis was the first Pope from Latin America after a long line of Popes from Western Europe, mostly Italy, with one Pope from Poland, Jean-Paul II, who played an important role in the transition away from Communism in Poland.<\/p>\n

The Bergoglio family had migrated from Italy to Argentina, and Pope Francis was always sensitive to the fate of migrants and refugees.\u00a0 His visit to Lampedusa shortly after becoming Pope was a strong visual account of his deep concern for migrants.\u00a0 He was particularly concerned with the armed conflicts in the Middle East from where many refugees had fled.\u00a0 He repeated his concern for migrants to J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice-President, whom Francis saw on Easter Day.\u00a0 Francis was the first Pope to visit Iraq and to meet with so many Muslim clergy both abroad and when they were visiting the Vatican in Rome.<\/p>\n

Francis was also concerned with ecological questions and the impact of climate change.\u00a0 His first doctrinal text, the encyclical “Laudato si” is on ecological issues on which he hoped that the Catholic church would play a vital role.<\/p>\n

The concerns of a Pope influence the policy of the church, but they are not the only influences at work.\u00a0 There are factions within the leadership of the Catholic Church as there are within any large, partly political body.\u00a0 The Vatican is both a state with observer membership in the United Nations as well as the administrative center of the Catholic church.\u00a0 There is a well-trained diplomatic corps with anbassadors in many countries.<\/p>\n

Now there will be a new Pope.\u00a0 We will have to watch closely to see what new policies are put forth.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ren\u00e9 Wadlow is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. He <\/em>is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving in economic and social issues<\/em>, and <\/em>editor of <\/em>Transnational Perspectives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Apr 2025 – Pope Francis was the first Pope from Latin America after a long line of Popes from Western Europe, mostly Italy, with one Pope from Poland, Jean-Paul II, who played an important role in the transition away from Communism in Poland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":244689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1670,107,1390],"class_list":["post-294313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-pope-francis","tag-religion","tag-vatican"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294315,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294313\/revisions\/294315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}