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00:00Actually, let's bring in Andrew Chestnut from the University of Virginia. Andrew, thank you for being with us.
00:05Clearly, we're interested to hear what you think about this appointment and what you see strengths, opportunities or threats and weaknesses.
00:12What's your take on the whole situation?
00:15Yeah, yeah, a couple of things.
00:18Other commentators have made this dichotomy between Latin America and the United States.
00:23But we have to realize that 40 percent of the church in the United States are Hispanics.
00:31And one of the very hot button issues since President Trump became president is the mass deportations of undocumented Latin Americans, the majority of whom are Catholic.
00:45And the American bishops have been very, you know, very vocal in opposing this.
00:51So this is great continuity with Pope Francis' ministry to migrants at the very time when there's, you know, thousands of Latin American Catholics are being deported, many of whom don't have criminal records and are ending up in pay for prisons in El Salvador.
01:10As far as far as as far as him being a polyglot, that's really interesting, too, because it's it's actually a very tiny percentage of the world's one point four billion Catholics who speak Italian.
01:25By far the most spoken languages by the one point four billion Catholics are Spanish and English.
01:33And those are the two main languages of our new pope as well.
01:37So that's that's also and we see that he's fluent in Italian as well.
01:41So he's got all the linguistic bases covered as well, which is in continuity with what our previous guest said about building bridges.
01:51And of course, Pope Francis was all about that, too.
01:55Andrew, do you feel these bridges that he can build will help perhaps improve relations with the White House?
02:00I mean, clearly, Pope Francis had certain things to say about what Donald Trump was doing.
02:04Do you think that the new pope will have maybe a different take or a different road in, perhaps?
02:11Yeah, I think that's going to be one of the major challenges, given given what I just said is happening with the mass deportations.
02:18I think I think we're going to see him step up as a talented diplomat and and probably surprise many of us in building bridges to the White House in a way that that maybe would have been more difficult for Pope Francis.
02:39I think Pope Francis, probably most difficult country during his papacy, was here in the United States.
02:49I'm a Latin America specialist.
02:51And interestingly, in surveys of opinions of Americans, Argentines always come up as kind of the least favorable of the United States.
03:02And I think we saw that in Pope Francis as well.
03:06So but I think I think he's proven that he has diplomatic acumen and we will see him making a tremendous effort to build bridges to to the White House.
03:21Andrew, bear with us. I've got so many more questions for you, sir.
03:24But thank you for that initial introduction. Fantastic stuff.
03:27Andrew Chester, the chair of Catholic studies at the University of Virginia.
03:31Douglas Herber, our international affairs commentator, is raring to go.
03:35Doug, I mean, this is a great story. I mean, whether you believe, whether you don't believe, whether you or any religion, what we're seeing here is a massive show.
03:43A church which has riches that perhaps are unable to be calculated because it is a bit obscure kind of how the Catholic church is using all this money where it actually is.
03:53But I've heard estimates of like three hundred billion dollars in the bank.
03:57Could be more, could be less, probably more.
03:58You know, there's this massive influence that the pope will have, too, because he speaks to not just the one point four billion Catholics, but bear in mind, they will have a vote.
04:07And some of them might vote for Donald Trump or might vote for somebody else.
04:10Or, you know, there's a voice there. It's interesting, isn't it?
04:13So geopolitically, this is where I come to you, sir.
04:16Geopolitically, Pope Leo XIV is a player.
04:21He's a player. We keep saying the number of one point four billion Catholics.
04:26It's drilled into our heads. We've been saying it for weeks now.
04:30If you could say he's the leader of, you know, next to China, maybe the largest constituency, built in constituency in the world.
04:37Obviously, as we've seen through this conclave and through also Francis's papacy, this is a constituency which, depending on the countries, the cultures from which they hail, they have many different ideologies, many different outlooks, many different social views, social policies.
04:56What's interesting here, though, and you have to keep reminding ourselves, yeah, he has enormous influence.
05:01Popes have influence. Obviously, they are a voice of moral authority in the world.
05:05Popes are not secular politicians, and that is a bane and a blessing in the sense that it's harder to sort of peg down a pope where they actually stamp.
05:15This pope, from what we're learning about him, what we've heard about him throughout, you know, the interviews we had Stuart doing there in St. Peter's Square, he is progressive on a lot of social issues.
05:26He seems to be much more closely aligned with Francis, with whom he also studied, by the way, in Chicago, on issues such as migrations, immigrants, outreach towards immigrants, the environment, climate change issues, social justice policies.
05:43On a lot of those, the social dossier, he has a more progressive bent.
05:47Like I said, from the little we know about him, popes can become different leaders than they are before they're elected.
05:53But he's seen as being more conservative on church doctrine, on the actual doctrine of the church.
05:59And this is where it's going to be interesting, because we were talking earlier, Mark, about some of the unfinished business from Francis's papacy, from his legacy.
06:08And yes, Francis was hailed in many quarters as a reformer, someone who opened the church up, a pope of inclusion.
06:16We heard that big word before, sinodality, which literally means listening to the faithful, going to people where they are.
06:22He was all those things.
06:24But for many in that same church, he was also divisive.
06:27There was a lot of resistance to him as well.
06:29He fired a lot of people at the Vatican that he didn't much like or care for.
06:35He brought in 80 percent of those cardinals who were voting were brought in by him.
06:39The question right now is how far on the church doctrine this new pope is going to perhaps veer away from what we saw in Francis.
06:50He faces, I'd say, the two biggest unfinished.
06:54Didn't mean that Pope Francis didn't make some headway.
06:57Obviously, we haven't said it yet.
06:58It's the elephant in the room, the sexual clergy abuse.
07:01This is something where Pope Francis very stridently tried to at least put forth the image of a pope who wanted to put an end to abuses.
07:11He wanted to put an end to cover-ups.
07:13He wanted to bring a sense of greater accountability to the church.
07:18We do not know where this new pope will stand, how outspoken he may be on that issue, whether he'll remain relatively more or less silent on it.
07:26We do know that he has had some criticism in the past on his dealings with priests who, through some way or form, were maybe implicated in sexual abuse scandals.
07:36Doesn't mean he didn't do anything.
07:37This is something we have to learn about him.
07:39We don't know where he stands.
07:41LGBTQ plus, right?
07:43The buzzword of our age.
07:44Pope Francis famously said, he was on a plate, I believe, he told reporters, he was asked about a gay member of the Vatican, of his entourage, and he says, who am I to judge?
07:56And he also famously said, homosexuality is not a crime.
08:00Now, we don't know really in detail yet what the new pope, what his views are with respect to church doctrine, homosexuality, how much he wants to bring them into the church, make them feel included in the church.
08:14He has come under some scrutiny or criticism in the past for remarks that were deemed to be not so inclusive towards the gay community, the lesbian community, the trans community.
08:25But like I said, popes, when they start or often during their tenure, they become far different pontiffs than they were previously in their former lives.
08:37So Robert Prevost, cardinal, might be a far different person than who he's going to evolve into as pope as he tackles these major challenges.
08:46And I just mentioned a couple of them, right?
08:48We talked earlier about the role of women.
08:50We talked about the polarization and building those bridges and the divides.
08:53He has a giant inbox, this pontiff, but he does seem like he has the capacities and the background that put him in a good position to start tackling them.
09:02Indeed, a continuity from Pope Francis.
09:05But as you say, Doug, it could be different.
09:07It could go in a different way.
09:08But there's that sense that he's cut from the same cloth in a certain way because of his views about bringing the church to people.
09:15Douglas, thank you, as always, for the light you never fail to shed on the subjects that we treat.
09:21And this subject is massive.
09:23A new pope, Leo XIV, St. Peter's Square, as you can see in these images, is looking empty.
09:29But let's go to our guest at the University of Virginia, head of the Catholic Studies Unit there, Andrew Chestnut.
09:35Because, Andrew, I know that your head is never empty and you've got many things to tell us.
09:39And I'm wondering how Catholics in the United States will view this.
09:45Will this have a political influence?
09:47Because if the pope disagrees with, say, Donald Trump on a policy or J.D. Vance on a policy,
09:53and we know that that happened with Pope Francis, will this have an influence, do you think?
09:58Oh, yeah, undoubtedly.
10:00And let me tell listeners that the Catholic Church is basically divided along ethnic lines politically.
10:0861% of white Catholics voted for Donald Trump in the last election,
10:14and about two-thirds of the 40% Hispanic Catholics voted for Kamala Harris.
10:22So great ethnic and political cleavage in the church as well.
10:30But, yeah, I think it'll be really interesting to see if the church steps up its opposition
10:38to these mass deportations that started on day one of Trump's presidency.
10:46Andrew, bear with us if you can.
10:48We're going back to the Vatican.