UNITED STATES
Religion News Service
David Gibson | September 23, 2015
(RNS) When the cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel in March 2013 to elect a new pope, they faced a sobering state of affairs: The Vatican had been plagued by scandals and dysfunction during the eight-year papacy of Benedict XVI, who stunned the Catholic Church by becoming the first pope in six centuries to resign.
The sense of crisis in Rome hung like a pall on the rest of the church, and that burden weighed heavily on the 86-year-old pontiff, playing a key role in his decision to retire to make way for a younger, more energetic successor.
But the 113 cardinal-electors also faced a stark choice: select an outsider from among their ranks who would come in and clean house, or go with another insider, someone who knew the Roman Curia — the papal bureaucracy that was widely blamed for the crisis — and could fix it.
“It takes a thief to catch a thief,” the reasoning went.
The problem with that argument was that Benedict, previously known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had worked in the Curia for decades before he was elected pope, and his familiarity seemed to breed complacency.
It didn’t take the cardinals long to make up their minds: In 24 hours they elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, a pope “from the ends of the earth” as Francis said in introducing himself to the world from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. Bergoglio had never liked traveling to Rome on church business, much less playing church politics, and he had a healthy suspicion of the Vatican’s curial culture.
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