ROME
Canberra Times
March 10, 2013
Barney Zwartz
Religion editor, The Age
After a week of general meetings, the world’s Catholic cardinals have settled on Tuesday, March 12, to start the meeting to select a new Pope.
At their second meeting of the day on Friday the assembled 115 cardinals who are under 80, plus dozens more ineligible to join the conclave because they are over 80, voted to go into seclusion from Tuesday.
Compared with the conclave of 2005, there have been public tensions and disagreements with non-Italian and non-Curia (Vatican bureaucracy) cardinals resisting pressure to move quickly and demands for answers to questions about Vatican scandals such as last year’s ”Vatileaks” crisis and the Vatican bank. The cardinals are also believed to want time to get to know each other and to have their staff research potential candidates before the conclave makes outside communication impossible.
The Italian and curial cardinals reportedly have been pressing for an early conclave. This would increase their influence as newer or more remote cardinals who do not know each other well would have less time to agree on the main challenges facing the church.
For first-world cardinals, these include the flight from faith by younger Catholics, loss of confidence in the church, the clergy sex abuse crisis and how to handle such controversial social issues as the place of women, homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, divorce and remarriage, and the decline in priests.
For cardinals from the developing world, social justice, poverty, environmental issues and relations with Islam and other faiths take centre stage. For both groups, the government of the church and reform of the Curia have risen sharply up the agenda.
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