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Secular blowhards just don't get the papacy

Secular blowhards just don't get the papacy

Times24-04-2025

One of the many joys of being a Catholic in a post-Christian era is that, every ten or fifteen years or so, we get to listen as people who reject just about everything the church represents lecture us with great conviction on who should be its next leader.
The death of a pope, at a time when Rome has almost no temporal power, and when in most of the anglophone world Catholicism is very much a minority interest, remains a curiously public participation sport, in which everyone gets to award marks to the man just gone and sizes up the runners and riders for the contest ahead. Commentators on the BBC who might once have attended a church wedding suddenly hold forth on the

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