Lila Rose was kind enough to ask Joe Heschmeyer to appear on her podcast LIVE and discuss all things Conclave and Papacy! Here’s a clip discussing the likely Papal candidates and what we know about them. Be sure to go see the FULL interview over on Lila’s channel!
Transcript:
Lila:
Welcome back to the Lila Rose Show. So happy that you guys are here. I’m excited to have you here because this is such a special moment with the conclave. I know everyone was very excited today. Is there going to be white smoke and we didn’t get it. Did you think there was a chance we would get white smoke today
Joe:
If we had white smoke today? There would only be about two possible cardinals. It would’ve been,
Lila:
Oh,
Joe:
Okay. I got it.
Lila:
Franco, can you pull up the white smoke picture? Actually we can see it. These images are so iconic too and so gorgeous. I mean this is one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth, Italy and then the gorgeous Vatican. Let’s get up the white smoke. But Joe, you just said, sorry to interrupt you, but you just said there were only two candidates that could have possibly
Joe:
Made if it had been white smoke, I would feel like I’d have a 50 50 shot at knowing who the candidate was. Whoa.
Lila:
Crazy.
Joe:
But a small margin of it being somebody else, but it just wasn’t likely. So I mean a little bit of background for why this is the College of Cardinals is more geographically diverse than in any point in history and Pope Francis really made a point of choosing from the global peripheries and so many countries have their first cardinal ever. And so Italy has the most cardinals still but only has 17. So you don’t
Lila:
Have how many in total?
Joe:
Out of 130
Lila:
Says it’s 1 33.
Joe:
Yeah, 1 33. But as a result, so okay, Italy has the most at 17, but 17 out 133 is nowhere near a two thirds majority. So even if you’re beloved by every other cardinal in your country, most of the rest of the world probably doesn’t know you very well. There are a handful of exceptions, people who are in positions where they’re crossing paths with a lot of the world’s cardinals by virtue of the role that they were in under the prior pontificate. And so there’s only a handful of people who are even well enough known that they would’ve been like an obvious shoe in everybody knows them, they have an opinion about them, and that would be Cardinal Perin and Cardinal Zpi. And I was skeptical it was going to be, I mean it could still be one of those two. The media was treating them much more as obvious and I was a little skeptical that they were going to go that route. And so as of today, at least I feel vindicated in that I wasn’t at all surprised by the black smoke.
Lila:
Sorry, where is Cardinal Perlin and Cardinal Zue? Where are they from?
Joe:
So Cardinal Perlin was Secretary of State for Pope Francis and Cardinal, I believe he was in Rome and then he actually became the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna and he’s been the kind of point man for Pope Francis in an informal way for major issues like Ukraine. He was the kind of papal representative. And then actually the controversial thing that I think could be of interest to Cardinals this time around both and Zui were really influential in the Vatican China deal in 2018 where they tried to improve relations. But I know it was a very controversial deal in terms of whether the church actually came out ahead on that or whether they kind of got played by the Chinese. And so as a result, but it shows those two were both very involved and because of this, ZPI has also been involved with the congregation for Bishops.
And so as a result, excuse me, the provost, but Zpi has been involved with a lot of the things that Pope Francis did. So a lot of bishops cross paths with him, whereas a lot of the cardinals from the rest of the world, they haven’t had a lot of opportunities to interact with one another. So that was the first reason I was skeptical we were going to get an obvious person. Day one Zui seems like the person Pope Francis probably wanted if he got to handpick his successor. But Zui Hass been pretty controversial. He wrote one of the essays in the Italian version of Father James Martin’s to build a bridge and so on. A lot of cultural issues, if you want to put it that way. Zui has a strong side and on a lot of controversial
Lila:
Issues. So is Cardinal, when you say if it had happened today, if we got white smoke today, meaning they elected a Pope, it would’ve been Cardinal or or Cardinal Zue. Is it your view though that because they were not chosen today, it’s unlikely that those cardinals are going to be in seriously in the running going forward?
Joe:
It’s not that they’re completely out of the running, but they aren’t just like a shoe in. It wasn’t like, because those were the two who you look at them and thought, okay, these are the two most strongly identified with Pope Francis.
Lila:
Got it.
Joe:
And Cardinal Toggle stylistically people will compare him to Pope Francis. But in terms of the actual governance, those were the two who, I’ll give you an example. Benedict the 16th was very much the right hand man of John Paul II and Pop the 12th was very much the right hand man of pop the 11th. So both of them were chosen, but that’s actually a little bit exceptional In the church’s, at least more recent history, there’s an Italian saying after a fat pope, a skinny pope, and it’s classically
Lila:
Like, wait, did that happen?
Joe:
Well, who other the way around between, well, I guess you could go John the 23rd to Paul the sixth, but Pius at 12th to John the 23rd. I
Lila:
Don’t know where one stage,
Joe:
Well John the 23rd is a little more, he had kind of my build and Pius at 12th was rail thin.
Lila:
You’re not fat Joe.
Joe:
Come on. John the 23rd was more by Italian standards than maybe American standards.
Lila:
He just liked his gelato.
Joe:
It’s more just like an expression. So in the same way that the president often loses seats in the midterm election for his party
Lila:
Because
Joe:
People say all, we like a lot of what he’s doing, but we want to push back on these things. Well, with every conclave, the cardinals there, they know what the Pope is, they know the strengths, but they also know the weaknesses. And that’s not like a dig on Pope Francis or any Pope. Every Pope has strengths and weaknesses. And so one of the things the Cardinals are considering are do we want to keep going in the direction we’ve been going in terms of the style and the emphasis and everything else, or do we want to maybe shore up some of the areas where the prior Pope was weak And you see this very conscious sort of deliberation happening. I would say you see it with certainly the move from Benedict the 16th to Pope Francis. One of the things that I think Benedict himself would’ve told you is he wasn’t great in terms of some of the governance stuff.
For example, the Vatican finances were a mess and they’re cracking down on internal corruption and that kind of administrative style wasn’t his style. He’s much more the style of a university professor and a theologian. And so one of the things they were interested in in choosing Pope Francis was, well, he would been bishop of Buenos Aires. He had a lot more practical experience in even the boring kind of management stuff that factors in. And maybe this is, so I guess I stress two things. One, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cardinals choose someone who is different than Pope Francis in some obvious ways. And the media will make that out to be a huge like, oh, they reject Pope Francis, but that’s pretty normal.
Lila:
Sorry to interrupt, but when you say you wouldn’t be surprised if the Cardinals pick someone different from Pope Francis in obvious ways, I know you’re talking about the joke of fat Pope versus skinny Pope, but you’re more speaking towards what might be perceived as a strength and weaknesses of that Pope picking someone else who had the opposite strengths and weaknesses just to in their best prudence, help respond to the Holy Spirit working amongst the conclave to find someone to help augment good things that Pope Francis was doing and maybe double down on areas where maybe there was less activity that they had hoped there would be more of that kind of a thing.
Joe:
Exactly. Okay. So I mean this is a huge role and every Pope is going to fall short in some regards. And one of the questions they’re going to face are like, do we keep leaning into the areas where maybe the prior Pope was strong or do we need to take a greater attention to the areas where the prior Pope was weak? And historically they’ve tended towards that latter option. There have been a handful of exceptions, but they’ve tended towards, you can see if you look at each particular Pope and say, what were some of his weak areas? And then look at his successor and say, okay, this is what they were discerning. The second thing I’d say about it though is their analysis isn’t going to be the same as ours at home. Meaning we are often looking at this in terms of left or conservative liberal, which those labels aren’t super applicable in the church. I get what they’re expressing. But a lot of what they’re looking for also just intangibles and maybe more tangible things about leadership. How effectively will this person lead? How charismatic are they? How good are they at balancing a budget or
Lila:
Interesting
Joe:
Running any sort of organization because someone can have all the right views and maybe be a beautiful theologian or preacher or something else, but if they can’t govern, that is something that they have to take into consideration. And so I always think about it just in-house. Chris Check is the president of Catholic Answers and it makes a lot more sense with all due respect to all of my fellow apologists. It makes a lot more sense for him to be in that role than for any of us because his skillset is much more suited for it. And that’s just not, if you put it to a popular vote and said, who’s going to be the next president of Catholic Answers? I think they would choose somebody who is a good apologist, but you need someone who’s also just good at running things. And the papacy works somewhat similarly.
Lila:
Chris Wilson asks, what are the odds that we get in American Pope?
Joe:
I would say very low, but not zero.
Lila:
Okay.
Joe:
Prevost is the name that I sometimes hear thrown around as a possibility because of his work with the congregation for Bishops, he knows a lot of the Cardinals,
Lila:
Cardinal Prevost,
Joe:
And he’s from Chicago.
Lila:
We have a picture of him, Franco,
Joe:
I don’t know. Yeah, he’s not super well known actually among Americans.
Lila:
If you had a percentage, you would say Cardinal Privos is going to be the next Pope, this American Cardinal, what would you give it?
Joe:
I would put it in the low single digits.
Lila:
Okay.
Joe:
5%, I’d say probably even sub five. I don’t think it’s super like he’s not on my short list, but the names you’ll hear on the short list and then last time around Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal O’Malley, their names were both mentioned. Cardinal Dolan is still under 80. Cardinal O’Malley is not. So they’re not impossible, but I think it’s unlikely. The prevailing wisdom was while America’s kind of running the world politically, it’s probably not likely that there’s also going to be an American
Lila:
Who’s interesting.
Joe:
The Pope.
Lila:
There’s the picture. I think Franco just pulled it up. You bump it back. Cardinal Prevost right here. And then you mentioned Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal O’Malley.
Joe:
Right. And those names are probably more familiar to ordinary American Catholics.
Lila:
Well, yeah. Cardinal Dolan I think was just added to the Council on religious liberty by President Trump. So you’re saying it
Joe:
Would be very strange to have the Pope have on the president’s council. Usually the papacy is sort of a counterbalance to the secular powers of the world.
Lila:
Interesting.
Joe:
And so I mean we have a long 2000 year history of this, of times where the secular sphere had too much control in the papacy. So you have the Byzantine emperors who had too much say during one era you have the French at a later era, and then you have this longstanding, this very strange relationship between the Pope and the Holy Roman emperor where the pope would crown someone, a holy Roman emperor, and then a few years later he’d invaded Italy and try to kill the Pope. Crazy. It was this recurring thing. Wild. And so the wisdom of the church, and there’s no rule about this, but wisdom of the church is typically you don’t want someone who might even be perceived as beholden to the most powerful kind of secular forces. You want someone who can work with them but counterbalance them as needed. If you have someone who’s really divisive, let’s say hypothetically, you’ve got an extremely liberal and an extremely conservative candidate. And just for the sake this is not accurate, let’s say like 50 50, 50% of the cardinals love the left guy, 50% love the right guy, and they realize pretty quickly they’re deadlocked. They’re then going to be actively looking for someone else who is a amenable to meet to the middle.
And so one of the candidates whose name has been thrown out there for that is Cardinal Pizza. He is young, he turned 60 on the day Pope Francis died. And that’s very youthful by papal standards because it might mean for 30 years.
Lila:
Can you pull up his picture, Franco? So this is Cardinal Pizza Ball. Love the name.
Joe:
And is
Lila:
He the one who said he told Hamas that he would love to take the place of
Joe:
All the hostages? Yeah, he offered trade places with the hostages and he’s been the patriarch of Jerusalem and has been on the one hand a great advocate for Palestinian Christians and for victims of violence in Palestine. He’s also stood up to Hamas and he’s been, I think people on both sides of the conflict have looked at him as a real honest broker and someone who isn’t just a partisan but is actually navigated this very tricky situation with a tremendous amount of grace and dignity and he doesn’t have a lengthy track record on other hot button issues. So he seems like the obvious from the outside. He seems like the obvious sort of compromise candidate. If let’s say you are someone who you love the Latin mass, if you love, you’re probably going to say Cardinal Syrah or Burke or somebody like that. And if it’s like, okay, they don’t have nearly enough votes to get to two thirds pizza, Paula looks pretty amenable. He looks like he’s okay with the traditional mass and he’s able to navigate geopolitics and he’s able to do all of these things to lead the church well. But then the danger of course is this is someone young, so if you miscalculate it, if you bet wrong, the consequences of that are more long ranging.
Lila:
Another common question, well maybe not so common depending who’s asking, but can the Pope be married at all possible to have a married pope?
Joe:
It is. It might be complicated, but there’s no canonical reason it couldn’t happen. There’s a dispute as to whether Peter was married or not because there’s a reference in the Bible to mother-in-law, but there’s no reference to a wife or children. And as he’s following Jesus around, the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. This was not the kind of life that seems fit for a married man. It’s hard enough. I’m on the road one night right now. If I was on the road for three years, my wife might have some stronger words. And so they’re following Jesus for three years and then for decades after that they’re going around preaching in various places. He’s in Jerusalem, he’s getting arrested, he’s going to Antioch, he’s going to Rome. Does he have a wife and kids who are somewhere in the picture either in Rome or maybe accompanying him they’re in Galilee or accompanying him on the road? We don’t know. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen, but I don’t think the biblical case for him being married at the time he’s an apostle is actually as strongest as people think. There’s a couple passages that I see getting misused a lot. So I’m not convinced Peter wasn’t married Pope,
Lila:
Meaning if he had a mother-in-law, meaning his wife had passed away, is what you’re
Joe:
Exactly. He seems like he could have been a widower. And in fact in Matthew 19 he says to Jesus, we’ve given up everything to follow you. What then shall we have? And Jesus then speaks about those who’ve given up having a family to follow him, which if that’s responding to the question he was just asked by Peter, he seems to be implying Peter has given up marriage and children
Lila:
To maybe remarriage it sounds
Joe:
Like. Right, exactly.
Lila:
Interesting. That makes a lot of sense because when you think about the goodness of our Lord, him tearing a married man away from his wife and children, first of all, that’s not scriptural. There’s not actual an example of that. It might be just an implication that somebody might make about the scripture,
Joe:
But
Lila:
It makes sense on a certain gut level that our Lord would not have done that. Of course, I’m not going to speak for our Lord, but it just seems that unless it’s explicit in scripture, which it’s not, it makes more sense that if he had been married Peter, he had a mother-in-law, she had passed away.
Joe:
Yeah. I mean one of the reasons we don’t think Jesus is married is there’s no reference to a wife and kids for Jesus. And this is if you say to a Protestant say, I don’t think Jesus was married. It’s like, well, of course not. There’s no mention. Then you’re like, and by the way, there’s also no mention of any of the apostles having wives or kids and a lot of the same reasons it would be weird for Jesus to be married and have kids are also reasons would be weird for the apostles. Not all of the same reasons. I mean imagine your dad being God himself, but nevertheless it does seem to speak in terms of if you want to say fittingness to maybe one of the reasons why it’s unlikely we’re going to get a married pope. And also the tradition in both the east and the west is not to have married bishops. Even though the east will have married priests, they don’t draw their bishops from the married priest population. They draw them usually from the monks.
Lila:
And that’s like a matter of justice because you have so much to offer a family and your wife and your kids and the priesthood asks a lot of you, and even more so the bishop position, the position of bishop even asks more of you. So
Joe:
That’s kind of, it’s hard to envision someone doing both of those things. Well,
Lila:
It’s a lot. We got a question here from of the sea backtracking just a moment here about St. Peter, you were sharing about him. So here’s a question she says, or they say a question about Peter not having a wife. What about one Corinthians nine, five? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and CFAs?
Joe:
I’m so happy someone asked this because I really wanted to do the deep dive there and thought, oh, this isn’t a whole segment on Peter.
Lila:
The people want it,
Joe:
Don’t it. Lemme tell you,
If you read one Corinthians nine, two things you should know. Number one, the Greek doesn’t say wife there it says woman and number two, wife makes no sense in that context, beginning in verse two, St. Paul is talking about how the other apostles are financially remunerated, they’re given financial benefits and he and Barnabas aren’t and do they not have the right to receive payment? And he hits this over and over again. So you might say, well, in the context, what is this believing woman context? Well, look at Luke eight. Jesus and the apostles were accompanied by wealthy women who would care for them out of their means. Mary Magdalene being the most famous. And so Paul is saying, I could have this. I have a wealthy donor who takes care of all my needs because women weren’t called to be apostles and one of the ways they would serve the apostolic ministry was supporting it financially. And that’s what Paul’s taught. It makes no sense to read that line as about marriage because the preceding four verses and the two verses after it are all about money.
Lila:
That is fascinating and it’s fascinating too that you’re saying there were these wealthy patrons, they were women who were supporting the apostles in those early days of our Lord’s ministry. Very, very interesting. Who would you say in your view is the top? Who are the top five candidates? Now we’re on day two going to day two of the conclave. So you said earlier there were these two candidates that you thought might be, if it happened today, one of them would get picked.
Joe:
Yeah.
Lila:
What do you think for tomorrow? Who would you say are your top five? I’m going to actually ask you who’s your ultimate bet if you had to bet on a pope tomorrow?
Joe:
That’s a great question and I’ve gone back and forth on this because I also don’t want to just do the blatant wish fulfillment of who would I like.
Lila:
Who would you like?
Joe:
I mean, Cardinal Rah would be great.
Lila:
Why do you love Cardinals? It’s called Cardinal Rah up here too,
Joe:
Or Sarah. I’ve heard it both Sarah and Rah. Every time I pronounce it one way somebody tells me it’s the other way.
Lila:
He’s is a extremely pro-life pro-family. Obviously they’re all pro-life and pro family. It’s so dumb to even say this about our cardinals. They’re all pro-life and pro-family, but he’s written a bunch of beautiful books.
Joe:
So his book on the Power of Silence is
Lila:
Really
Joe:
Well known. I’m working on his book Catechism in the Spiritual of the Spiritual Life right now. And so he’s got this tremendous reservoir of wisdom and just seems like a really saintly man. He seems to have been encouraged by Pope Francis to be less vocal. He obeyed that. He retreated from the public scene for a while.
Lila:
How did that happen? When you say Pope Francis encouraged Cardinals to be a little less vocal?
Joe:
I think he had a private conversation with, I can’t speak to that anymore.
Lila:
He wasn’t on X, right? Was Cardinals on X?
Joe:
I don’t know if he was, I didn’t follow on. I don’t really use a lot of,
Lila:
But he would just make a lot of strong statements
Joe:
On moral
Lila:
Issues
Joe:
And he would make controversial points. He described a lot of western bishops as functional atheists and so that sort of stuff,
Lila:
He’s a... Read more on Catholic.com