“The mission is urgent.” It is the message that the first American Pope in history at the premiere homily launched yesterday that pronounced as the maximum leader of the Catholic Church. Robert Prevost presided over his first Eucharist as a pontiff in the Sistine Chapel, the same place where only seventeen hours before the Cardinals had chosen him as Pedro’s successor.
Ten minutes after eleven in the morning, the entrance procession of a Mass in which the weddddies voters and those over 80 years of age who participated in the Precontchlave were started. If in his presentation to the world at the lodge of blessings he used the muleta and the root that directly evoked Benedict XVI, on his return to the Sistine the simplicity of his box and his black shoes led again to think about Francisco. As in his first speech in the Plaza de San Pedro, in his homily he also had as reference to the deceased Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
The first call to the Catholic Church to emerge urgently had as its axis Francisco’s main concerns: “The lack of faith often brings tragedies such as the loss of the meaning of life, the oblivion of mercy, the violation of the dignity of the person in their most dramatic forms, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that our society suffers and not little.”
During his speech, he claimed the importance of believing, in the midst of “environments in which it is not easy to testify and proclaim the Gospel and in which believers are subject to mockery, opposition, contempt or, at most, supported and pity,” he said, with the assurance that “other securities such as technology, money, success, power, pleasure.”
Along the same lines, he stopped in the figure of Christ to clarify that “today the contexts in which Jesus is reduced only to a kind of charismatic or superman leader is missing.” “And this not only among non -believers, but also among many baptized, who end up living in this area an atheism in fact,” said the Augustinian pontiff. In the same way, he pointed out that “the Nazarene is not a ‘charlatan’: he is a straight man, who has value, who speaks well and says fair things.” The new Pope also criticized those who only let themselves be guided by “moral demands.”
Among the most significant details of his homily, he also highlights his reference to the key documents of the Second Vatican Council, that is, the dogmatic constitution “Lumen Gentium” and the pastoral constitution “Gaudium et Spes”.
-“You have called me to take that cross,” he joked with those who chose him, to a region often show his confidence in the wandering: “I know I can count on each and every one of you to walk with me.”
Choice theories
And while Leo XIV started his pontificate with the glitter who chose him, outside the theories were multiplied on how the majority that allowed his victory could be configured. As “La Razón” has confirmed, Prevost would have managed to overcome those two thirds more quickly than expected. Proof of this is the extensive speech he shared when he appeared to the world at the lodge of blessings. “I could have embraced the eighty votes before lunch with an unstoppable rise that would be certified in the afternoon,” says a source that drops that this support is precisely in the first votes that would have led him to prepare the text with some time. “It would be practically impossible for him to have written it between the moment of vote and his greeting in the Plaza de San Pedro,” a Vatican ecclesiastical is ratified.
Overcoming those 89 necessary suffrages would only have been possible from a “transverse” majority, explains this source, which details how the twenty votes from the purple of Latin America, to which the Spaniards would have added, as well as a large part of the Americans, would have counted as fundamental support. Together with them, he would have obtained the support of the Cardinals of the non -Italian curia. To finish this motor group, you would have to add the cardinals of different continents that belong to religious congregations, such as the Salesians and the Jesuits, who know that betting on an Augustinian is a guarantee of a synodal church in line with the previous pontificate.
This reconstruction of the conclave is far from the version that the Italian media offered yesterday. Thus, “Il Messagger” points out that Parolin took a “step back (betrayed by the Italians)”, and made their block of votes converge in Premost.
In the same line “Il Corriere della Sera” points out that Parolin had “advantage” in the first scrutiny but that “in a few hours” the votes turned around, leaning towards the American. For his part, “Il Giornale” points out that Parolin was left without the votes of Africa and Asia and points out the activism of the New York archbishop, Timothy Dollan, which he points out as “true maker of kings.” The truth is that it is hard to believe that Cardinal Dolan, critic with Francisco’s reforms, became a great Premost voter.
