Philip Shenon
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Philip Shenon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And this comes at a particularly important moment for McCarrick because he's now facing mandatory retirement age of 75. He wants to remain in his post. And so the concern is that he made this big secret gift to the pope in hopes of staying in place in Washington. And in fact, that's what happened. He was then allowed to remain in his post for another couple of years.
I should point out that Benedict and his aides denied that was any sort of a quid pro quo. But McCarrick remained in place in Washington, a decision made by the pope shortly after McCarrick presents the pope with a quarter million dollars.
The comparison was made pretty early on that Francis was much like John XXIII in that he was talking about sort of an end to the closed fortress authoritarian church. He wanted to move the church toward, you know, declarations of mercy and tolerance, that he wanted to put the church out of the business of heresy hunting.
And he also, I think, delighted millions of Catholics by sort of rejecting all the sort of pompous trappings of the papacy. He refused to and continues to refuse to live in the papal palace. He lives in a small guest house. He refused the big Mercedes sedan that popes had traditionally used.
By giving up the trappings of power, he's got a moral legitimacy that has a lot of appeal to millions of Catholics.
Little has changed in terms of formal doctrine. And I think one great concern about Pope Francis is since he hasn't made these sort of substantial changes in church teachings, a future pope could just reverse them as easily as Francis put them into place. But Francis has gone out of his way to reach out to gay Catholics, to divorced Catholics.
He's made it much easier for divorced couples to get annulments that allow them to remarry. He's also allowed them to receive communion, which had been denied to divorced Catholics for centuries. He made it possible a couple of years ago for priests to offer blessings at gay weddings, even though that decision created an awful lot of scandal among conservative Catholics around the world.
In the course of his career in the church, Francis has often talked of abortion as being a sin, but he's also talked of the need to offer the women seeking abortions a sense of mercy and forgiveness. In terms of birth control, I must say, given what I now know of this history, I find it remarkable he didn't lift the ban on birth control because it would be easy to do.
It would be embraced by most of the most influential theologians in the church. But for whatever reason, it remains in place to this day.
After Pope Benedict died a couple of years ago – Francis moved quickly to move out a lot of churchmen who were seen to be associated with Benedict, you know, arch conservatives. And, you know, Francis selects everybody. He is the absolute monarch. He can choose all of the personnel around him.
Over the course of his papacy, he has remade the College of Cardinals, which is the body that will choose his successors. You know, 80% of the cardinals who will vote in the next conclave to choose the next pope are men who were put there by Francis.
So I think there's a feeling that even if Francis hasn't been the dramatic reformer people had hoped he would be, he's put in place in the College of Cardinals a group of men who will choose a successor who may have had the same agenda as Francis and may feel empowered to do much more to achieve it.
I think he faces a lot of justifiable criticism for having not done nearly enough about the child sexual abuse crisis. He had a checkered record on that in Argentina. I think we have several instances now when it's clear he was very slow to act. against churchmen known to be sexual predators, including men who would be described as his friends.
And I think there's been a general sense of disappointment that he hasn't done much more on that front.
You can tell that the screenwriter had a lot of fun because there are several cardinals who seem to be based on real cardinals. And elements of their battling in the film reflect real battling that has gone on within the Vatican bureaucracy in recent years. And of course, you know, a centerpiece of the film is the question of sexual abuse and sexual misconduct and violence.
You know, we know those are battles that are fought. Those are debates that are held within the Vatican all the time.
That's all true. I say they got the pageantry. They got the logistics right. When the cardinals gather for a conclave, their cell phones are taken away from them. There's electronic jamming equipment so they can't communicate with the outside world. The shutters are sealed. They really are supposed to have no communication with the outside world.
It appears they often are able to establish some sort of communication, but they are supposedly forbidden from doing it.
Absolutely. It's a bit like any Congress or parliament you've ever heard of. You know, there's lobbying, there's pressure, there are factions that square off against one another. You know, it's a political place. The Pope is an absolute monarch, but he is elected through a democratic process of debating among the world's cardinals.
Whatever your position. religious background, you have to admire much of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The message of mercy and tolerance is a noble one. You don't have to be a Christian to see the wisdom of what Jesus Christ offered to the world 2,000 years ago.
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