Aurelia Butler

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    Who Will Be the Next Pope? Here Are Some Possible Contenders.

    Guesses about who the next Roman Catholic pope will be often prove inaccurate. Before the selection of Pope Francis in 2013, many bookmakers had not even counted him among the front-runners.This time, predictions are further complicated because Francis made many appointments in a relatively short amount of time during his tenure, diversifying the College of Cardinals and making it harder to identify movements and factions within the group.Still, discussion of potential names began long ago behind the Vatican’s walls, and observers are predicting several possibilities. Some are seen as likely to build on Francis’ progressive agenda, while others would represent a return to a more traditional style. Experts also suggest that the College might favor a prelate with experience in the complexities of international relations.Here are some of the contenders.Pierbattista PizzaballaPierbattista Pizzaballa, 60, an Italian who is the Vatican’s top official for Middle East affairs, is considered a possible front-runner. Although he became a cardinal only in 2023, his experience in one of the world’s most heated conflict zones helped him rise to prominence.Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa in the West Bank city of Bethlehem in December. He has spent most of his career in the Middle East.Pool photo by Alaa BadarnehWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. Asks Judge to Break Up Google

    The Justice Department said that the best way to address the tech company’s monopoly in internet search was to force it to sell Chrome, among other measures.The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.“Your honor, we are not here for a Pyrrhic victory,” David Dahlquist, a Justice Department lawyer, said in his opening statement. “This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws.”The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.The legal troubles could hurt Google as it battles OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta to lead a new era of artificial intelligence. Google has increasingly woven A.I. into its search. But the Justice Department has told Judge Mehta he should make sure Google cannot parlay its search monopoly into similar dominance in A.I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Canadians Confront News Void on Facebook and Instagram as Election Nears

    After Meta blocked news from its platforms in Canada, hyperpartisan and misleading content from popular right-wing Facebook pages such as Canada Proud has filled the gap.Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.” More

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    Try This Quiz on Disaster Movies Inspired by Books

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on books about disasters — natural or human-made — that were adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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    How Francis, a Progressive Pope, Catalyzed the Catholic Right in the U.S.

    His critics were fellow clergy as well as elected officials in the ascendant wing of the American Catholic political realm.A few months before he died on Monday, Pope Francis entered what turned out to be his last high-profile skirmish with his flock in the United States. In a letter in February to American bishops, with whom he had his own complicated relationship over the years, the pope criticized President Trump’s treatment of migrants, claiming that deportations violate the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”Though he didn’t name names, he also seemed to to rebut Vice President JD Vance’s recent interpretation of a Catholic theological concept. Mr. Vance, who is Catholic, met briefly with Pope Francis at his home in Rome on Easter Sunday, making the vice president among the last people to see the ailing pontiff alive.The slap in February, with its intertwining layers of politics and theology, was typical of the often fraught public relationship between Pope Francis and conservative American Catholics. When Pope Francis took office in 2013, many Catholics in the United States were optimistic that his emphasis on inclusivity and ministry to the margins would lead to a “Francis effect” that would enliven the American church for years to come.Pope Francis did end up energizing American Catholics, but not only in the way his supporters hoped. His papacy galvanized a traditionalist stream that had always existed in the American church, and that strengthened and expanded throughout his papacy as a tide of resistance rose in the American church hierarchy, in Washington and in the pews.Pope Francis’ critics represent a minority of the American church but a powerful one. They were not only fellow clergy but also elected officials in a newly ascendant wing of the American Catholic political realm, as Catholic power in Washington developed harder edges in the final months of his life. President Trump stocked his cabinet with conservative Catholics, and elevated Mr. Vance as vice president, a Catholic convert whose views on church doctrine are deeply enmeshed with his political priorities. Catholics make up more than a third of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.But Pope Francis’ critics in the American church had objections that ranged far beyond disagreements over public policy. Critics, including some clergy, have accused him of sowing confusion on bedrock church doctrines, and at the same time of wielding an autocratic leadership style behind a facade of humility and informality. He was seen as haphazardly rushing the church into the future, at a time when many American traditionalists were questioning the changes of Vatican II.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Pope Francis’ Legacy in the U.S.: A More Open, and Then Divided, Church

    Months into his papacy in 2013, Pope Francis was asked about gay priests, and he responded, “Who am I to judge?” Across the United States, Catholics and non-Catholics alike took a collective gasp.For years the Roman Catholic Church in the United States had deeply aligned with the religious right in fierce conflicts over issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception. But Pope Francis wanted a church “with doors always wide open,” as he said in his first apostolic exhortation.Words like these made the new pope a revolutionary figure in the United States, in both the Catholic Church and the nation’s politics. He challenged each to shift its moral focus toward issues like poverty, immigration and war, and to confront the realities of income inequality and climate change. Pope Francis offered a progressive, public Catholicism in force, coinciding with the Obama era, and at the beginning of his pontificate, he moved the U.S. church forward from the sex-abuse scandals that roiled his predecessor’s pontificate.He pushed church leaders to be pastors, not doctrinaires, and elevated bishops in his own mold, hoping to create lasting tonal change in the church through its leadership. He gave voice to the growing share of Hispanic Catholics, as the American church grew less white, and appointed the first African-American cardinal. He allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made it easier for divorced and remarried Catholics to participate in church life.In doing so, he captured the imaginations of millions both inside and outside the American church who had long felt rejected. At a time of increasing secularization, the world’s most visible Christian leader gave hope to many U.S. non-Catholics who saw in him a moral visionary while much of public Christianity in America took a rightward turn.“He made the church a more welcoming place,” said Joe Donnelly, former Democratic senator from Indiana, who was the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See under President Biden. “For Americans of all different economic strata, for divorced Americans, for basically everyone in our country, his arms were always open.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Will a New Pope Be Chosen After Francis’ Death?

    Many of the rituals and procedures of selecting a new pope — designed to ensure secrecy and an orderly transition — have remained unchanged for centuries.Pope Francis has died, the Vatican announced on Monday, ending a groundbreaking pontificate. Cardinals will now decide whether to continue his approach or restore more doctrinaire leadership.The death of a pope sets in motion a chain of rituals and procedures, many of which have remained unchanged for centuries. They were drafted and refined to ensure secrecy and an orderly transition.Several Vatican officials step into designated roles to certify the pope’s death, organize a public viewing and a funeral, and to initiate the process for selecting a successor.Here is what to expect for the period between pontiffs known as the sede vacante, a Latin phrase meaning the seat is vacant.Here’s what you need to know:Who takes charge at the Vatican?What does the pope’s funeral look like?When does the conclave begin?How will we know when a pope is elected?Who takes charge at the Vatican?Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell was appointed camerlengo, or chamberlain, of the Holy Roman Church, by Pope Francis in 2019. Andrew Medichini/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Pope Francis and the End of the Imperial Papacy

    Pope Francis, who passed to his reward on the morning after Easter at age 88, was a version of the liberal pope that many Catholics had earnestly desired all through the long reign of John Paul II and the shorter one of Benedict XVI — a man whose worldview was shaped and defined by the Second Vatican Council and whose pontificate sought a renewal of its revolution, a further great modernization of the Catholic Church.In one way, at least, he succeeded. For generations, modernizers lamented the outsize power of the papacy, the anachronism of a monarchical authority in a democratic age, the way the concept of papal infallibility froze Catholic debates even as the world rushed forward. In theory Francis shared those concerns, promising a more collegial and horizontally oriented church, more synodal, in the jargon of the Catholic bureaucracy. In practice he often used his power in the same way as his predecessors, to police and suppress deviations from his authority — except that this time the targets were dissenting conservatives and traditionalists instead of progressives and modernizers.But just by creating that novel form of conflict, in which Catholics who had been accustomed to being on the same side as the Vatican found themselves suddenly crosswise from papal authority, Francis helped to demystify his office’s authority and undermine its most imposing claims.That’s because the conservatives whose convictions he unsettled were the last believers in the imperial papacy, the custodians of infallibility’s mystique. And by stirring more of them to doubt and disobedience, he kicked away the last major prop supporting a strong papacy and left the office of St. Peter in the same position as most other 21st-century institutions: graced with power but lacking credibility, floated on charisma without underlying legitimacy, with its actions understood in terms of rewards for friends and punishments for enemies.Two rebellions, in particular, illustrate this shift. The first is the continuing resistance to the pope’s attempt to suppress, in the name of Catholic unity and the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the faith’s traditional Latin Mass. After Vatican II in the late 1960s, when Pope Paul VI remade the church’s liturgy, he commanded enough deference that he was able to swiftly consign the Mass that every Catholic in the world had grown up with to the modern equivalent of catacombs — to church basements, hotel rooms and schismatic chapels.Whereas when Francis attempted a similar suppression, reversing the permissions granted by Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and complaint, garner new media attention for the old Latin Mass and increase traditionalism’s cachet among younger Catholics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More