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5 Qualifications For The Next Pope

By ThinkProgress on Feb 16, 2013 at 1:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, Writer and Researcher for the Center for American Progress Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative.

Since Pope Benedict XVI announced he will resign from the Pontificate at the end of February, speculation has already begun as to who his replacement will be.

The process of electing a new Pope, however, is somewhat complicated – both politically and theologically. Technically speaking, for example, political positioning and specific personal attributes don’t make someone more or less “qualified” to be the Pope – according to Catholic tradition, the Pope is selected through the will of God, not because of any particular trait.

Still, recent Papal elections have exhibited some noticeable trends about who ends up in the Vatican’s Big Chair – attributes that aren’t necessarily required, but that show up more often than not among Popes. Here are a few:

1. The Pope can be almost any Catholic male, but is usually a cardinal. While the Pope does seem to have to be male, Canon law isn’t all that specific about other qualifications. The Pope can actually be a cardinal, a bishop, priest, or even a layman, although any non-cardinal would have to immediately receive an “episcopal consecration” from the Dean of the College of Cardinals before becoming Pope. There is certainly some precedent for non-cardinal Popes (see Pope Urban VI), and there is even speculation that a non-Catholic could hypothetically be elected Pope – provided he converts to Catholicism upon assuming the pontificate, of course. Most of the time, however, Popes are former cardinals – probably because cardinals are the ones who actually get to vote on the new Pope in the first place.

2. Popes are often old, but they’re not that old. The papacy isn’t known for attracting especially youthful individuals, but the system does have a cap: Only cardinals under the age of 80 can vote on the next Pope, and – since most Popes come from this group – it’s unlikely that anyone over 80 will ascend to the Papacy.

3. Popes tend to share many of the same views as their predecessor. Cardinals select the new Pope based on their faith and their personal conscience, but who does the voting matters: Pope Benedict, for instance, has appointed 67 of the 181 Cardinals that will be electing the new Pope. This is a common practice among Popes (John Paul II has appointed two-thirds of the electing Cardinals by the time he passed away), and significantly increases the chances that a new Pope will share many of his predecessor’s views.

4. The Pope is usually fluent in several languages. Catholicism boasts 1.3 billion adherents spread across every country in the world. This means communication (read: translation) is a big challenge for Catholicism, and a big part of Church governance. Not surprisingly, many former Popes were known to be linguistic savants; Pope John Paul II, for instance, was fluent in at least 8 languages, and conversant in several more. By contrast, Cardinal Timothy Dolan – the so-called “American Pope” – appears to only be fluent in English and Italian, although he also claims to be conversational in Spanish.

5. The Pope is typically knowledgeable about – or influential within – places where the Catholic Church is growing. Although the Catholic Church isn’t exactly a model for rapid change, the tradition isn’t oblivious to shifting times: Pope John Paul the II, for instance, was the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years, and came to represent the global broadening of the Catholic tradition. The election of Pope Benedict XVI continued the new trend of non-Italian Popes (he’s German), and it stands to reason that – since the Catholic church is continuing to grow in Latin America and Africa – a new Pope could easily be pulled from one of those areas.

Climate Progress

Forward on Climate And Solidarity Rallies Sunday

By Joe Romm on Feb 16, 2013 at 11:04 am

I will be at “the largest climate rally in U.S. history” in Washington, DC Sunday (details here). I’ll be tweeting, and, later, CP will have some stories on it.

I hope you can make it to the National Mall, February 17, Noon – 4:00 p.m.– but if you can’t,  there are a bunch of solidarity rallies (full details here):

Carry on, carry on!

Economy

The Other Aaron’s Law: How FASTR Could Help Americans Access The Research They Paid For

By Andrea Peterson on Feb 16, 2013 at 9:30 am

Just over a month after internet folk hero and activist Aaron Swartz ended his own life, a bipartisan group of law-makers have introduced legislation that would make progress on a cause near and dear to his heart: Open access to publicly funded research. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), introduced this week by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA), and Kevin Yoder (R-KS) in the House and Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) in the Senate, “require[s] federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal,” building on the success of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) 2008 public access policy.

Swartz faced a maximum sentence of decades in prison at the time of his death for charges related to his alleged downloading of nearly 5 million documents from the academic database JSTOR, in what many believe was an attempt to release the data. While efforts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the law Swartz was being prosecuted under, using the moniker “Aaron’s Law” emerged quickly, the introduction of FASTR is the first legislative effort since his death to address the open access movement — the effort to provide unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research online.

Here’s how academic publishing works: Research is largely done by members of university communities (frequently funded by the public) who submit research to journals for publication (sometimes paying for the privilege). Then journals send the research back out to other academics to be edited blind (usually pro-bono), and the journal’s (often for profit) publishers sell back access to the published research to university libraries.

While the largest of the for-profit academic publishers, Elsevier, made $1.1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin of around 35 percent, libraries have struggled to afford rising subscription costs that drove up expenditures by a staggering 273 percent between 1986 and 2004. The Harvard Faculty Council released a statement on the crisis last year noting that the prices for online content from two major providers increased by around 145 percent over the last six years alone, saying “[m]any large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive.”

FASTR is not an outright solution to this broken system, but it is a substantive step in the right direction that would provide open access because academic federal funding is the primary source of basic research support in the U.S. (the majority of which is carried out by academic institutions). And there are signs that the open access movement is making dents in the the academic publishing industry’s armor, like JSTOR’s Register & Read program. Neither that limited concession or FASTR will fully bring about the world of free information Swartz envisioned, but taken together they are a sign that world is slowly moving in the right direction.

Justice

Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul Join Bipartisan Bill To Legalize Hemp

By Nicole Flatow on Feb 16, 2013 at 9:00 am

While most Republican members of Congress have been lukewarm at best to the prospect of legalizing marijuana, senators introduced a bipartisan measure this week to legalize industrial hemp. Riding on the passage of recent Kentucky Senate bills to ease hemp growing, the state’s Republican senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, joined Oregon Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden in introducing a bill to legalize production of the strain of cannabis used in the production of goods.

Hemp is a plant in the cannabis family with significantly lower levels of the psychoactive component, THC, than most varieties that are smoked or consumed. It is used to make textiles, paper, paints, clothing, plastics, cosmetics, foodstuffs, insulation, animal feed and other products, according to NORML. Hemp is nonetheless lumped in with all other cannabis products, which are classified as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive of the five schedules designated for those substances considered dangerous with no currently accepted medical value.

The bill, which would would remove hemp from the controlled substances list and define it as a non-drug so long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC, is a small demonstration of fading hysteria over anything “cannabis” that emerged in the era of “Reefer Madness.” It also raises questions, however, about federal support for legalizing at least those strains of medical cannabis that have very low levels of THC, as well as those chemical compounds extracted from marijuana that are low in THC.

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