{"id":8192,"date":"2004-01-11T14:50:21","date_gmt":"2004-01-11T14:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/why_the_next_pope_needs_to_be_italian.html"},"modified":"2004-01-11T14:50:21","modified_gmt":"2004-01-11T14:50:21","slug":"why_the_next_pope_needs_to_be_italian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/why_the_next_pope_needs_to_be_italian.html","title":{"rendered":"“Why the Next Pope Needs to be Italian”"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the NYTimes op-ed page<\/a><\/p>\n

To be bishop of Rome \u2014 that is, of the world \u2014 is not like being bishop of Krakow. We Italians are an ancient and tested bridge between past and future, and supported by 2,000 years of consummate political tradition. The popes knew how to bring into the melting pot of Christianity first Roman civilization, then barbarian cultures, and finally the many conquerors who came to Italy and were seduced by the imperial myth of the Rome of the emperors. Italy is also a secular school of political and religious mediation, run by the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

Even in modern times the highest Italian political class, the one most capable of a European breadth, the Christian Democrats of Alcide De Gasperi and Aldo Moro, was reared by the Catholic Church. And this church has been a master of mediation between historical contingency and the eternal \u2014 the child, often, of Machiavelli as well as of the Gospel.<\/p>\n

John Paul II’s rigidity seems alien to this more farsighted and elastic Italian tradition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, that’s what we all want, all over the world, in our Pope. One dedicated to the Italian way of doing things. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the NYTimes op-ed page To be bishop of Rome \u2014 that is, of the world \u2014 is not like being bishop of Krakow. We Italians are an ancient and tested bridge between past and future, and supported by 2,000 years of consummate political tradition. The popes knew how to bring into the melting pot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n"Why the Next Pope Needs to be Italian" - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/why_the_next_pope_needs_to_be_italian.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Why the Next Pope Needs to be Italian" - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the NYTimes op-ed page To be bishop of Rome \u2014 that is, of the world \u2014 is not like being bishop of Krakow. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}