BRAINTREE, Mass. — As the College of Cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel to choose a new pope, priests from the Archdiocese of Boston gathered in Andover for a long-planned convocation.
To be sure, the secretive, mysterious Vatican City conclave was on many minds.
“We’re excited, we’re ready, we’re interested,” said Reverend Paul Sopor, Director of Clergy Personnel for the Archdiocese. “Everybody on Twitter is asking who it might be. Probably somebody we never heard of. Who heard of Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he became Pope Francis?”
For Sopor, the person who succeeds Pope Francis may be less important than the policies he espouses. To say the least, Sopor and others who spoke with Boston 25 News, hold Pope Francis in very high regard.
“I think that our new pope is going to have to both continue the work of Pope Francis and try to enhance that work of making it possible to have a sense of unity across boundaries,” said Sopor. “I think that one of the principal challenges that the new pope will have is that we live in a world that’s increasingly fractured. It’s very difficult, even, for people to sit down and have conversations with each other sometimes.”
Ironically, Pope Francis, known for making sometimes provocative statements and taking aggressive stands on world issues, divided Catholics on the issue of defining “papal tradition.” Sopor saw him as transformative.
“God bless him, he was such a good man,” he said. “He did so many good things for the Catholic church throughout the whole globe. He had such a global vision of who should be part of the church.”
Reverend Nathaniel Sanders is a chaplin at Harvard University. When Pope Francis was elected, Sanders was in college. He, too, holds the late pope in high regard — but is also excited to learn of his successor.
“I was ordained under him, so I have a great deal of affection for our deceased Holy Father,” he said. “He was certainly a unique figure in the history of the church. The number of initiatives that he started were, in a way, unlike anything we had seen — certainly in the past generations. I’m grateful for all that he did and I just know from other young priests we had a great deal of affection for him.”
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