At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta. Two hours earlier, Pope Francis ‘è tornato alla casa del Padre’ – ‘had returned to the house of the Father’. Most people won’t have noticed a curious detail: the cardinal was speaking Italian with a pronounced Irish brogue.
The incoming pope will face challenges that dwarf those that confronted any in living memory
Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the papal ‘Camerlengo’, was born in a Dublin suburb.
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