
The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope
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. Or, as a tabloid put it: ‘Interim Pope is a bloke called Kevin from Dublin.’ That’s an exaggeration, but the
