Archived Articles

Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

Global Real Estate Project
News Index

Directories
  Int'l Realty
  US Realty

The old Pope John Paul II has died and the struggle for succession among the different factions in the Catholic Church is already open although the cardinals are still officially mourning. We cannot know the name of the next Pope (in fact even he still doesn't know his new job) but at least we can make some guesses as of the political orientation that will dominate on the next cardinals' conclave.

According to the tradition all cardinals that are 80 years old and less will elect in secret the next Pope. This means that in fact with few exceptions those who John Paul II appointed as cardinals during his 26-year-old pontificate will elect the next Pope. This gives a certain advantage to supporters of the more traditional vision for the Church and for those that live in regions with high level of religious practice and quickly growing and predominantly young population like Latin America and Africa. The representatives of the richer countries of North America and Europe will be marginalized given their limited number and less traditional views on the religious dogmas.

It should be remembered that the Catholic Church as any organization (for some it's the oldest organization in the modern sense of the term) has different perceptions about how to accomplish its mission on earth. Since the WWII and the gradual secularization of the public life in the West (during the communism in the East the secularization was much less gradual) the Church had to choose between standing on more traditional positions and trying to make the population live by the traditional concepts, or trying to follow the general population and change to a degree. To complicate further the matter the global Catholic population has been divided on those living in advanced industrial countries and those living in less advanced agrarian countries. In the first group the capitalist society has accumulated enormous wealth that the Christian churches as non-governmental organizations can redistribute in order to alleviate poverty. In these richer countries some moral issues are not any more as solid as they were in the past.

On the other hand, the less advanced agrarian countries offer abundant population in poverty in need of social protection. This population sticks to more traditional moral values and is keen to see in the capitalism the main reason for its misery. Given this dichotomy the Catholic Church has also unofficially split on two. Some like the late John Paul II opted for remaining traditionalist, conveying the message of hope and justice for all and for anyone, preserving the traditional moral values and accusing the capitalism of all sorts of moral and social problems. They may count on the ever-growing Catholic population in less advanced countries. Others that were out of power during the last 26 years tried to accommodate the church to the modern realities in the more advanced countries. Their support comes from more and more dwindling in numbers religious population which although pays for the Catholic church bills around the world. If they fail again to elect their representative as new Pope the Catholics going to mess and paying their share each Sunday might just disappear in Western Europe over the next decades.

By appointing cardinals from Latin America and Africa en mass John Paul II has tried to make sure that his successor whatever his name is, will follow his policy without major deviations. There are although some reasons to believe that this may not be the case after all. Even if they represent the largest group in the conclave, the cardinals-traditionalists are jealous toward one another. Given that their countries are largely recipients of Church money any of them won't be happy to see that the next Pope favors "his" country over anyone else. Thus they may decide to elect "European" cardinal in order to preserve his impartiality and thus giving the ultimate power in the hands of the reformists. Another possibility to see a non-traditionalist as a Pope will be to try to find a figure that will try to bring together again the two main streams of the Church, someone that will on the one hand please the reformers, but on the other hand not anger the traditionalists. Such possibilities are real but the more likely outcome will be to see another traditionalist Pope with more appeal in the Third world and less allure in the First.

The age of the next Pope will also contain an important message. If the elected is younger than 60-65 years that would suggest that his faction enjoyed comfortable majority in the conclave (John Paul II was elected by almost 90% majority). If the elected is older than 70-75 years this would mean that the deadlock is real and the real choice is postponed until the next conclave some years from now.