logo
What happens now the Pope has been chosen?

What happens now the Pope has been chosen?

Yahoo08-05-2025
Plumes of white smoke have poured from the Sistine Chapel, announcing to the world that 133 cardinals have selected a new pope and he has accepted.
Robert Prevost has been named the newly elected pontiff and taken supreme authority over the Catholic Church.
He has chosen the papal name Leo XIV.
A solemn ceremony to formally inaugurate the new Pope typically takes place a few days after his election.
In the past, the pontiff was invested with a papal tiara, a crown symbolising their authority, but this was stopped by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s.
Nowadays, the ceremony is a more pared-down affair, with the pope wearing a bishop's mitre, a two-shield-shaped headdress.
The senior cardinal deacon presents the pallium, a woollen cloak symbolising the pope's authority, along with the Fisherman's Ring, a gold signet ring stamped with an image of Saint Peter, who was a fisherman and is traditionally believed to be the first pope.
The ring is forged anew for each pope and has been part of the papal regalia since the 13th century. It will be ceremonially destroyed upon his death.
This is a key moment for the pope to make his first real speech 'and articulate the themes that will be the centre of his papacy', said Prof Schmalz.
He will greet the cardinals, who will kiss his ring, with some also embracing him.
'[It is] an important ritual that is used to symbolise he is owed obedience not only by cardinals but all rank-and-file Catholics around the world,' said Prof Schmalz.
An inauguration mass is then held at St Peter's Square.
'What everyone will be watching is the new public interactions the new pope will have – will he be shy and reserved like Pope Benedict XVI or open and get close to the people like Pope Francis?' said Prof Schmalz.
'How will he handle the public spectacle, interact with the crowd ... Will we see the Popemobile, or will he do the rounds on foot?'
Pope Leo XIV will then step into his role as the leader of 1.41 billion Catholics around the world. His next big decision will be where to make his first trip outside of Rome.
'This will be an early defining moment for the new pontiff,' said Prof Schmalz, 'signalling to the world how he intends to connect with the global community … and how he will position himself in relation to Francis's reforms.'
Pope Francis chose to first meet migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, to pray for those lost at sea, setting the tone for the rest of his papacy, during which he championed marginalised people in society.
What happened after the
Pope Leo was taken into a side room known as the Stanza delle Lacrime (Room of Tears) and asked to choose his attire.
He changed into the white vestments of the papacy, which had been prepared by Rome's best tailors in three sizes.
Pope Benedict XVI chose to wear the full regalia, including a gold cross and crimson cape and red papal shoes. However, Pope Francis opted for a more humble appearance, wearing simple white robes and a zucchetto (skullcap) with black shoes.
'It is the first clue into whether he will continue on with Francis's legacy or not,' Prof Mathew Schmalz told The Telegraph.
The pope was announced to the world from the loggia of St Peter's Basilica with the Latin words, 'Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus papam!' ('I announce to you a great joy. We have a pope!') and his chosen papal name was revealed.
The 267th pope then appeared before the crowd to give his first blessing as pontiff before retiring to the Vatican.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

On This Day, Aug. 1: Worldwide ban on cluster bombs goes into effect
On This Day, Aug. 1: Worldwide ban on cluster bombs goes into effect

UPI

time15 hours ago

  • UPI

On This Day, Aug. 1: Worldwide ban on cluster bombs goes into effect

Aug. 1 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1498, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus set foot on the American mainland for the first time, at the Paria Peninsula in present-day Venezuela. In 1790, the first U.S. census showed a population of 3,929,214 people in 17 states. In 1907, an Aeronautical Division was added to the Army Signals Corps. The first aircraft bought by this forerunner of the U.S. Air Force was built by the Wright brothers. In 1961, the first Six Flags amusement park opened on 212 acres in Arlington, Texas. In its opening year, admission for adults cost $2.75 and for children cost $2.25. File Photo by Ian Halperin/UPI In 1966, Charles Whitman killed 16 people, including his wife and mother, in Austin, Texas. Thirty-two people were wounded. Most of Whitman's victims were struck by shots fired from the University of Texas Tower. The gunman, a student and ex-Marine, was killed by a police officer. In 1977, Francis Gary Powers, pilot of a U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, was killed in the crash of his weather helicopter in Los Angeles. In 1981, MTV premiered with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." In 1994, Lisa Marie Presley confirmed rumors that she had married pop star Michael Jackson May 26 in the Dominican Republic. The couple divorced less than two years later. In 2004, nearly 400 people died in a supermarket fire on the outskirts of Asuncion, Paraguay. In 2005, Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, who had ruled since 1982, died after a long illness at the age of 83. He was succeeded by his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah. File Photo courtesy the Arafat press office In 2007, an eight-lane bridge across the Mississippi River at Minneapolis, collapsed during the evening rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring nearly 150. About 50 vehicles were thrown into or near the water when the steel-and-concrete Interstate 35W span buckled and fell. In 2010, a worldwide ban on cluster bombs went into effect. Cluster bombs, usually dropped from planes, are filled with smaller anti-personnel bombs, which are scattered over wide areas. More than 120 states have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions. In 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama said CIA agents who interrogated suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States "crossed a line" and "tortured some folks." In 2024, Simone Biles became the first American in history to win two Olympic all-around gymnastics titles, taking home gold at the Paris Summer Olympics. Fellow American Suni Lee -- who won the all-around gold in 2020 -- took home bronze, and Brazilian Rebeca Andrade captured silver.

‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland
‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland

Boston Globe

timea day ago

  • Boston Globe

‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland

One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open. 'There was just a jumble of bones,' Hopkins said. 'We didn't know if we'd found a treasure or a nightmare.' Hopkins didn't realize they'd found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place. It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the Advertisement The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system. Word of Hopkins' discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of the home's walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker with an interest in history. Advertisement Corless, who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the local historical society. But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children. 'I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,' she said. Mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church's influence on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns. In Tuam's case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse built in the 1840s, for poor Irish where many famine victims died. It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923. Two years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans. It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns. Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives. But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape, or incest. Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own. Advertisement Corrigan, raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she's unsure if it's a memory or dream. While researching her late father's traumatic childhood confined in an industrial school for abandoned, orphaned, or troubled children, she asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom. Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home. 'I cried for brothers I didn't know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,' she said. Her mother never spoke a word about it. A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment. Twelve of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were described as 'delicate,' 'wasted,' or with 'wizened limbs.' Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, was described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.' He died two months later in a measles outbreak. Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent. Corrigan's brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight months later. There was no death certificate, though, and his date of birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask adoptions, Corrigan said. In a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood. A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto, and Virgin Mary statue was walled off in the corner. It was created by a couple living next door to memorialize the place Hopkins found the bones. Advertisement Some were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the famine. She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden behind the home's 10-foot-high walls. 'It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,' she said. 'Nobody knew what they were doing.' When she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing. That changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found Corless. Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly, and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: 'A Mass Grave of 800 Babies.' The article caused a firestorm, followed by some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press, highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank could have been used as a grave. The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away. Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage. Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled. It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them, and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan. Advertisement Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed. But Corrigan hopes each child is found. 'They were denied dignity in life, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,' she said. 'So we're hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they've been crying for an awful long time to be heard.'

Pope to bestow one of Catholic Church's highest honors on Anglican convert John Henry Newman
Pope to bestow one of Catholic Church's highest honors on Anglican convert John Henry Newman

San Francisco Chronicle​

timea day ago

  • San Francisco Chronicle​

Pope to bestow one of Catholic Church's highest honors on Anglican convert John Henry Newman

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Thursday decided to declare St. John Henry Newman a 'doctor' of the church, bestowing one of the Catholic Church's highest honors on the deeply influential 19th century Anglican convert who remains a unifying figure among conservatives and progressives. The Vatican said Leo confirmed the opinion of the Vatican's saint-making office during an audience Thursday with its prefect, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, and would make the decision official soon. The designation is one of the most significant decisions of Leo's young papacy and also carries deep personal meaning: Newman was strongly influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration of Leo's Augustinian religious order and Leo's namesake, Pope Leo XIII, made Newman a Catholic cardinal in 1879 after his conversion. Newman, a theologian and poet, is admired by Catholics and Anglicans alike because he followed his conscience at great personal cost. When he defected from the Church of England to the Catholic Church in 1845, he lost friends, work and even family ties, believing the truth he was searching for could only be found in the Catholic faith. The title of doctor is reserved for people whose writings have greatly served the universal Catholic Church. Only three-dozen people have been given the title over the course of the church's 2,000-year history, including the 5th century St. Augustine, St. Francis de Sales and St. Teresa of Avila. Unifying figure Newman experts said the decision to add the British theologian to their ranks was deeply significant, given Newman's contribution to Christian understanding of conscience, truth and education — and his near-universal appeal to progressives and conservatives alike. Jack Valero, who served as a spokesman for Newman's 2010 beatification and 2019 canonization ceremonies, said he had never come across anyone who had a problem with him. If back then Newman was the perfect unifying figure for a polarized church, he is even more so now, for a new pope who has made unity a core priority of his pontificate, Valero said. "You know, I look at Pope Leo and I hear him say, 'We need unity, we need peace,' and so on and I think, 'Here's the man who's going to make it happen,'' he said in an interview. The first American pope vowed during his May 18 installation Mass that he would work for unity so that the church could become a force for peace in a troubled world. It was a message of pacification after the sometimes turbulent pontificate of Pope Francis exacerbated divisions in the church. Leo has also repeatedly affirmed his identity as an Augustinian, deeply inspired by the teachings of the 5th century theologian. Many scholars have long considered Newman to be the Augustine of the modern era. Newman's conversion Anglicans split from Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment. In the centuries that followed, Catholics were fined, discriminated against and killed for their faith. Newman was one of the founders of the so-called Oxford Movement of the 1830s, which sought to revive certain Roman Catholic doctrines in the Church of England by looking back to the traditions of the earliest Christian church. But he gave up a brilliant academic career at Oxford University and the pulpit of the university church to convert to Catholicism. As a Catholic, he became one of the most influential theologians of the era, bringing elements of the Anglican church into his new faith tradition. He died in Britain in 1890. Newman's path to being declared a doctor in the Catholic Church has been exceptionally quick. Pope Benedict XVI beatified him during a visit to Britain in 2010 and Pope Francis made him a saint in 2019, with then-Prince Charles in attendance. Francis declared two doctors of the church during his 12-year pontificate — St. Irenaeus and St. Gregory of Narek — and was on the receiving end of a concerted push by English-speaking bishops to add Newman to their ranks.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store