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The Vatican meetings will set the date for the start of the conclave this month and help identify candidates among the cardinals to be the next leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
“We’re going to take as much time as we need to think about what sort of pope the Church needs now,” French cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois told reporters as he arrived for yesterday’s meetings.
“I’d be keen to have a polyglot, a man of faith, a man of dialogue . . . The new pope will certainly have to confront problems within the Curia,” the government of the Catholic Church, he said.
Benedict’s eight-year pontificate was often overshadowed by Vatican intrigue and scandals in Europe and North America over sexual abuse by paedophile priests going back decades and the cover-up of those crimes by senior prelates.
A total of 115 “cardinal electors” – cardinals aged under 80 – are expected at the conclave after Britain’s Keith O’Brien opted out and an Indonesian cardinal said he was too sick to attend.
O’Brien had already recused himself from the conclave and resigned as head of the Scottish church after allegations of misconduct surfaced.
“My sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal,” he said in a statement on Sunday. The field for next pope remains wide open after Benedict became only the second pontiff to step down by choice in the Church’s 2 000-year history and the first to do so since the Middle Ages.
The Vatican says it expects a new pope by Easter, the most important date in the Christian calender which this year falls on March 31.
Meanwhile, an Italian man dressed up in fake ecclesiastical robes was escorted out of a meeting of Catholic cardinals by Swiss Guards yesterday after trying to sneak into the closed-door Vatican meeting.
The man had told reporters that his name was “Basilius” and that he was a member of the “Italian Orthodox Church”, which does not exist.
Before he was discovered, the “bishop” told reporters that Catholic bishops had “made a mistake by moving priests” who were accused of paedophilia around different parishes.
He was wearing a purple scarf around his waist that was similar to the sashes warn by senior Catholic prelates and he shook hands and chatted with priests and cardinals arriving at the meeting. – AFP.
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