It's Friday, May 9th, 2025.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Well, yesterday in St. Peter's Square, the smoke turned from black to white,

indicating that the cardinal electors inside the Sistine Chapel had elected

the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. The new Pope took as his name, Pope Leo the 14th. His

given name was Robert Francis Prevos, and he was born September 14, 1955, in Chicago, Illinois. That

turns out to be a very big story indeed. The headline

almost instantly telegraphed across the world is that, number one, the Catholic Church

had a new pope, and number two, the new pope, is an American, the first American pope. Something

like that would have seemed almost inconceivable just a matter of a few years ago. We'll talk

even later about

why it is at least likely, at least in part, that you had an American chosen as the new Pope.

But the fact is that the big question on the part of just about every observer of the Vatican

is what does this mean in terms of direction? What does this mean in terms of the trajectory,

not only of the papacy, but thus of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to understand this,

let's just remind ourselves of where the Roman Catholic Church stood before the election of Pope Leo the 14th yesterday.

It was a church that it had over the course of the last several decades, three popes. First of all,

a succession of two rather conservative popes, John Paul II, and then Benedict the 16th. And then in

2013, Pope Francis was elected, and Pope Francis was a decided turn from the direction of

Pope's John Paul II and Benedict the 16th. John Paul the second was a major

figure, the first Polish Pope. He was a major figure who was very influential on the world stage.

He contended for the objectivity of truth. And in terms of his worldview, which was largely based

...