I think there's something at first glance about the election of a new pope that's like,

oh, it's just a little bit of a letdown.

Or it seems like it should be more of a mystical kind of experience.

I'm my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Essentially Presents.

Here is a man who's been elected to be the Pope, the Holy Father of the Catholic Church,

who is from, I mean, born in at least, and raised, I think, for a lot

of part of his life in Chicago. When you have his brothers being interviewed and they're like,

oh, is it, Rob? Rob and oh my gosh, it's Rob. And you're like, wait, Rob? Because I think for us

here in America, maybe, maybe most places in the world, you think of, you think the person who gets elected to be pope has a lot of mystique behind it. You don't think of them as having siblings who are normal. You don't think of them as being normal. You don't think of them as going to the Cubs game and cheering on their hometown team. You don't think of that kind of thing. Not only that, but when it comes to the election process, a good friend who said this, she said, I thought the process

would be a lot like holier in the sense of like, I thought it would be kind of like almost like

this idea of you go into the conclave, right? You go into the Sistine Chapel and you, in the idea,

like, you kind of consult the oracle. You just kind of like pray for the Holy Spirit to guide

the discussion. And she said, it seems me that they

have like, you know, someone talks and they kind of can argue back and forth and they can, they can say

who would be a good person. And you even have people like maybe jockeying for a position to, you know,

get elections or to get votes to get elected. He would seem more holy, I guess, would say it like that. And yet, when you go back to the Bible, what you see is,

oh, here is the Holy Spirit working through ordinary people. Here's Holy Spirit working

through things and means and events that we never would have anticipated. For example,

in Acts of the Apostles chapter 1, what do you have? You have, here's Judas, who is now dead.

And so the apostles come together and say, we need to select someone to take his place. Because here's the

office of apostle. We need to select someone to take his place in the office of apostle. How they

figure out, between Joseph Barsabas and Matthias, like how did they figure out who is going to be

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