Old Pope, New Pope

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to navigate this paradox. He also looks back at the Francis papacy, and the way that Francis behind his smile ran the Vatican with an iron first; at relations between the Vatican and the Trump administration; and at Francis’s motives for bringing the future Pope Leo XIV to Rome in 2023: ‘the reason, in my view, is the same reason that Francis began to smile.’ Read Colm Tóibín on Pope Leo: https://lrb.me/toibinpopepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,
0:07.4	Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,
0:12.4	from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works
0:17.2	by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes
0:22.5	for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice
0:28.3	and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with
0:35.5	two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.
0:39.2	And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.
0:43.1	You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07.1	Thank you. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Column Turbin, whose most recent novel Long Island will soon be out in paperback,
1:12.5	and he has a piece in the latest LRB on the Pope, the new Pope Leo, the 14th, and also on his predecessor,
1:19.6	the late Pope Francis Jorge Bergoglio. Hello, Column, and thank you very much for speaking with me
1:25.3	today. Hi, Tom, it's great to talk to you. So should we talk
1:28.6	about Francis first before we move on to Leo? And you wrote about him about Bergoorio in the
1:34.3	LRB in 2021 as well. And it was a long piece looking looking in some detail, among other things, at his
1:40.3	record in Argentina as a priest in Argentina under the generals in the late 1970s and early
1:46.1	1980s. And there seems to be considerable distance between who he was, what he did, or even more
1:53.3	what he didn't do, perhaps, back then, and the reputation at least that he enjoyed as Pope 30 or 40
2:00.0	years later. Did he change or did something else change?
2:03.5	I think he changed. I think it was an extraordinary moment where he saw that coming into the Vatican
2:09.4	and doing his humorless thing, his humorless stance, he was known for his humorlessness.
2:16.2	And he was very severe and serious. And he ran certain things with an iron fist. In recent years, before he came to the Vatican, as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he did get a P.R. man who was a priest. And he did attempt to set himself up as someone who didn't live in a palace
	...

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