Habemus Papam! New Pope Elected

Posted March 13, 2013, 2:06 p.m.
Updated July 9, 2023, 7:27 p.m.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, 76, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has been elected Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. Bergoglio has taken the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi. He is the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope, and the first to take the name Francis. He is also the first non-European pope in about 1,200 years.

The election was announced at 7:06 p.m. in Rome (2:06 p.m. Eastern) with traditional white smoke from the chimney of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and bells ringing in Saint Peter’s Square. The dean of the College or Cardinals announced the name of the new pope just over one hour later.

Pope Benedict XVI stepped down at the end of February, becoming the first pontiff to resign in nearly six hundred years. The conclave to select his replacement began on Tuesday. Popes must be elected by a two-thirds majority of cardinal-electors, a threshold that was met on the fifth ballot cycle.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

It’s easy to tell when another person is rationalizing (as opposed to being rational), but it is nearly impossible to know when you are doing it yourself.

When schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Truth can never be confined to time and culture; in history it is known, but it also reaches beyond history.

To this end we ought to take every precaution to prevent legislators becoming mere office-men; choose them frequently, make them recallable, establish rotation among them, make them ineligible to offices, and give them as small a share as possible in the disposal of them.

The proud man can learn humility, but he will be proud of it.

If you have to do it every day, for God’s sake learn to do it well.

The rabbit’s tail looks like it’s made of cotton because if the tail looked like it was made of polyester, everybody would assume that the rabbit was artificial.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

There are some people who seem to want to ask favors from God as a right. A pretty kind of humility that is! He who knows us all does well in seldom giving things to such persons, He sees clearly that they are unable to drink of His chalice.

No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there’s something bad about it.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.

The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

Those who deny that a tendency toward evil is basic to human nature cannot make sense of history, which becomes merely endless, incomprehensible tragedy.

It has long been thought to be a well founded position, that the purse and sword ought not to be placed in the same hands in a free government.

Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? . . . If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

Tangent Theme:	26.0.48
Tangent Plugin:	6.0.111

Go to Top	`tt`
Go to Bottom	`tb`
Search	`ts`
Main Content	`tc`
Open Gallery (if present)	`tg`
Open Flagpole	`tf`
Keyboard Shortcuts	`tk`
Site Information	`ti`

Main Menu

X

Site Information

Keyboard Shortcuts