A New Start

Change has brought a new perspective to the Roman Catholic Church. After being reigned by European popes for more than 1000 years, there is now an outsider in charge. After the resignation of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis I, a formal Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has now made history as the first Latin American to become the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

As expected, responses to this election were made immediately. As soon as he walked out on the balcony to make it known that he was chosen as the new leader of the Roman Catholics, there was first an awkward gasp because of the fact that he was not European as expected. However, Pope Francis was not intimidated by the first response, instead he joked about his ethnicity. “In Italian, he seemed to address his outsider status by joking: ‘As you know the duty of the conclave is to give Rome a bishop. It seems that my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world.’” In response to the pope’s decision to name himself Francis “after the humble Catholic friar St. Francis of Assisi,” President Barak Obama referred to the pontiff as "champion of the poor."

Although at first, I thought that the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI was unacceptable because there was no one to directly follow him, as it would be if the president were unable to fulfill his duty then the vice president would take charge. However, with the election of Pope Francis I there bring new views and also some diversity in the history of pope’s.