Right Wing Cardinals Push For Anti-LGBTQ Pope

USA Today reports:

With the passing of Pope Francis, who presided over the Roman Catholic Church and its estimated 1.4 billion followers for 12 years, attention now turns to the selection of his successor. The decision is made through a time-honored process known as the conclave, an election conducted in secrecy behind the locked doors of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.

Soon, the College of Cardinals, the church’s most senior members and the acting head of the church until a new pope is selected, will convene to choose the new pontiff. Only those under age 80 are eligible to vote; of the church’s 252 cardinals, 135 will serve as electors, according to the Vatican.

The conclave, customarily held between 15 and 20 days after the pope’s death, is anticipated to start between May 6 and May 11.

The Guardian reports:

Eight in 10 of those eligible to vote in the conclave were appointed by Pope Francis in the past 12 years. Twenty became cardinals only in December last year. Many had never met each other before heading to Rome over the past week after the pope’s death last Monday.

More than 20 cardinals have been identified as papabile – candidates for the papacy – by Vatican observers. However, few frontrunners at the start of the process make it through successive rounds of voting. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was not considered a papabile, but by the end of the conclave he was Pope Francis.

Some cardinals who are not thought to be in the running for the job are likely to be pushing their favoured candidates, especially among less experienced colleagues. Among those likely to be lobbying for a conservative successor to Francis are Raymond Burke, a Donald Trump-supporting US bishop, and Gerhard Müller, a German who warned last week that the church could split if an orthodox pope is not elected.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has appeared here many times for his anti-LGBTQ actions, most recently in April 2023 when he and four other cardinals published an open letter calling on Pope Francis to be more anti-LGBTQ.

In October 2021, he appeared here when he spearheaded the ultimately failed campaign to deny communion to President Biden over his support for abortion rights.

In August 2021, Burke, who is stridently anti-vax, nearly croaked and was placed on a ventilator for COVID and now reportedly suffers long-haul symptoms. 

In June 2020, Burke published an open letter declaring that those “who suffer from the homosexual condition” have no right to “form families.”

In May 2015, Burke declared that Ireland’s public vote to legalize same-sex marriage means that Ireland is now “worse than the pagans.”

In October 2014, Burke wrote that families should not expose their children to “disordered relatives who suffer from the evil of homosexuality.”