Four meetings involving members of the College of Cardinals have taken place in the Vatican this week to discuss the future of the Catholic Church and establish who among them might be the next pope.
About 250,000 people from all over the world lined up to say farewell after the pope’s body was brought to St Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday to lie in state, the Vatican said.
Among the last visitors on Friday evening were French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, who stood together at the side of the casket for a few moments.
A meeting held on Friday in “general congregation” involved 149 cardinals, with 250 expected to attend the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday.
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The more discussions that take place before the conclave to elect a successor begins in early May, the more likely it is the next pope could be elected quickly.
“I think it would be great to be blessed with another person with the capacity to capture the public imagination and to be a voice for sanity, for peace and for justice in a world that has need for such a voice,” said Bishop Paul Tighe, one of the most senior Irishmen in the Roman Curia.
Bishop Tighe (67), from Navan, Co Meath, is secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. He is a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese and has served in Rome for 17 years.
His emphasis in the dicastery is on culture, not least the digital world, particularly social media, which he once described as “postmodernism on speed”.
He said the legacy of Pope Francis “is in the hearts of people”.
“That’s everybody – from the public to those of us who knew him, worked with him and saw him up close. People talk about simplicity. My favourite word would be authenticity. What you saw was what you got,” he said.
Bishop Tighe said he believed Pope Francis realised early in his convalescence, after spending more than five weeks in hospital, that “he wasn’t a man made for” it.
“He certainly was not a man who was made for retirement and I think he decided to spend himself, what energy he had, to try and continue his mission,” he said.
The late pope had “lived his life, as best he could” to the end, Bishop Tighe added.
When it came to social media and artificial intelligence (AI), he said Francis would say “this is not my world but everybody tells me how important it is”.
Bishop Tighe said Francis was most concerned that AI and increased digitalisation would lead to increased inequality.
Pope Francis “would have seen great potential for AI, if it was put at the service of humanity” but he feared it would serve “the interests only of a powerful elite,” he added.
Where social media side was concerned, he said Pope Francis had “a horror of the polarisation” it could create.
This was, he said, becoming “much more dangerous” in a world where it was “hard to know” if what you were seeing online was true and where many people decide to “run with it because it seems to back up their own prejudices”.
Bishop Tighe said Pope Francis “would always want to try to see the humanity in the other person, no matter how different they might appear, their faith, their commitments, but to try and recover a sense of a share humanity”.
