DENVER – When you’re talking about the Catholic Church, you need to be awfully careful about using the word “unprecedented” to describe any new development. This is an institution with more than 2,000 years of history, which has seen just about every vicissitude imaginable, and its opposite, over that span.
As the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago memorably put it, “In the Catholic Church, everything has happened at least once.”
Yet even with that caveat, the outcome of Sunday’s presidential election in Argentina looms as a fairly singular event – a seemingly direct rebuff to a sitting pope by his own home country, through the choice of a president who’s pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from Francis on virtually every issue.
