Cardinals from around the world gathered yesterday inside the Vatican for their first round of meetings before the conclave to elect the next pope, amid scandals inside and out of the Vatican, and the continued reverberations of Benedict XVI’s decision to retire.
Cardinals were treated like rock stars as they entered the Vatican yesterday morning, with television crews swarming around the red-capped churchmen and their handlers pushing their way through the crowds.
“A Latin American Pope is possible, everything is possible,” Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins said as he entered.
The core agenda item is to set the date for the conclave and set in place procedures to prepare for it, including closing the Sistine Chapel to visitors and getting the Vatican hotel cleared out and debugged, lest anyone try to listen in on the secret conversations of the cardinals.
However, a date may not have been agreed upon yesterday because the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, has said the date would not be finalized until all cardinals have arrived in Rome.
The first day of discussion was again rocked by revelations of scandal, with Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien admitting that he had engaged in sexual misconduct not befitting a priest, archbishop or cardinal. O’Brien last week resigned as archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and said he would not participate in the conclave after four men came forward with allegations that he had acted inappropriately with them — the first time a cardinal has stayed away from a conclave because of a personal scandal.
Separately, the Vatican is still reeling from the fallout of the scandal over leaked papal documents and the investigation by three cardinals into who was behind it.
Italian news reports have been rife with unsourced reports about the contents of the cardinals’ dossier. Even if the reports are false, as the Vatican maintains, the leaks themselves confirmed a fairly high level of dysfunction within the Vatican bureaucracy, with intrigues, turf battles and allegations of corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the highest levels of the church hierarchy.
In one of his last audiences before resigning, Benedict met with the three cardinals who prepared the report and decided that their dossier would remain secret.
However, he gave them the go-ahead to answer cardinals’ questions about its contents.
Another topic facing the cardinals is the reason they are in Rome the first place: Benedict’s resignation and its implications.
His decision to end 600 years of tradition and retire rather than stay on the job until death has completely altered the concept of the papacy, and cardinals have not shied from weighing in about the implications for the next pope.
People can preregister to receive their NT$10,000 (US$325) cash distributed from the central government on Nov. 5 after President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday signed the Special Budget for Strengthening Economic, Social and National Security Resilience, the Executive Yuan told a news conference last night. The special budget, passed by the Legislative Yuan on Friday last week with a cash handout budget of NT$236 billion, was officially submitted to the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon. People can register through the official Web site at https://10000.gov.tw to have the funds deposited into their bank accounts, withdraw the funds at automated teller
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FRESH LOOK: A committee would gather expert and public input on the themes and visual motifs that would appear on the notes, the central bank governor said The central bank has launched a comprehensive redesign of New Taiwan dollar banknotes to enhance anti-counterfeiting measures, improve accessibility and align the bills with global sustainability standards, Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) told a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee yesterday. The overhaul would affect all five denominations — NT$100, NT$200, NT$500, NT$1,000 and NT$2,000 notes — but not coins, Yang said. It would be the first major update to the banknotes in 24 years, as the current series, introduced in 2001, has remained in circulation amid rapid advances in printing technology and security standards. “Updating the notes is essential to safeguard the integrity
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