‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to navigate this paradox. He also looks back at the Francis papacy, and the way that Francis behind his smile ran the Vatican with an iron first; at relations between the Vatican and the Trump administration; and at Francis’s motives for bringing the future Pope Leo XIV to Rome in 2023: ‘the reason, in my view, is the same reason that Francis began to smile.’
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