Official conservatism conflicts with society

This week’s election of a pope fell between two momentous events, each showing how the world has tilted ever so slightly on its axis.

Francis’s election came at a consistory provoked by his predecessor Benedict’s resignation. Benedict’s decision came because he was weakened by age and was all but unprecedented in modern history. That Francis is not a European much less an Italian added to the sense that a momentous shift, the kind that defines era change, was afoot.

Even half a century ago — no more distant than 1963 — geopolitical change of that depth, especially in an organisation as rigidly and as enthusiastically conservative as the Catholic Church, would have been beyond the imagination even of that Church’s most ambitious innovators.