Three Popes - Two Popes - Introduction

An extraordinary thing happened in the Vatican recently. Another extraordinary thing happened in an era when we have Two Popes for the first time in six hundred years, in an era when a Pope was elected from the New World well over five hundred years past the Columbus's discovery, in an era when the molestation scandal was finally taken with seriousness so grave that, for the first time ever, a Pope allowed for priests to be held up for trial for the conduct of their ministry in legal court rather than ecumenical court, in an era when a Pope sanctioned the church for their remonstrative obsessions with issues of sex rather than attending to the achingly dire burdens of their lay faithful, in an era when the Vatican appears perpetually on the verge of changing its stances on divorce, in an era when the Pope himself speaks kindly of Liberation Theology... this is an extraordinary religious era in which the immobile Catholic Church, seemingly unchanging, unseeing, unhearing, unmoving and unmoved, hurtles toward change at a comparative light speed while, for the second time, the traditionalist wing, who stymied nearly every reform for centuries, must divine new tricks in order to keep up. 

Hurtles toward change, yet never quite gets there....