October 15, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Sean M Theriault (The University of Texas at Austin)
This talk examines the records of the recent popes to see how different Francis is from his predecessors based on the policies they discussed, the people they promote, and the places they went. Using the tools of social science, I find that Francis is indeed iconoclastic, but so, too, have all the popes been since at least Pope Pius XII. The power of the office, the length of their tenures, and the world in which they live require each pope to reinvent the office.