The announcement of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Francis’s successor moved me in a way I did not expect.
As a secular Jew — one deeply familiar with the fraught and often tragic history between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people — I found myself stunned, and, to my own surprise, uplifted.
There was something about this moment that transcended doctrine and denomination. It felt like a reaffirmation of conscience in a time of chaos.
Read the entire commentary on Substack In The Center Lane With Herb Paine →
More commentaries from Herb Paine
-
Commentator Herb Paine asked: What happens if democracy's ordinary remedies fail? He received quite a range of responses from readers. -
Commentator Herb Paine says masculinism is a challenge to our democracy. -
We spend a lot of time asking what AI can do. We spend far less time asking who is accountable when it acts. That question sits at the heart of Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical — and it is the focus of Herb Paine's latest commentary. -
Commentator Herb Paine says King Charles III's address to Congress last month was remarkable as an example of civic intelligence and an exhortation to defend democracy. -
Commentator Herb Paine on the troubling revival of capital punishment in the United States and Israel.
