Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel Has Seen the Past and Future of Travel

The world of travel has changed dramatically since Glenn Fogel first joined the company that would become Booking.com 25 years ago. Today, it’s almost unimaginable to go through a travel agent, and almost all travel plans are booked online. Fogel has helped navigate the company through these transitions, and is now driving Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, KAYAK, and OpenTable, to its inevitable future with AI. Through this transition, he says, travel websites aren’t going anywhere; indeed, he’s planning for them to be more essential than ever. It’s working with investors; Booking Holdings stock is near an all-time high.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

TIME caught up with Fogel on March 5 to talk about his expectations for the future of travel.

I think you’ve been at Booking for 25 years, is that right?

25 years exactly last week

Congratulations

You know, we get nothing, no toaster . . . 

No watch?

Well, I got a thank you.

What made you join the company in the first place?

Well, it was 1999 and the dot com boom was happening, and I was a trader at Morgan Stanley asset management. I had been a software developer and I had been an investment banker. And as a banker, I covered the airline industry, so I had some familiarity with that. It just seemed so much more exciting to be part of this new technological revolution. 

The company did a lot more things back then.

We were into so many different verticals. We were doing name-your-own-price for everything.  Name-your-own-price for cars, for mobile phone time, for home and life insurance. And we were hemorrhaging cash. 

So we needed to take some massive, drastic steps. 

How did you turn things around? 

We noticed that people wanted to book their own hotel knowing what hotel they’re going to get, instead of the name-your-own-price model. But we didn’t have a model like that, so I started looking around at who knew how to do that. I found a bunch of people who had graduated from Cambridge [University], and they had started a company called Active Hotels. We got them to join our company. And then very shortly thereafter, we found a very similar company in Amsterdam called Booking.com. We were able to convince them to come and join too. We combined them together—Booking.com was a much better name—and that was the start, around 2005.

Why did that resonate? 

It was a great model because it did something that people liked, which was that you knew what you were buying in a hotel. You knew what the price was. And really important, you didn’t have to pay until you showed up at the hotel. 

It was an agency model, meaning we got our commission after the person was staying at the hotel. So the traveler didn’t have money go out of their credit card two months before they traveled. And the hoteliers were happy about it because they hadn’t been getting their money until long after the person stayed. So they got their money sooner. It was a win-win for everybody. And we just started growing.

Fast forward to today, what’s something that you’re not offering, that you think customers want?

Well, what we are doing now that is so exciting is what we call the connected trip, which is when the systems are all connected. It brings together all the different verticals, flight, hotel, ground transportation, attractions—all the elements of a trip in one way, one place, our place, that knows so much about you. 

How does that differ from how Booking.com works now? 

Have you ever used a human being travel agent?

Yes.

Maybe that person knew you a little bit because you used her before, and she’d work with you and make things a lot easier. In addition, that agent probably knew what you like and what you could afford. 

Unlike when you go online, if you don’t have a relationship, you can get a long list of options and have to try to sift through it all. 

The idea of the Connect trip is to make it much less complicated. When you’re done, you’re just dealing with one point of contact, not multiple different ones.  That has been the vision for some time. 

Now, with all the advancements in generative AI, we’re going to be able to do it in a much simpler way. We’ll be able to personalize everything to you, and that’s really where the goal is and where we’re driving towards.

It’s almost like Booking.com would have a memory of you and understand what you want?

Let’s say you’re at the airport and you get a text from the airline that says your flight is delayed four hours. Pretty annoying. 

But I’ll bet they never sent you a text that said your flight is delayed four hours, however, we have a competing airline that’s departing in two hours. We’d be happy to switch your ticket right now. 

We should be offering that up to you, making it easy for you. Before you even know there’s a problem, be offering a solution to that problem.

How does generative AI help with this?

Eventually you will make a call to customer service, and what’s picking up at the other end is not a human being. It sounds like a human being. You wouldn’t know it’s not a human being, except that regulatory [authorities] will probably be required to say it’s not human. 

The great thing is, generative AI will never come to the office tired. It will never be upset, because they had a fight that morning with their partner when they left the home. And they won’t get upset that you’re upset. That will make it so much better going forward. That’s going to be more for the simpler problems.

For complex problems, we’re still going to have to deal with humans. But they’ll be able to do their job better. Because when they’re looking at their screens while they’re talking to you, the generative AI will help give all sorts of solutions and ways to solve the problem. 

That’s why you’ll be happier, and that’s why you’ll be more loyal, because we’re providing you with better customer service.

We’re talking a little bit about what generative AI can do if there’s a problem, what about if there’s not a problem? How can it help you have a better travel experience from the outset?

I can give you so many examples of this. Let’s go with the basics of what do you like in terms of a hotel? 

Quiet, walkability, middle-of-the road price.

So, right now, to do that, you generally on most sites will have to put in some filters. There’ll be a filter for a three star middle road, and there’ll be a map, maybe where it is. But imagine this. You just type into a search box, I need a hotel in, let’s say, New York. I’d like the middle of the road price, and I’d like it to be a walkable area in the center of the city where it’ll be close to museums, etc. And you don’t have to click a filter, that’s what you can do on Booking.com now.

What gets even more interesting, though, is the hotels that you’re going to see in the search results, the content that you’ll see today will be what is known as static, meaning it’s in the database. It’s the same no matter who is looking at it. But imagine instead using generative AI, it is going to show different content based on what your requests were. You thought what was important was walkability. It will talk about the walkability of the hotel first thing in the first paragraph.  We’ll be able to dynamically create content that actually is personalized for what the person who is doing the search is looking for.

Let’s talk a little bit about the economy. You know, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty out there right now. What do you see as the trends for travel in the next 12 months? 

There’s a healthy demand for travel. That’s basically what we say in terms of what we think about the future. 

What I try and direct people to always think about in terms of travel, is that travel is one of those things that almost seems like a basic need for human beings. If you look over a long period of time, 100 years, travel has always been growing, in the long run, faster than GDP. 

And as people get wealthier, going from poverty to middle class, one of the first things they want to do is travel. 

And even as people get wealthier, wealthier, up the income level, they just travel more and maybe go to more expensive hotels. 

That is a consistency that is going on decade in, decade out. So somebody says, what do we think is going to happen this year? Because of the economy, I say, I have no idea, because who knows. But I do know that over a decade, travel will grow faster than GDP, and the way people travel will become more and more through a digital process like us, as opposed to the old non-digital going into a shop or making a phone call. Those are consistencies that I know, but I don’t try and predict this year’s economy. 

People can go to ChatGPT and ask where to stay, bypassing your site. How do you keep them from bypassing you? 

Go back 25 years ago when I first joined: there were a heck of a lot of ways to find out about hotels, and there still are. How many people go to Google first, right? There are always tons of ways to find things out. ChatGPT is wonderful, but Google’s been around for an awfully long time. There are a lot of people who type into Google, ‘Hotel in New York,’ but we continue to grow nicely.

Tell me about your favorite place to travel. 

Home. I travel so much. I am always traveling around the world, so many different places, so many different offices, so many different things. We’re a very global company. We are able to put you into over 220 countries and territories around the world. We do our business in over 40 languages. I am traveling all the time. One of the happiest places I travel to is home after a trip. 

Like you said, you have employees all over the world, how do you bring them together as employees of one company? 

If you want to use a sports analogy, you have lots of different players in different positions. How do you all focus? Well, having one goal. If it’s a sports team, it’s to win. If it’s a business like ours, we have a mission that I believe is very important. Our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world. 

Now, this is a noble mission. It’s not curing cancer. But I ask you this, when you think back, what are some of your fondest memories? I go to somebody who’s maybe in their 50s or 60s. For them, that may be the birth of children, sure, maybe a wedding, sure, but I’ll tell you you want to make them cry. Talk about the time they took their kid to Disney World. Talk to them about the family trips they took with their children. The family trips they took as a child with their parents. That is an easy way to show you the power of travel. 

I really believe travel helps people, brings together people of different cultures, of different places. It helps build understanding of others. It’s a really powerful thing. That’s why I say, okay, we’re not trying to cure cancer, but we sure are doing something that’s making the world better.

How will you know if you’ve won?

This is not a competition to win. This is an ongoing mission that will never end, because there’s always been more places to explore. There’ll always be new places to learn about, new people to meet. It never ends.

source https://time.com/7284698/booking-ceo-glenn-fogel-interview/

Climate Change Is Straining Pakistan’s Water. Tensions With India Could Make It Worse

As military tensions continue to flare up between India and Pakistan, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed earlier this week to stop water from crossing the border into Pakistan, saying “India’s water will be used for India’s interests.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

On April 23, Modi suspended a 1960 treaty that allows the two countries to share water from the Indus Basin. Building infrastructure to stop the flow of water into Pakistan, however, would take India years to carry out, and the move would further strain the resources of a water-scarce country.

Pakistan’s water resources have already been burdened by climate change, as the country faces rising temperatures, droughts, and melting glaciers and superfloods that are impacting the timing of water flow. Now, India’s moves could exacerbate the crisis—and present long-term challenges for Pakistan’s agricultural sector. 

Many Pakistanis currently lack access to clean and reliable water sources—in part due to climate change. In the months after the 2022 floods killed at least 1,700 people, more than 10 million people were left without access to safe drinking water, according to a UNICEF report. “There’s been quite a lot of difficulty for local populations to have access to water on a consistent basis,” says Bhargabi Bharadwaj, research associate at the Environment and Society Center at Chatham House. “This is already being felt at local population level, even scrapping this most recent escalation on the Indus Water Treaty agreement.”

Why does India control Pakistan’s water supply?

When the South Asian subcontinent was cleaved by the British in 1947, boundaries were drawn that divided the Indus River along India and Pakistan. “The problem starts on day one,” says Hassaan Khan, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University.

Read more: How India Is Threatening to Weaponize Water in Its Conflict With Pakistan

Much of the headwaters are located in India, despite most irrigation systems falling in Pakistan. “Around 80% of Pakistan’s agriculture and the third of its hydropower depends on the water from the Indus Basin region,” says Bharadwaj. “There is a greater dependency on this basin for Pakistan than there is for India.”

The Indus Waters Treaty was drawn up in 1960 by the World Bank, and required the two countries to divide the river system’s water equally. The treaty included mechanisms to resolve disputes—and was designed to last in perpetuity. 

For India to cut Pakistan’s water supply altogether would be an impossible task. “Currently, India does not have the infrastructure capacity to really store excess water, which is what they’d be required to do if they’re kind of trying to cut away from letting this water reach Pakistan,” says Bharadwaj.

But still, experts say India could engineer small disruptions that would impact how much water flows into Pakistan. “Stopping the flow isn’t really possible,” says Khan. “What [India can do] is impact the timing of the flow—release more water one day and then stop. [It can] create these small disturbances, which, if they’re not properly managed by Pakistan, can have an impact on the agricultural system.”

The impact would likely largely be felt during the low flow season—from December to February—when there’s less water to begin with.

But Bharadwaj notes that the Indus Water Treaty was designed to withstand the many tussles the two countries have had over the years. “This isn’t the first time this has happened,” she says. “One of the very positive things about the Indus Water Treaty is that it has withstood two previous wars and another limited conflict between the two countries, and that can be, I think, largely attributed to the strength of its design.”

Why does Pakistan have a water crisis?

Pakistan’s water scarcity crisis can be traced back to before the country was founded. “The regions that now make up most of Pakistan as part of the Indus Basin, they’re alluvial plains, so they’re very fertile, but typically don’t have that much rainfall,” says Daniel Haines, associate professor in the history of risk and disaster at University College London whose research focuses on South Asia. “The ambition to increase the acreage of farmland outstripped the amount of water that was available.” 

As early as the 1930s and ‘40s, different regions of then colonial India were already disputing who would get what amount of water for agricultural projects, says Haines. 

Climate change and rapid population growth is now making things worse. Today, Pakistan is considered one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. And last winter was one of the driest in the country’s history, with the Pakistan Meteorological Department reporting 67% less rainfall than usual. According to the Germanwatch 2025 Climate Risk Index, Pakistan ranked as the most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change in 2022, as it faced one of the costliest disasters in world history caused by the flooding—putting much of the country’s agricultural land at risk and impacting drinking water. But farmlands are also becoming unusable due to increasing droughts, pushing more people into cities and placing a strain on urban water supplies.

“Cities now are increasingly water stressed, because water supply hasn’t kept up with the increase in population,” says Khan. 

Over three-quarters of Pakistan’s renewable water resources come from outside its borders—mostly from the Indus Basin, and major cities rely on that for their drinking water. Any changes to the country’s water supply will have major impacts on agriculture and livelihoods for millions, says Haines. “Because the water system in Pakistan is already so stressed, any kind of major disruption to even the timing, let alone the volume, would potentially have pretty serious consequences.”

source https://time.com/7284470/india-pakistan-water-supply-climate-change/

Why Do I Always Have a Runny Nose?

A nose that won’t stop running isn’t just annoying; it can affect your quality of life. “If you’ve got a runny nose that you constantly have to sniff up or use a tissue—that has a significant impact on the way you feel throughout the entire day,” says Dr. William Reisacher, an otolaryngologist (also known as an ear, nose, and throat doctor, or ENT) specializing in allergies at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

There’s a medical definition for a nose that runs like a faucet. Persistent or chronic rhinitis is a runny nose that lasts longer than 12 weeks, says Dr. Natalie Earl, an otolaryngologist at the Centers for Advanced ENT Care—Feldman ENT Division in Maryland and Washington, D.C. The condition is also called chronic rhinorrhea.

Read More: 10 Weird Symptoms That Might Be Allergies

The mucus “can be clear, runny, watery, thick, and/or colorful,” Earl says, and it usually takes medication to dry up the drainage.

That’s different from an acute cause of a runny nose, she says. Dripping from a cold, for example, will usually stop on its own “within a few days to less than 4 weeks,” she says.

While a chronic runny nose probably isn’t the most serious health concern you’ve ever dealt with, you don’t have to put up with the sniffles in silence. “Runny nose is one of those conditions where people often will not talk about it because, while it’s really bothersome to them…it seems like a trivial problem,” Reisacher says. “They come in almost apologetic for having to bother me with such a ‘nuisance,’ where that’s exactly what my field addresses.”

Talk to a health care professional any time you’re concerned about a runny nose that won’t quit, he says. That way, you can figure out what might be causing your symptoms and find something that brings you relief.

Here are some of the most common causes of runny nose.

Allergies

Allergies are a major reason for a constant runny nose, Earl says. But you can typically tell if you’re having an allergic reaction because it comes with a host of other symptoms, namely “sneezing, nasal itching, and nasal obstruction,” she says. “Some people will also experience itching, tearing, and/or burning of the eyes.”

Weather changes

Temperature, air pressure, and other weather fluctuations can all set off a drippy nose, and if the environment where you live changes enough, you might feel like you’re constantly sniffing, Reisacher says. “The nose is a thermometer, it’s a hygrometer, it’s a barometer. It will react in a way that certainly gets our attention.”

The same goes for other changes in your environment, such as construction nearby that stirs up irritating dirt and dust, he says. 

Medications

Certain prescription medications, such as beta-blockers used to treat high blood pressure, are famous for causing a runny nose as a side effect, Reisacher says. Hormonal birth control can trigger similar symptoms, per the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (ACAAI). 

Read More: Is Seltzer Water Good or Bad for You?

Changes in the type or dose of medication you’re taking could result in a persistent runny nose, he adds.

Structural problems

An ENT is trained to look inside and around your nose for structural abnormalities that could be causing your symptoms, Reisacher says. You may have nasal polyps, small growths in the nose’s lining, or a deviated septum, when the wall between your nostrils leans more to one side, according to Stanford Medicine.

Pregnancy

So many body parts change during pregnancy, and your nose is no exception. Hormone fluctuations expand blood vessels to help deliver nutrients to your growing baby, Reisacher explains, but “the tissues inside the nose also get affected by that, and they leak more fluid.”

Read More: Pregnancy Can Make You Age Faster

Typically starting in the second trimester, you may feel like you suddenly developed allergies when you never had allergies before, he says, or like you’re constantly stuffed-up and sniffly. 

What to do about it 

You don’t have to wait through weeks of sniffling before you talk to someone about your symptoms. “You should call or message your doctor whenever you feel concerned,” Reisacher says.

You can try over-the-counter saline or steroid nasal sprays and oral antihistamines on your own, especially if you think you might have allergies, Earl says. But the wall of options at the pharmacy can be daunting; if you could use more guidance, it might be helpful to ask your doctor for some suggestions first.

If you don’t get any relief from these meds in two weeks, it’s time to see a health care professional, Earl says.

Talk to your doctor about any recent changes to the medications you’re taking, Reisacher says. They may be able to suggest ways to reduce this side effect or deal with the drippage.

Discuss your environment and any changes to your surroundings, too, he says. It’s important to run through all the potential triggers of your runny nose because “there’s no blood test that will give you that answer,” he says. You can be tested for allergies, of course, but otherwise, it may take a skilled physician interpreting your detailed medical history to suss out—and treat—the root of your discomfort.

source https://time.com/7283979/runny-nose-causes-treatments/

Pope Leo Calls His Appointment a Cross and a Blessing in First Mass as Pontiff

Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV, made history on Thursday, May 8, when he was elected as the first American Pope. The Chicago native, who has spent many years serving as a missionary in Peru, took to the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and addressed the cheering crowd, speaking in Spanish and Italian.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Read More: ‘Peace Be With You’: Pope Leo XIV Steps Onto the World Stage

On Friday morning, Pope Leo spoke once more when he presided over his first mass as Pontiff.

Dressed in a white robe with a gold border and a tall white miter, and holding a gold crucifix, Pope Leo delivered his first homily during which he spoke in his native English, as well as Latin and Italian, to the cardinals who elected him just a day before.

Leo referred to being appointed Pope as both a cross and a blessing, and spoke of the responsibility he and the cardinals have to spread Christianity in a world that sometimes mocks faith.

“You have called me to carry that cross and to be blessed with that mission, and I know I can rely on each and every one of you to walk with me as we continue as a church, as a community, as friends of Jesus, as believers, to announce the good news, to announce the Gospel,” the new Bishop of Rome said in English.

He warned against “practical atheism” among Christians who see Jesus as more of a “charismatic leader” than the savior, and also praised the late Pope Francis as he emphasized his predecessor’s missionary focus as a leader.

Concluding his homily, Pope Leo XIV decided to focus on humility in the Vatican’s leadership and in priesthood, quoting St. Ignatius of Antioch: “Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world no longer sees my body.” 

This quote can be applied to Church leadership, Leo said, emphasizing that Cardinals must “move aside so that Christ may remain,” and should make themselves “small so that he may be known.” The reminder of the importance of humility echoes the teachings of his predecessor, Pope Francis.

While this was Leo’s first mass as the leader of the Catholic Church, it only included the 132 cardinals who elected him as Pontiff. On May 18, Leo will deliver an inauguration mass that will be attended by a wider audience.

source https://time.com/7284403/pope-leo-first-mass-pontiff-humility-cardinals-guidance/

What to Know About the Equal Pay Activist Lilly Ledbetter, Who Inspired Lilly

Seven months after the death of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom Congress’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named after, a film about her life opens in theaters May 9.

In the biopic Lilly, Patricia Clarkson stars as Ledbetter, a Goodyear employee who found out that she was getting paid less than fellow supervisors who were men, and follows her legal journey to the U.S. Supreme Court. The film culminates in the historic 2009 passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Congress. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Here’s what to know about the real woman who inspired Lilly. 

What Lilly Ledbetter endured

Growing up in poverty gave Ledbetter the resilience necessary to endure a lengthy legal fight.

She was born in 1938 in Alabama, when there were few career options for women.

“She grew up without running water, without electricity, with only a high school education,” says Lanier Scott Isom, who helped Ledbetter put together her 2012 memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. “Her clothes were made out of feed sack material.”

She was never afraid to get her hands dirty. For example, she worked at a chicken processing plant at one point to help her family make ends meet. 

In 1979, as a married mother of two children, she landed a job as a supervisor at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama, plant. 

Her husband was always supportive of job, but she encountered many men who felt threatened by her. 

Ledbetter had always been outspoken about the sexual harassment she experienced on the job. 

As Isom explains: “One of her supervisors basically said [paraphrasing], ‘If you want to go to the motel down the street with me, I would ensure your promotion.’”

Lilly writer and director Rachel Feldman adds: “There was one guy who could not stop talking about her underwear and what kind of bra she was wearing, and one man who said [paraphrasing], ‘I don’t like women around here. What if I have to scratch my balls and fart?’”

Work wasn’t the only place where Ledbetter encountered offensive men. When her son suffered from repeated ear infections growing up and needed surgery, a doctor suggested she earn the money by participating in a program where young surgeons were learning how to perform hysterectomies. 

Nineteen years into a job at Goodyear, she learned that a young man she had just trained was making more than she was. An anonymous tipster left her a note at work that had the salaries of her male counterparts written out, so she could see that she was making up to $2,000 a month less than they were.

Lilly Ledbetter’s fight for equal pay

A young lawyer named Jon Goldfarb, played in the movie by Thomas Sadoski, took on Ledbetter’s case, and much of Lilly is a dramatization of her legal battle. She won money from a federal court, but then lost it when Goodyear appealed. In 2007, she lost her case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which argued that claims had to be filed within 180 days of a discriminatory action.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke to Ledbetter in her dissenting opinion, pointing out that she still had a chance to take her fight to Congress. Real interviews and speeches that Ginsburg has given about Ledbetter are woven throughout Lilly. 

As if fighting for equal pay legislation wasn’t hard enough, Ledbetter had to do it while her husband was battling cancer, even having to get his jaw removed in the process. But he was fully supportive of her efforts and had no problem with her trips to D.C. to lobby for the bill.

President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on Jan. 29, 2009, just nine days into his first term, the first major piece of legislation he signed into law as president. In the icing on the cake, Ledbetter actually got to dance with Obama on Inauguration Day, a dream come true for her because she did ballroom dancing growing up.

According to the law, pay discrimination claims would have to be made within 180 days of an employee’s last paycheck, as opposed to 180 days after the first discriminatory paycheck. As the New York Times notes, Ledbetter was never entitled to back pay from Goodyear because her discriminatory paychecks occurred before the law was enacted. 

Lilly Ledbetter’s legacy

Ledbetter died on Oct. 12, 2024 at the age of 86. Lilly is an apt tribute for a film lover like Ledbetter, who grew up going to see movies starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “She also truly understood the power of movies—that when you affect people’s hearts, you affect their heads,” says Feldman.

Feldman consulted Ledbetter throughout the script-writing process. “There were many times when I would call Lilly, and I would say, ‘I wrote a great character here, but only Lilly Ledbetter could come up with this line, what would you say?’” When she was trying to figure out a line for the fictional Ledbetter to say when she arrives for a press briefing and asked how she calms her nerves before a dance competition, the real Ledbetter told Feldman that her character should say she dreams about winning the lottery.

TIME owner Marc Benioff, who produced the film, recalled meeting Ledbetter for the first time in a remembrance, writing about how she helped inspire him to investigate and fix pay disparities at his company Salesforce. As of 2022, the company had spent $22 million to ensure pay equity, because, he wrote, “It’s not just about fixing the problem once. It’s about making sure we are operationalizing equality as a core value of our company.”

Feldman tells TIME that she hopes moviegoers see “the importance of male allies.”

While the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a milestone, it did not end the gender pay gap. According to the Pew Research Center, women in 2024 earned an average of 85% of what men earned.

source https://time.com/7283667/lilly-ledbetter-movie-true-story/

Watch Live: New Pope Announced on Second Day of the Conclave

A top cardinal announces a new pope has been elected, uttering the words “Habemus papam!” Latin for “We have a pope!” from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. The new pope is expected to make his first public appearance and impart a blessing.

source https://time.com/7283956/watch-new-pope-announced-conclave/

As the Conclave Continues, Catholicism Is at a Crossroads

As the cardinals gather in Rome to choose the new leader for 1.4 billion Catholics, the Catholic Church once again stands at a crossroads. The animating question facing the conclave is whether the cardinals want the Church to continue in the direction of a broader, more capacious understanding of the faith as articulated by Francis, or will they revert to the conservative, more traditionalist ways of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The Church has stood at similar crossroads several times in the modern era.

From 1545 to 1560, the Council of Trent met to determine the Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar prior to his excommunication in 1520, had pointed out the corruptions of medieval Catholicism and emphasized the doctrine of justification by faith (not works) and what he called the priesthood of believers.

The question before the prelates at the Council of Trent was whether to acknowledge the excesses and reform the Church in the direction of the more stripped-down Protestantism that Luther and other Reformers advocated. Trent, however, moved in the opposite direction, becoming “more Catholic” in its affirmation of the importance of the sacraments and good works. This hyper-Catholicism can be traced most graphicly in the Baroque and Rococo architecture that followed, which John Updike described as “the incredible visual patisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompe-l’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism.”

Another crossroads for modern Catholicism occurred following the death of Pope Pius XII in October 1958. The cardinals opted for what they thought was a “caretaker” pope, 76-year-old Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who took the name John XXIII. He turned out to be anything but a caretaker. Declaring that it was “time to throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through,” he convened the Second Vatican Council, which reformed Church theology and liturgy (including mass in the vernacular) and, its supporters say, brought the Church into the modern world.

John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI faced another crossroads shortly after the conclusion of Vatican II. John XXIII had formed a study group, the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, to review the Church’s teaching on the matter. The commission, which Paul VI expanded, included laywomen, married couples, theologians and bishops. The overwhelming recommendation was that the Church should revise its teaching to allow artificial means of birth control.

Paul VI, however, rejected that recommendation and issued the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25, 1968. The only acceptable means of birth control, the Church decreed, was the rhythm method, which critics promptly dubbed “Vatican Roulette.”

Humanae Vitae persuaded many Catholics, especially in the United States, that the Pope was hopelessly out of touch. Second-wave feminism, the drive for upward mobility, career opportunities and the desire for smaller families prompted many Catholic households to ignore the papal directive on birth control. As many studies have shown, Catholic attendance declined after 1968; many Catholics felt for the first time that it was all right to disobey the pope and still consider themselves good Catholics.

Now, following the death of Pope Francis, the Church once again stands at a crossroads. Conservatives, those Mark Massa, a historian and a Jesuit, calls “Catholic Fundamentalists,” are pressing for a pope who will reverse course. They criticize Francis for making overtures to the LGBTQ community and for permitting priests to bless same-sex unions. They claim he has “feminized” the Church by calling out what others describe as “toxic masculinity.” They dislike the fact that he restricted use of the traditional Latin mass and entertained the possibility of ordaining married men to the priesthood.

The other faction of the Church points out that Francis graciously sought to welcome marginal people—gays, lesbians, divorced people—into the Church and evinced concern for immigrants and for the poor, positions that have demonstrable appeal to a younger generation of Catholics. They also appreciate his attention to the ravages of climate change.

The term liberal in the context of the Roman Catholic Church may be an oxymoron, but this second camp seeks to perpetuate the work and the legacy of Francis. The conclave stands at a crossroads, and the person the cardinals choose will likely determine the direction of the Church for years to come.

As an Episcopal priest, not a Catholic, I have only a rooting interest in the conclave, and I’m loath to make predictions. But I recall the lyrics of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” by the Charlie Daniels Band, a fiddler’s faceoff between Satan and a young man named Johnny. The devil bets a fiddle of gold against Johnny’s soul and leads off with the bow across the strings, making “an evil hiss.” The rendition may be technically perfect, but it lacks soul.

When Johnny takes his turn, the fiddle vibrates with verve and passion—and he prevails. Whoever prevails in the cardinals’ deliberations will inherit a church with plenty of gilding but still in need of some of the verve and passion that Francis brought to the task.

source https://time.com/7283873/conclave-catholicism-at-a-crossroads/