Lessons from Pope Francis

VIRTUAL REALITY

- TONY LOPEZ

Pope Francis visited Manila and Tacloban, Jan. 15 to 19, 2015—the third pontiff to visit the Philippines after Paul VI in 1970 and John Paul II in 1981 and 1995. Luneta in Manila is the site of the world's two biggest masses ever—five million on World Youth Day in 1995 and more than six million on the final papal mass in January 2015. The 1995 and 2015 crowds are also the biggest papal audiences ever.

As a major country (meaning a population of over 100 million), the Philippines is the largest Catholic country in Asia with 90 million Filipino Catholics—the third largest population of Catholics, after Brazil, 140 million, and Mexico, 101 million. Argentina has only 31 million Catholics and yet produced a pope, Francis.

So maybe, there is a logic in our dreaming of the first Filipino pope, the Asian Pope Francis, Luis Antonio Tagle, 67, who became a cardinal in 2012. Manila-born and a Cavite native, Tagle is Jesuit-educated (BA in Pre-Divinity, summa cum laude, and MA in Theology, Ateneo). He has a doctorate in theology, summa cum laude, 1991, from the Catholic University of America, and a dozen honorary doctorates. He was the late Pope Francis' right-hand man on evangelization.

If the Holy Spirit makes it happen, a Pope Antonio (Tagle) will be seen as a continuity of Pope Francis' reign (pro-poor, inclusive and progressive) and a rupture from the mold of the former archbishop of Munich, Benedict XVI (Pope, April 2005-February 2013), an arch conservative.