I usually stay quite focused on technology in this blog, but today I'm going to digress somewhat. Given the death of John Paul II today, something makes me think that we will all look back some time in the future and talk about the revolutionary change in the Catholic church that coincided with it. Regardless if your belief system, the Catholic church is one of the largest (the largest?) and one of the oldest and most influential organizations world-wide with huge impact on societies and politics around the globe, so this matters.

Doc Searls recently said: "Churches are conversations" and quotes FaithCommons:

[Church] firewalls have kept smart [Christians] in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation [Christendom] has ever engaged in.

John Paul II was already a very unusual pope for 1978: he traveled, he had a media circus behind him and used it etc. But the world has changed so much since he became pope that far more things are different for a new pope today than are the same: the cold war is only a memory today. Globalization wasn't even on the horizon. No internet. No computers. No cell phones. No China. No India. No Euro. He was the first non-Italian pope in hundreds of years, which was disconcerting to many (can you imagine that today?) and Poland is less than 1000 miles away from Italy.

I think there's a good chance that the new pope will be from a continent other than Europe (e.g. Africa) and for such a person, the traditions of 2000 years of Rome will mean relatively little. Such a person could imagine a papacy that embraced the above quote. It will be the most radical change in 2000 years of history of a venerable organization. It would upset a great many. But the world has changed so much, and while many societal changes could be ignored over the centuries, this one cannot. Change is in the air.