Difficulty Level: Medium/Hard

#57

Abstract: Over the past thirty years the average number of meals Americans consume each
day has gone from three to two. A byproduct of the death of breakfast is the growth of
brunch, a leisurely meal eaten around midday. Burger King is taking brunch seriously
enough to offer a special menu, which entails quite a big risk.
Vocabulary: Saucy, Debrief, Exploit, Eponymous, Insatiable, Raking, Disseminate, Fiasco

Burger King Breaks Out Brunch

for CNN.com
In the popular television series "Sex and the City," brunch was often the war room in which
the saucy foursome would debrief about their exploits on the battleground of New York's
dating scene.
Starting at least a century before the show's 1998 television debut, that leisurely, often
boozy, midday meal has frequently been associated with well-heeled urbanites making
much ado about eggs Benedict, Bellinis and stuffed French toast. Now Burger King wants
to bring brunch to the local drive-through. The fast-food chain is testing brunch fare in
Massachusetts and Florida, and depending on its success there, it may be rolled out
nationally.
The menu is set to feature a breakfast sandwich of eggs, cheese, tomato, ham, bacon and
smoky tomato sauce served on Ciabatta bread, Whoppers (which are not usually available
in the morning) and the BK Mimosa -- a nonalcoholic version of the classic cocktail with
Sprite standing in for the traditional champagne.
This represents a bold reinvention of Burger King's breakfast menu, which competes
aggressively with McDonald's. The latter's popular Sausage McMuffin was recently the
subject of a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign in which the signature recipe was "stolen" by
arch rival Burger King's eponymous mascot. John Schaufelberger, Burger King's senior
vice president of global product marketing and innovation, stresses the brunch concept is
only in its testing phase but admits the company has seen the trend grow in popularity over
the years. "[This initiative] allows us to meet strong consumer demand," Schaufelberger
says. He says the BK Mimosa was a no-brainer. "The idea of Mimosas and brunch go hand
in hand, and we thought it would be a clever and unique way to enhance our morning
beverage offerings."
However, watchdog groups such as Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the
Marin Institute -- which monitors the alcohol industry -- are not as pleased.
"This normalizes to children at a young age the idea that drinking is fine to do, and
something we do everywhere," Michele Simon, the institute's research and policy director,

told Brandweek.
Will this gamble pay off? The track record for menu extensions such as this is spotty,
especially when it comes to testing out new flavors to appeal to America's insatiable
appetites.
Burgers and fries are a big business, raking in billions of dollars in global revenues by
supplying quick, cheap eats. But it's a crowded field, forcing fast-food chains on a
seemingly endless search for new markets, tastes and trends.
Whether it's going upscale, healthy, or inventing new ways to disseminate their product
("Fourthmeal," anyone?), companies such as McDonald's, Burger King and KFC are
constantly looking for that new idea that will connect with consumers and give them an
edge against their competitors.
Here are some recent, and classic, menu extension gambles. Some were massive missteps,
some flops in progress, and for others, the race isn't over.
Long John Silver's
This quick-service seafood chain became famous selling fried, battered fish and deeperfried hush puppies. Tasty, but it's hardly healthy fare. So the company decided to lighten up,
launching a suite of meals featuring grilled fish and vegetables.
One of the low-calorie offerings featured the darling of seafood restaurants -- tilapia. The
flaky, white, freshwater fish has been a trendy ingredient for years, and Long John Silver's
jumped on that ship. Long John Silver's still offers Freshside Grilles on a menu dominated
by fried chicken planks, popcorn shrimp, "crumblies" (deep-fried breading) and buttered,
battered Langostino lobster bites.
Wendy's Superbar
For about a decade, beginning in the late '80s, hot on the heels of a failed omelet-based
breakfast menu that proved too labor intensive for most franchises to maintain, Wendy's
experimented with augmenting traditional fast-food ordering lines with a self-serve buffet.
The Superbar had three sections: a salad bar, a Mexican bar with burritos and tacos, and an
Italian bar, serving pizza and garlic bread. Customers could simply load up at the
smorgasbord, which offered as many as 50 items. Ultimately, this effort was discontinued at
participating stores in 1998.
McDonald's Arch Deluxe
McDonald's has always been an aggressive innovator. Its flops are legendary: the
McLobster, the McDLT and the McPizza. But it was the Arch Deluxe, a hamburger the
chain hoped would appeal to grown-up tastes, that stands out as the company's biggest
loser.
The Arch Deluxe, released in 1996, cost an estimated $150 million to $200 million to
develop and market, according to a New York Times article about the debacle. The burger

boasted pepper bacon, Spanish onions and a blend of mustard and mayo.
Consumers rejected the Arch Deluxe soundly, especially after marketing touting it as a
burger that wasn't for "unrefined taste buds."
KFC's Grilled Chicken
KFC spent millions on television ads when the company took its biggest risk by
introducing grilled chicken. It was a fiasco from the start: The concept was wildly offbrand, confusing consumers who still assumed the "F" in KFC stood for "fried."
An Oprah Winfrey-sponsored promotion backfired when individual franchises refused to
honor it. The grilled chicken launch did nothing to slow KFC's market share slide, reported
by Ad Age to have tumbled six full percentage points since 2005 to 30 percent in 2009,
while the category grew from $14.5 billion to $16.1 billion.
The company recently returned to its unhealthy roots with the Double Down sandwich
featuring bacon and cheese between two fried chicken cutlets. The company is continuing
its considerable investment in grilled chicken, so this story's conclusion is yet to be
hatched.
Questions:
1) Why do you think it is that most attempts at menu extension fail? What about the
hamburger is so popular?
2) Do you agree with critics who argue that featuring nonalcoholic alcoholic beverages at
Burger King might make kids more likely to drink? Why?
3) Do you think this promotion will be successful? Why or why not?

Difficulty Level: Medium

#58

Abstract: This article details one of the more bizarre approaches to solving the worlds
coming energy crisis. Essentially, you use a Star Wars Death Star inspired laser to create a
miniature sun. This sun explodes instantly and the energy of its fusion reaction create
nearly infinite steam power.
Vocabulary: Harness, Fusion, Smidge, Induce, Fission

Scientists Look to Create Sun on Earth

for CNN.com

Livermore, California - Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world's
largest laser -- it's the size of three football fields -- to set off a nuclear reaction so intense
that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's formula for cooking up a sun on the
ground may sound like it's stolen from the plot of an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's no
Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time,
late this summer.
If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the
energy generated by the mini-star.
The lab's venture has doubters, to be sure. Nuclear fusion, the type of high-energy reaction
the California researchers hope to produce, has been a scientific pipe dream for at least a
half-century. It's been pitched as a miracle power source. But it hasn't yielded many results.
To make matters worse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office this month released an
audit of the lab's work that cites delays and mismanagement as reasons it's unlikely the
scientists will create a fusion reaction this year.
But researchers in Livermore, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco, say it's not a
matter of if but when their laser-saves-the-Earth experiment will be proved successful.
"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next
two years," thus proving that controlled fusion is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a
manager of the project, which is called the National Ignition Facility.
That would put the lab a step closer to "our big dream," he said, which is "to solve the
energy problems of the world."
Here is the boiled-down recipe for how the Livermore lab plans to cook up a star:

Step one: Build the largest laser in the world, preferably inside a drab-looking office
building. (To do this, you'll have to suspend all previous notions about what a laser looks
like. This one is basically a giant factory full of tubes. The laser beam, which is
concentrated light, bounces back and forth over the distance of a mile, charging up as it
goes.)
Step two: Split this humongous laser into 192 beams. Aim all of them -- firing-range style
-- at a single point that's about the size of a BB.
Step three: On that tiny target, apply a smidge of deuterium and tritium, two reactive
isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater. Surround those atoms with a gold
capsule that's smaller than a thimble.
Step four: Fire the laser!
If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than
100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres.
This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their
nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.
Voila. An itty-bitty star is born.
Miracle cure?
The fusion reaction at the heart of this recipe is the same one that fuels the sun in our solar
system and other stars.
"It's the most fundamental energy source in nature," Van Wonterghem said.
Workers at the Livermore Lab insist that the reaction isn't dangerous. Their version of
fusion is controlled, rather than explosive like in America's current arsenal of nuclear
weapons, which include a fusion reaction.
"There's no danger to the public," said Lynda Seaver, spokeswoman for the project.
"The [worst possible] mishap is, it doesn't work."
The fusion reaction does emit radioactive neutrons. But to stop those neutrons from
escaping, the Livermore lab surrounds the reaction chamber with concrete walls that are
more than 6 feet thick. Despite the fact that the reaction will "even exceed the conditions
at the center of the sun," Van Wonterghem said, the controlled fusion is expected to be
incredibly small and short-lived.

The star being cooked up in Livermore this summer is expected to die 200 trillionths of a
second after it's ignited, Van Wonterghem said.
And it will measure only 5 microns across, which is several times smaller than the width of
a human hair.
The value of this summer's experiment in laser-induced fusion will be in proving that
powerful beams of light can produce a controlled fusion reaction, Seaver said.
It will take at least another 20 years, with adequate funding, to develop a continuous fusion
reaction that could heat water, create steam and turn generators at a commercial fusion
power plant, she said.
Meanwhile, the project is behind schedule and over budget, according to government
reports.
Since 2005, when the laser-fusion experiment was isolated in a government program called
the National Ignition Campaign, the project has spent more than $2 billion, or 25 percent
more than its budget of $1.6 billion, according to the April Government Accountability
Office report.
And, in those recent years, the project has fallen a year off schedule, the GAO says, with
the expected completion date for the research now at the end of 2012.
Seaver, the National Ignition Facility spokeswoman, said the report mischaracterizes the
lab's work.
"NIF has held all its milestones. It's held to its budget. The experiments are going just fine
at NIF," she said. "They're going the way we thought they would."
Construction on the Livermore laser facility began in 1997, but the laser technology needed
for the experiment has been 50 years in development, she said. Meanwhile, other labs are
working on fusion projects, too. ITER, a project in France, for example, aims to use
magnets and plasma, instead of lasers, to test nuclear fusion.
Research continues in non-fusion areas of nuclear power, as well.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced in February that he is funding research in a
modified and more sustainable version of nuclear fission, the type of reaction that powers
the world's existing nuclear reactors.
Fission involves splitting large, heavy atoms. Fusion, the star-making reaction being tried in
Livermore, works the opposite way, sealing the nuclei of smaller atoms together. The
Livermore lab says it could get its fuel -- the two isotopes of hydrogen -- from seawater.

The process for extracting large amounts of deuterium and tritium from water has not been
perfected, but the lab says the supply of these materials is nearly limitless.
"One gallon of seawater would provide the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline;
fuel from 50 cups of water contains the energy equivalent of two tons of coal," the
Livermore project's website says.
Unlike burning coal and natural gas, nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases.
Critics of Livermore's fusion research say it's too expensive and too theoretical.
The world needs to employ existing fixes for climate change rather than looking for a
technological silver bullet that will prove to be too expensive for commercial energy
production anyway, said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist and nuclear physicist at the
Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. If you want to do [research
and development] to alleviate climate change, you have to have technologies that can be
brought online soon," he said. "We don't have much time to turn this around."
Even if the facility's lasers do create a fusion reaction, the lab is still a long way from
becoming a commercial power plant, he said.
"It's not going to be competitive," he said. "It's crazy to go down that road. It's kind of fun
and interesting -- graduate student projects designing these concepts. But they waste a lot of
money in thinking [nuclear fusion] is going to contribute to society."
Nevertheless, the scientists in Livermore remain optimistic.
Van Wonterghem holds out hope for an energy miracle from fusion and has invested his
entire career in the idea. Seaver believes that what's happening at the lab is historic.
"This is something you're going to tell your grandchildren about," the spokeswoman said on
a recent tour of the lab. "You were here when they were about to get fusion ignition.
"It's like standing on the hill watching the Wright brothers' plane go by."
Questions:
1) This article repeatedly mentions that this idea is possible but unrealistic. Is it worth our
money to invest in these types of technology? Why or why not?
2) Do you think that this technology is too dangerous to use? Why or why not? Do you trust
the assurances of the head engineer?
3) Do you think that this project is worthy of public investment? What sort of standards do
you think a project must have in order to be funded by public money?

Difficulty Level: Medium/Hard

# 59

Abstract: The use of remote controlled attack aircraft in the Middle East has allowed for
incredibly precise military targeting. However, these are a terrifying and impersonal
weapon which could cause incredible damage if not used judiciously,. This article examines
current legal debates concerning the use of these potent weapons.
Vocabulary: Drone, Militant, Constitutes, Contractor, Empirical, Assert, Prohibit,
Contemplate, Dynamic, Implicit, Articulate, Brazen

Legality of Drone Attacks Investigated

for CNN.com

WASHINGTON Congress delved Wednesday into the politically explosive issue of

unmanned drone attacks, questioning the legality of operations increasingly used to combat
al Qaeda and Taliban militants in countries such as Pakistan.
In the eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, unmanned aircraft - or drones - attacked
militant targets 45 times.
Since President Barack Obama took office, the numbers have risen sharply: 51 last year and
29 so far this year.
Most attacks have targeted suspected militant hideouts in Pakistan. While the United States
is the only country in the region known to have the ability to launch missiles from drones which are controlled remotely - U.S. officials normally do not comment on suspected drone
strikes.
Based on a CNN count, all of the 29 drone strikes this year have hit locations in North
Waziristan and South Waziristan, along the 1,500-mile porous border that Pakistan shares
with Afghanistan.
Several top U.S. law professors debated the legality of the attacks in a hearing before the
House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, the second such hearing
held by the subcommittee within the past two months.
"The United States is committed to following international legal standards," said Rep. John
Tierney, D-Massachusetts, the subcommittee's chairman. "Our interpretation of how these
standards apply to the use of unmanned weapons systems will set an example for other
nations to follow."
The four legal scholars invited to testify, however, offered sharply contrasting views of
what constitutes an acceptable legal standard. The biggest controversy appeared to

surround the legality of strikes conducted by CIA operatives, as opposed to the U.S.
military.
"Only a combatant - a lawful combatant - may carry out the use of killing with combat
drones," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor from the University of Notre Dame law
school.
"The CIA and civilian contractors have no right to do so. They do not wear uniforms, and
they are not in the chain of command. And most importantly they are not trained in the law
of armed conflict."
O'Connell also claimed that "we know from empirical data ... that the use of major military
force in counterterrorism operations has been counterproductive." The U.S. government,
she asserted, should only use force "when we can accomplish more good than harm, and
that is not the case with the use of drones in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia."
David Glazier, a professor from Loyola law school in Los Angeles, California, defended the
drone attacks on the grounds that there is "no dispute that we are in an armed conflict with
al Qaeda and with the Taliban." That fact "allows the United States to call upon the full
scope of authority which is provided by the law of war."
Glazier said there is "nothing within the law of war that prohibits the use of drones. In fact,
the ability of the drones to engage in a higher level of precision and to discriminate more
carefully between military and civilian targets than has existed in the past actually suggests
that they're preferable to many older weapons."
He conceded, however, that there are legitimate concerns over the CIA's use of drones. CIA
personnel are "clearly not lawful combatants (and) if you are not a privileged combatant,
you simply don't have immunity from domestic law for participating in hostilities."
Glazier warned that "any CIA personnel who participate in this armed conflict run the risk
of being prosecuted under the national laws of the places where (the combat actions) take
place." CIA personnel, he said, could be guilty of war crimes.
William Banks, the founding director of Syracuse University's Institute for National
Security and Counterterrorism, said the U.S. government has engaged in targeted killings of
individual combatants dating at least back to a 1916 border war with Mexican bandits.
Banks said the authors of the 1947 National Security Act, which traditionally gives the CIA
much of its legal authority, likely didn't contemplate the targeted killings tied to drone
attacks. But the statute, he said, was "designed as dynamic authority to be shaped by
practice and by necessity."
"The intelligence laws permit the president broad discretion to utilize the nation's

intelligence agencies to carry out national security operations, implicitly including targeted
killing," he said. U.S. laws "supply adequate - albeit not well articulated or understood legal authority for these drone strikes."
Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, could not say definitively prior to
the hearing why U.S. drone attacks have increased so significantly during the Obama
administration. He cited a revenge factor, however, saying that U.S. forces are upset and
want retribution for the brazen bombing of a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan that killed
seven Americans on December 30.
"The people who died in this suicide attack were involved in targeting people on the other
side of the border," he said earlier this year.
Long War Journal, an online publication that charts data for U.S. airstrikes against al Qaeda
and the Taliban in Pakistan, says the air campaign "remains the cornerstone of the effort to
root out and decapitate the senior leadership of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other allied terror
groups, and to disrupt both al Qaeda's global and local operations in Afghanistan and
Pakistan."
Such attacks, which have taken a civilian toll in many cases, have frequently caused tension
between Pakistan and the United States.
Questions:
1) The biggest question: How many civilian casualties is considered okay as part of a
drone offensive? How much does it depend on context? Pick a number and a reason.
2) Should Pakistani protests have an influence on US drone use policy? Why or why not?
3) Who should be allowed to call for drone strikes? How accurate do you think the
targeting information must be to justify the use of a drone?

Difficulty Level: Very Hard

#60
Abstract: The most recent round of abuse scandals involving Catholic priests - most
notably the Pope and several Cardinals, has rocked the very foundations of the Western
Catholic Church. This is accelerating a population shift in terms of who call themselves
Catholic away from Europe and into Africa and Latin America. This article examines the
consequences of this shift.
Vocabulary: Assail, Litigation, Flourish, Evangelism, Demographic, Secular, Negligence,
Antagonistic, Hierarchy, Rhetoric, Expose, Pervasive, Burgeon, Cleric

Catholocism Gone South

by Phillip Jenkins for The New Republic

These are obviously dark days for the Roman Catholic Church. For over a decade, the U.S.
church has been assailed by abuse charges and devastated by the resulting litigation. The
Vatican used to console itself with the belief that this was a peculiarly American crisis, but,
this year, similar abuse cases have arisen all over Europemost agonizingly in Ireland, one
of the world's most faithfully Catholic countries. Across the continent, bishops are facing
demands to resign, while critics are urging Pope Benedict himself to consider standing
down. Some media commentators are even asking if the Church can survive the crisis.
But most evidence suggests that the Church will endure and even enjoy a historic boom-just not in places it has flourished historically. For years, its core has been migrating away
from Europe, heading southward into Africa and Latin America. Some Church observers
have remarked that the Vatican is now in the wrong location: Its 2,000 miles too far north
of its emerging homelands. The recent abuse scandals will accelerate this radical shift,
discrediting older European elites and opening the door to new generations of leaders who
are more attuned to the needs and concerns of believers in the southern hemisphere.
Literally, the Catholic world will turn fully upside down.
For centuries, the Catholic Church was unquestionably strongest in Europe. In 1900, the
continent accounted for perhaps two-thirds of the Church's nearly 270 million members.
Latin America had another 70 million believers, while Africa barely appeared on the map,
with about two million followers. As Anglo-French sage Hilaire Belloc proclaimed in 1920,
The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.
Since then, and especially since the 1960s, Catholicism has been moving south. Partly, this
is due to evangelism sponsored by the Church and its religious orders; new conversions,
for instance, have surged in Africa. But shifting demographics have also played its part:
While populations have increased modestly in Europe, they have boomed across the global
southand Catholic numbers have grown apace. Today, the world has 900 million more
Catholics than it did in 1900, but only 100 hundred million of those new additions are
Europeans.

In part, European Catholicism has been declining because of a general trend toward
secularization and religious indifference. Recent survey evidence, for instance, shows only
half of the French claiming to belong to the Churchdown from about 80 percent two
decades ago. There has also been a massive decline in practice of the faith. Particularly in
Western Europe, millions of Catholics are members of the Church only in the technical
sense of having been baptized; they never darken the door of a church, and don't support
official Church policies on issues of morality or sexuality. At the turn of the millennium,
only around 18 percent of Catholics in Spain and 12 percent in France reported attending
weekly mass; the figures for Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands ran between 10 percent
and 15 percent.
Latin America, in contrast, is now by far the world's most Catholic region. Rapid
population growth over the past century has boosted the official number of believers to
around 460 million, and this number should rise to 600 million within two decades
comprising some 45 percent of the Churchs worldwide membership. Vatican statistics
show Brazil as the worlds largest Catholic country, with 160 million believers, or around
85 percent of the population. (More reliable estimates suggest that 65 percent of Brazilians
are Catholic, because of the rise of fervent Pentecostal churches. Still, the number of
Catholics is huge.)
Africa, meanwhile, is the scene of a religious revolution. During the twentieth century,
Christian numbers boomed across the continent, and Catholics did particularly well. In
2000, Africa had 130 million Catholics, which, as Vatican observer John Allen, Jr. points
out in his book The Future Church, represented a growth rate over the century of 6,700
percent. By 2025, there should be at least 220 million African Catholics, making up around
one-sixth of the Church's worldwide membership. (I say at least because the African
Church is likely under-counting its followers as it lacks the institutional framework to track
what's happening on the ground. According to the Gallup World Poll, the number of
Africans claiming to be Catholic is already pushing 200 million, which is more than 20
percent larger than any official Church figure.)
By 2050, according to projections, Africa will have far more Catholics than Europe. Indeed,
projections show that, by the half-century mark, Europe will account for perhaps 15 percent
of Catholicsand many of those will be immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
So, while the Catholic Church will remain a majorlikely still the majorplayer in the
worlds spiritual economy, it will be a very different entity. And its transformation will only
be hastened by the current abuse crisis.
Previous abuse scandals, such as those in the United States in the early 2000s, had no
obvious effect on Catholic adherence in Europe. Yet the recent allegations, which hit
Germany, Ireland, Belgium and other European countries, will resonate deeply on the
continent, especially since charges of official negligence seem to reach to the pope himself.
The impact will be particularly strong in Western Europe, with its powerful media that are

increasingly antagonistic toward the Catholic hierarchy and even the Church itself.
We cant gauge precisely what impact the crisis will have on the Church's European
membershipthough, according to the Forsa Institute, perhaps one-fourth of German
Catholics are considering leaving the Church. At a minimum, the crisis will likely alienate
already lukewarm Catholics and marginalize the minority of devoted believers. It will also
severely diminish Church finances, particularly in countries where citizens opt to devote a
portion of their taxes to religious and charitable causes: Expect a heavy diversion of funds
away from Catholic causes.
Media coverage of the abuse and the Vatican's mangled response will also provide ample
ammunition for those who want to keep religion out of the political realm. European
opponents of the Church will find it much easier to silence the Vatican's voice in future
legislation concerning issues like abortion, gay marriage and adoption, or reproductive
technologies. In any of these controversies, the rhetorical conflict is easy to predict: When
Church leaders cite the defense of children and their rights as their reason for backing or
opposing policies, secularist critics will immediately point out that bishops and cardinals
haven't always been so concerned with children's welfare. It will be a tough criticism to
counter.
But the effects of the abuse crisis will be far smaller in Africa and Latin America, where
religious loyalties are intimately connected with complex social and familial networks.
(African Catholicism, for example, is still tied up with loyalty to family, region and
ethnicity, a sacred geography and historymuch like the system that existed in Europe in
bygone centuries.) The secular media also dont enjoy the same pervasive presence in
Africa and Latin America that it does in Europe, and the Church has its own powerful
media voices that will defend the faith. If abuse revelations do drive some Catholics away
from the Churchand perhaps to rival faithsthen those people were probably on the
verge of defecting anyway. The exposs will just have provided a final push.
Indeed, as the crisis quickens the wane of Europe's Catholic influence, it will help solidify
the Church's new roots in the south. Membership there will continue to burgeon, and
Church's hierarchy will increasingly be paved with southern clerics. When the time comes
to choose someone to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, the cardinals, acutely aware of the
effects of the abuse crisis, will probably consider more innovative international candidates,
untainted by European connections. A Latin American pope would be a likely choice. Yet,
in speculating what the Church might look like in 2050, John Allen imagines an African
pope who would represent the interests of his home continent on the world stage. It is very
possible that the abuse crisis will only push this scenario closer to the present day; the next
time the cardinals must choose a new Vatican leader, they may ask, why not an African?
By that point, perhaps, some keen theorist may be boasting, Africa is the Faith." And who
would dare question the statement?

Questions:
1) Why might the recent sex abuse scandals be more offensive to European Catholics than
other Catholics?
2) Every single Pope in the long history of the Catholic Church has been European. How do
you think electing a minority Pope might shake the foundations of the Church? Do you
think it would be a positive or negative development?
3) How do you think that the main interests and concerns of the Catholic Church might
change as part of its southern migration? Name three changes.