ABSTRACT
The Italians, who constituted about half of the fifty-seven European cardinals, expected that the 455-year-old tradition continue, and the next pope be Italian. Others claimed the time had arrived to smash this lock on the papacy, as non-Italian names were seriously pondered. The challenge of the papacy proved a heavy burden for John Paul I. John Paul II showed himself no more inclined to tolerate deviations from the right than from the left. Thus Marcel Lefebvre, the seventy-year-old archbishop who continued to question the changes introduced by the second Vatican council, while challenging the authority of the pope, was summoned to Rome. In the autumn of 1994, the pope appointed thirty new cardinals. In keeping with his vision of a universal church, these hailed from twenty-four countries, including two from the United States: William Henry Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore, and Adam Joseph Maida, the archbishop of Detroit.
