Are you tracking the papal conclave like yours truly, Save Jerseyans?
This may help you get into the proper spirit:
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1. Only one sitting pope has ever visited New Jersey…
Now a saint, the then-incumbent supreme pontiff and legendary cold warrior John Paul II visited the Garden State in October 1995. He celebrated a mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral (Newark) and another at MetLife Stadium (East Rutherford). Pope Francis didn’t come to New Jersey during his September 2015 U.S. tour despite visiting both New York City and in Philadelphia. Fun fact: the first pope to ever visit the U.S. (and the Western Hemisphere) was Paul VI, another recently-minted saint; a high school in Camden County is named in his honor.
2. New Jersey is one of the country’s most Catholic states.
As of 2014, approximately one-third (34%) of New Jerseyans identified as Catholic, approximately 3,075,959 souls. Only Rhode Island (42%) is more Catholic as a percentage of its population. The least Catholic state in America? Only 4% of Mississippi residents are Catholic.
3. New Jersey got its first Catholic governor in the Kennedy era.
One year after JFK defeated Nixon and became America’s first Catholic president, fellow Irish American Democrat Richard Joseph Hughes became New Jersey’s first Catholic governor. Hughes served two terms and left office in January 20, 1970; he later became the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Governor Murphy is allegedly Catholic who has engaged in some olympic-level sophistry concerning reconciling his radical abortion policies with Catholic teachings.
4. There’s a lot of Church infrastructure in New Jersey.
Believe it or not, despite its relatively small geographical size, New Jersey is home to one archdiocese (Newark), four regular dioceses (Camden, Trenton, Metuchen, and Paterson), and the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Passaic. Between them, there’s 651 parishes and 197 Catholic schools.
5. There’s a longshot New Jersey cardinal on the papal candidate list.
None other than Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of the Archbishop of Newark has been widely cited as a possible second-string contender for the papacy this time around. A friend of Francis, devout liberal and vocal critic of President Trump’s immigration policies, Tobin’s politics could make him the one American cardinal whom the other electors would believe is sufficiently “independent” from the Trump Administration to avoid accusations of unjust enrichment for the world’s leading superpower.
