Election papers – how The Tablet has covered nearly two centuries of papal conclaves
The Tablet’s foreign editor Patrick Hudson receives the good news in St Peter’s Square
Patrick Hudson
The biggest challenge to an editor of a Catholic journal is the death of a pope and the election of his successor.
Frederick Lucas, the founder and editor of The Tablet, found himself faced with just such a test six years into his paper’s existence with the death, in 1846, of Pope Gregory XVI. Ever the loyal RC, Lucas described the late pontiff, one of the most illiberal of the past 500 years, as a “truly pious and amiable character”, which description must surely have come as a surprise to some who had encountered him, but Lucas hurried on.
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