National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s edition of The Editors, described how and why he found the lead-up to yesterday’s announcement of the new pope to be nerve-wracking.

“I’m a traditionalist going back to 2002,” said Dougherty. “We tend to have almost an anti-clerical strain in us and a jaundiced eye when it comes to the senior prelates of the church.” Given recent history, he said, he has “always been filled with fear and trepidation that they’ll elect a progressive that will ban the Latin Mass.”

While many others viewed the impending announcement with joy and anticipation, Dougherty said he was “sitting there tapping my foot and nervous, pacing around.” He added, “In 2005, when Ratzinger was announced and he was the only one I could have imagined being a friend of our movement, then, you know, I literally began crying tears of joy, I was so relieved,” said Dougherty. But “when Francis was elected, it was pure dread and sorrow.”

“Yesterday, I was nervous. I was worried that because it finished so quickly that it would be an operator like Parolin. It turns out to be this man. And like I said, I’m cautiously cautious.”

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