by PAUL COLLITS – IT IS said in most election campaigns that this election is “the most important in … [add your own number of years]”. A quarter of a century is a popular one – whether it’s remotely true or not.
Well, the Catholic Church is having an election, as just about everyone on the planet knows. Even in Mecca, no doubt.
- The Church will likely split in two if another Francis is elected in a few weeks.
- To elect one Francis might be regarded as misfortune.
- Electing two is carelessness.
Certainly, they know in Beijing where the Chinese Communist Party gets to pick our bishops, thanks to the late Pope Francis and his sidekick, the late Uncle Ted McCarrick.
Just imagine if the possibly two-term and now possibly born-again Catholic, Beijing-adjacent Albo got to pick local Australian bishops.
SUFFRAGE
The Catholic election isn’t universal suffrage, unfortunately. The next pope is chosen by 135 voting Cardinals.
Cardinals are picked by the incumbent pope. Actually, it is now 133, as two (conservative) Cardinals have called in sick.
The Trad American podcaster Taylor Marshall has suggested that we do a GoFundMe whip around to get these two sick cardinals on a private jet to Rome.
Most of the current cardinals have been picked by Pope Francis.
Given that the Catholic Church is the Church created by Christ, and hence a sacred institution not merely overseen by earthlings, it might be argued that every papal election is equally important. There is sacred cargo in play.
There is never a greater or worse time for the Barque of Peter to be safeguarded. It always needs safeguarding. There is certainly an argument, however, that this one is especially important.
For unlike in the secular realm, where the UniParty rules whichever “Party” is in power, with a split Church, the differences matter.
Every candidate thinks he will be guarding the Barque of Peter.
But when post-modernism has infected the Church on earth – think Pope Paul VI’s “smoke of Satan” – candidates with barely (it seems) the most basic understanding of God’s will in relation to the direction of His Church probably think that they are entitled to the keys to the Kingdom. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?
The great German prelate – no, that isn’t an oxymoron – Gerhard Muller, has suggested that the Church will likely split in two if another Francis is elected in a few weeks.
His warning was a between-the-lines reflection on the late pope. He used words like “heretic”, disdaining secular political clichés like “conservative” and “liberal”. These are, at best, useful approximations which illuminate a little and hide much.
Muller’s warning is timely, and reflects the late George Pell’s anonymous “demos” critique of the gravely flawed pontificate of the Argentinian pope.
Muller seems to be saying, to elect one Francis might be regarded as misfortune. Electing two looks like carelessness. I have no idea whether Cardinal Muller has read Oscar Wilde.
Cardinal Muller also warned the cardinal-electors not to behave as characters in the recent, Edward Berger directed film, Conclave. Think Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards.
DEAL-MAKING
This conclave is real, not fictional. Muller obviously has a less-than-favourable view of the film version of a papal election.
He warns against back-room deal-making and politicking.
In your dreams, Cardinal Muller. I am afraid that all-too-human cardinal-electors are likely to engage in just that.
See under the St Gallen mafia that got Pope Bergoglio over the line in 2013 (and almost in 2005). Cardinal Muller’s reference was a normative one. One of hope.
There are three prominent cardinals that might, in normal times, be seen as “papabile”.
This time around, not so much.
These three Francis-becalmed prelates are known to be orthodox (aka Catholic), sane and capable of restoring “holiness” and Christocentricity to the office of pope. They are Robert Sarah, Raymond Burke and the aforementioned Gerhard Muller.
I said normal times. These are not normal times. These are post-Francis times. A bit like post-COVID times in the secular realm.
Of the three, only Sarah, a black African prelate, is considered vaguely papabile. In woke times, wouldn’t the first black pope be a thing? Nope.
Sarah would be considered, in woke secular terms, an Uncle Tom black candidate. He would certainly be considered thus by the Francis-canonising legacy media.
There is one intrepid, Irish-Canadian Catholic blogger, Robert Nugent (Decrevi Determined to be Catholic), who, in the spirit of synodality so beloved of the previous regime, has raised a petition at change.org to lobby for the election of Sarah.
He does look good in white, I admit. It is early days, but it will most likely go nowhere, alas.
As Cardinal Pell noted, these cardinals do not know one another. Francis, like Joe Biden (bless him), wasn’t big on cabinet meetings. Just appointments.
GROUPTHINK
This will make for a very different conclave. It might, perversely, actually reduce the groupthink of St Gallen-era politicking. And reduce the chances of this conclave, and life, imitating art. We shall see.
Tony Abbott thinks (perhaps tongue in cheek) that Albo’s reported reversion to his Catholic roots might be a papal miracle.
No, I don’t think we are there yet. Perhaps this is Albo’s contribution to the emerging Francis-for-sainthood movement that we can see across the broad progressivist movement.
It is a reverse of “making heaven on earth” (per Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics).
This is making heaven reflect our own current ideological obsessions. Open borders, mass immigration, climate emergency, COVID hysteria, woke politics, globalism and the rest.
Let’s hope that the conclave cardinal electors don’t buy the croc of crap they are being sold by the rabidly anti-Catholic culture to which at least some of them appear to be so wedded.PC
