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. It is always said, whether it is remotely true or not.
The Catholic Church is having an election, as just about everyone on the planet knows. Even in Mecca, no doubt. Certainly in Beijing, where the Chinese Communist Party gets to pick our bishops, thanks to the late Pope Francis and his sidekick, the slightly earlier late Uncle Ted McCarrick.
The Catholic election isn’t universal suffrage, unfortunately. The next pope is chosen by 135 voting Cardinals. 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 whipround to get these two sick cardinals on a private jet to Rome.
Most of the current cardinals were picked by Pope Francis.
Given that the Catholic Church is the Church created by Christ, and hence is 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. However, there is certainly an argument that this one is especially important.
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) a 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.
The great German prelate Gerhard Muller has suggested that the Church will likely split in two if another Francis is elected.
His warning was a between-the-lines reflection on the late Pope. He used words such as ‘heretic’, disdaining such secular political cliches as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. These are, at best, useful approximations which illuminate 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 that to elect one Francis might be regarded as misfortune; electing two looks like carelessness. (I have no idea whether he 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’s House of Cards.
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 much 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).
There are three prominent cardinals who 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 from Guinea, American 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, 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 (who runs the YouTube channel 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. This will make for a very different conclave. It might, perversely, reduce the groupthink of St Gallen era politicking. And reduce the chances of this conclave, and life, imitating art. We shall see.
We can only hope that the conclave cardinal electors don’t buy the crock of rubbish they are being sold by the rabidly anti-Catholic culture to which at least some of them appear to be wedded.
The conclave to elect the new pope starts on May 7 the Vatican has announced
