Category: Bishops

(This was taken from a comment I made in an earlier thread that deserves its very own post.)
We keep hearing about how the new pope must reach “progressives,” but who are these people, and how many of them are there? The world at large is not “progressive.” Africa isn’t, nor the Middle East. India and China are not, and that’s a third of the world’s population right there. Nor is Latin America, or most of Asia.
There are pockets of “progessive” people in all those regions, but by and large, they have not signed on to the liberal-secularist project. The “progressives” that need to be pleased are thus white Western elites with college educations — which is, what, maybe one percent of the world’s population? That’s a rather narrow perspective.
I have another word for “progressive”: it’s “decadent,” a word that means “falling down” in Latin. The people who embrace this agenda are not advocating a more just and prosperous society, which are the measures of true earthly progress. The main objectives are simultaneously to remove any stigma against practically any sexual activity, and to get the state to pay for life’s necessities. This has resulted, among the “progressive” societies of Western Europe, in the declining birthrates that are dooming their own existences. It’s an unsustainable societal model, and it’s collapsing as we speak.
How is that progress, exactly?

Everybody gets to be a papal expert today, so here are my observations, worth precisely what you paid for them.
1. The choice is not a sentimental one. It does not play to the crowd, much less to the zeitgeist‘s desire for a nice, kind, “flexible” man.
2. The choice is a safe one. The cardinals all know the new pope and they know what to expect (or at least they think they do.)
3. The speed of the choice indicates that if the cardinals did not know who they wanted, they at least knew what they wanted.
3. The problems within the Church stem from a lack of orthodoxy, compounded by insufficient and often flawed leadership. Cardinal Ratzinger is intimately familiar with both shortcomings, has been dealing with them for years, and now has the power to correct them at the higher levels.
4. This does not absolve us, the laity, from correcting the flaws at our lower level. Indeed, that is our job. We should start with the lowest level of all — our own hearts.
5. Orthodox Catholics may be hoping for a Götterdämmerung of the heterodox liberals, when the internal enemies of the True Faith will be cast out into the darkness. We should instead hope for their conversion and repentence for whatever misunderstandings they have created, and for the faiths they have stifled. (I say this as someone who is infuriated every time a priest, religious, or Church employee questions Catholic teaching in public.) The Holy Father will sort things out the way he deems prudent, and we should be careful not to indulge ourselves in revenge fantasies, however psychologically satisfying they may be. “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you” (Matt. 7:2).
Let the work begun with Pope John Paul II find its consummation in the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
CORRECTION: I hope it was clear from the original text, but I was saying we should not indulge in revenge fantasies. I left out the “not” in the original.

CWN reports that Pope John Paul has chosen the Archbishop of Tours, André Vingt-Trois, to succeed Cardinal Lustiger as the archbishop of Paris. Since the archbishop’s name means “twenty-three” in French, I think he is ready to take over Cardinal Sin’s place as the prelate with the most unusual and amusing name. Ad multos annos!