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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Secular Media Reporting on Poor RCC Governance by Pope Francis

https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-rome-vatican-city-germany-catholics-liberal-revolution/

So, having access to sources of information not available to the general public, none of this really comes as a revelation, and there's a bunch of biased narration and low level mistakes, but the reporting is broadly accurate. Or rather, delivers big picture accuracy while distorting the true stories of lots of specific incidents to reflect the author's liberal biases. Like here:

Last year, for example, a landmark declaration allowing clerical blessings for same-sex couples was diluted after a fiasco involving religious musings on the nature of orgasms.

What they're referring to is Pope Francis' #2 being revealed to have authored erotic poetry(and a book on kissing entitled "Heal me with your Mouth") and trying to defend himself by calling it theology. It was a scandal but didn't have much to do with the backlash to gay blessings, which was the global south against progressives. African bishops declared their opposition to Fiducia Supplicans, in partnership with the eastern rites, as a group and got concessions.

What the article gets right, I think, is doing a pretty good job of summarizing the pope's inability to hold his own coalition together, and accurately noting that this occurs in an environment where most senior churchmen are laser-focused on the possibility of a conclave very soon. It also begins to convey his immense personal unpopularity with Vatican insiders; even cardinal Parolin is campaigning for the conclave by emphasizing their dissimilarities. I like this anecdote:

“Read the document[Fiducia Supplicans],” said a Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak openly about a pope he described as vindictive toward critics. “It says: well, obviously you cannot bless a homosexual relationship, because from a Catholic point of view, it’s sinful. However, we will invent a new form of blessing. It’s not a sacramental blessing, it’s a ‘fracramental flessing.’ It looks almost like a blessing, and if you run sideways, and do it in under ten seconds, and keep it totally spontaneous…”

The chief problem, the official added, is that the pontiff has an overriding need to do everything his way, often at the expense of ideological coherence. “Most of his energy goes into hiding what he thinks, hiding who he is, and hiding what he’s going to do, in an almost neurotic way,” the official complained. “He keeps what he wants to do even from himself as long as possible, in order to be totally unexpected in what he does.”

This is not the way to win friends and influence people in an oligarchy of elderly true-believing academics.

It doesn’t help that, in all likelihood, the Pope is not long for this world. At 87 and with only one intact lung, he struggles to breathe, suffers bouts of pneumonia, and is perennially in and out of hospital. Every public cough generates macabre headlines. Meanwhile, he has largely failed to appoint enough allies to the College of Cardinals to guarantee a like-minded successor, and liberals wonder whether he will leave any progressive legacy at all.

This is perhaps understating things; many of the cardinals appointed as Francis allies turned on him over something or other, often personal falling outs or mismanagement driven by the tendency referenced above. Factually one of the top papabile in the next conclave, cardinal Pizzaballa, is a recent Francis appointee now campaigning among the conservatives, and the largest initial powerblock in the next conclave is likely to be backers of cardinal Erdo's promise to reign as Benedict XVII. It also understates the mood in the Vatican that pope Francis is going to die any day now.

The current synod has invariably stoked the fears of conservatives who see it as a Trojan horse for an insidious woke agenda. As if in confirmation, the synod’s own leaders have cast it as the last great hope for introducing real structural reform: “If we miss this experience, we will not be effective in our mission,” Cardinal Mario Grech, the Synod on Synodality’s secretary general, told POLITICO in his Vatican office, a portrait of the pontiff smiling down from the wall behind him. “And then the future will be bleak.”

Cardinal Hollerich, the Synod’s relator general, acknowledged that the goal of the synod is rather more aspirational — to seed a culture of inclusivity and dialogue that could, perhaps, lead to doctrinal reform, somewhere down the line. Holy See spokesperson Matteo Bruni said its core aim was to foster “greater involvement of the people of God” in pastoral and administrative Church matters, pointing to early successes in the Eastern Church. But he emphasized that it wouldn’t delve into the other big questions — the Synod on Synodality, as its name suggests, would be entirely self-referential.

I wanted to highlight these two paragraphs- the progressive faction(of which cardinal Hollerich is more or less the leader and one of the more extreme examples thereof) is dispirited, weighed down by outsized responsibility for the sex abuse scandal(s), extremely high average age, and ties to an unpopular and more moderate than commonly perceived pope. All the way up and down the totem pole, progressive Catholics are cynical, expect to lose, and increasingly too depressed to even grasp at straws.

My impression is that the Catholic Church is going through a similar pattern to Mainline Protestant churches:

(1) Declining membership in the West (immigrants aside) but still strong in the Third World.

(2) A hesistant pivot to liberalism, which alienates the conservatives in the West and alienates almost all of the Third World, without actually increasing membership in the West. More radical churches pick up the Western conservatives$ and gain strength in the Third World.

(3) Doubling down by pivoting more (but still hesitantly) towards liberalism.

Catholicism seems to be less far down this road that Mainline Protestantism, but it seems stuck. And as the experience of Evangelical Protestants has shown in the past 20 years (AFAIK) conservative Christianity is struggling in the West too, just in different ways (higher apostacy among the young).

$ This does not seem to be happening with the conservative Catholics, but from those I know, they are disengaged and fed up, and this may result in greater apostacy among their children.

Is that accurate? It would confirm my expectations of Pope Francis's papacy, but I have limited info on the Catholic Church these days, so I am worried about confirmation bias.

https://padreperegrino.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-08.21.43.png

The Catholic church is going to lurch to the right. Well over 70% of Catholic priests ordained in the US during the past 14 years are conservative or very conservative/orthodox. The leftists priests were ordained in an era in which liberalism was accepted while gay men weren't accepted in society at large. Gay men became catholic priests yet weren't that interested in social conservatism. Few young gay men are using the church as their closet today.

The catholic church has a fair number of converts from protestant churches who want something more conservative. Liberals within the catholic church are more likely to leave and go to a faster moving church. The interesting clash is going to be between cultural catholics who are liberals at heart and converts to catholicism who aren't actually into the whole Jesus thing but watch Nick Fuentes and are purity signally their basedness.

The Catholic church is going to lurch to the right. Well over 70% of Catholic priests ordained in the US during the past 14 years are conservative or very conservative/orthodox.

Couldn't a left-leaning pope prevent such a rightward "lurch"? Maybe by such means as, for example, picking the more notable of the "very conservative/orthodox" priests and having them defrocked and excommunicated from the church pour encourager les autres?

In the short term absolutely. The average age of ordination is 33 years old which means that for priests below the age of 47 social conservatism is the norm. The boomer liberals will continue to hold the high offices but these really liberal age groups are now well into their 60s. In 20 years the super conservative generations will be pusing 70 while the liberals will be dead. The next two decades are going to be tumultuous within the church.

for priests below the age of 47 social conservatism is the norm.

The norm, but not universal. There've got to be at least some liberal priests among the younger generation. So then, just kick out enough of the young conservatives out of the Catholic church so that those liberals become the majority of those left.

Some, yes. But you have to identify them from the careerists who will mirror the current pope's opinions (cf. president choosing a judge to nominate). This was a problem the previous popes faced with their appointments.

And with the dire shortage of priests, kicking anyone out is something a bishop has to be very careful about. You can't just kick out everyone who prays the rosary, because then you'd have to shut down almost every parish in the diocese. Closing or merging parishes massively upsets people.

For example, many bishops have slow-walked suppressing the TLM, not because they're fans of it, but because they don't want to piss off even a small number of people in their diocese. Closing even a single parish is a much bigger headache.

You can't just kick out everyone who prays the rosary, because then you'd have to shut down almost every parish in the diocese.

And why is that a problem?

Closing or merging parishes massively upsets people.

So what? Let them be upset. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. They can suck it up, or they can choose to leave the One True Church, and thereby condemn themselves to eternal hellfire.

For several reasons. Bishops are not progressive robots dealing with constant complaints is not enjoyable. All the people complaining won't be sending in any checks. And finally what makes you think progressive's believe in Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus or even hell for that matter.

Bishops have been importing priests from Africa/India/Etc. because of the shortage for a while now and those guys are not progressives. Bishops are already revealed they prefer keeping the parishes open over progressive ideological purity.

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