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Notes -
In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
Seems simple enough right?
Whoops.
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
John Paul II himself saw Cardinals in excess of the number. It wasn't a proclamation of God ordaining there be only 120 Cardinals, it was a matter of bureaucratic efficiency to "establish fitting norms to regulate the orderly election of their Successor." Sola Church has libraries of debate, and I would need to know your exact issues with Vatican II, but for the last I can at least point to—
Preterism.
"Cardinal" and "cardinal elector" are two distinct concepts. Having more than 120 cardinals in existance does not violate the document. Having more than 120 cardinals vote in a conclave does.
Regarding preterism, from Matthew 24:
This flat out didn't happen in history. And before you say that this is all supposed to be allegorical, 1 Thessalonians 4:
Paul sure seems to think that Christ coming in the clouds from heaven means the ressurection of the body.
Yes, and again, it violates bureaucratic decree, not divine proscription.
Partial Preterism, which is not considered incongruous with orthodoxy, holds much of the prophesies of Revelation as being fulfilled in 70 AD. The destruction of Jerusalem, Nero as the Antichrist, and the Romans as the tool for God's judgment on Israel as the Great Tribulation. It does not hold the Second Coming, the bodily resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment as having occurred.
That said, 29 is metaphorical, it uses the same language found throughout the Tanakh where what is being referred to is not the literal sun, moon and stars, but God's judgment on the nations of man. Invoking the Tanakh continues with 30, as God is repeatedly described as arriving upon a cloud to enact his judgment. And also, Paul was writing and died before 70 AD. He did condemn those, in his time, who claimed the prophecies had been fulfilled, but he did so while warning in his epistles of the imminence of the Second Coming.
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