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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Congratulations United States, you are Pope!

Edit: Sorry if that is too short but I am currently watching the livestream from Europe and am totally baffled.

Dude wasn't even a cardinal 2 years ago and is now Pope...

If this is the stuff we know of, he's got enough skeletons in the closet to be very reliable indeed.

Primer on how it works in the church for those who aren't catholic. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/mccarrick-catholic-church-how-the-lavender-mafia-works/

The few Italian catholics who I'm following on twitter are seething.

Italians seethe and cope

Gosh, somebody piped up to accuse him of mishandling sexual abuse allegations. I'm so surprised - not. There's a lot of people making a tidy living from being professional agitators about this, usually with an accompanying laundry list of "we demand zillions in payouts/also the Church must totally change every single bit of doctrine so the stuff we like isn't a sin and it becomes just like a mainline liberal Protestant denomination".

When there's real grievances, I'll listen. When it's "fifteen or so years ago, somebody said that there was something happened" not so much, because while there has been genuine horrific abuse, there has also been ambulance chasing lawyers and people looking to make hay out of it. "Oh did you know X is bad because whisper whisper?" Funny how these allegations all immediately popped up after the announcement but not in the days beforehand?

Your Italians are seething because an Italian didn't get selected.

Your Italians are seething because an Italian didn't get selected.

Said Italians were hoping for Erdo.

Unfortunately, their Erdo’s number wasn’t sufficient

This is what necropapers are for.

Italy was Erdo’s weakest point in Europe, though.

His mishandling abuse cases were known to Vatican watchers well ahead of time and probably the reason he didn’t make many lists of papabile. You’re suddenly hearing about them because he suddenly became pope.

Apparently well known to the Vatican which investigated them and found nothing there. As to "Vatican watchers", I wish my fellow conservatives would stop looking for "the smoke of Satan, he's a liberal! he'll ban the Latin Mass for good and all! he'll force us all to allow married women priests and excommunicate us and burn us at the stake!" every time anyone who is not Archbishop Lefebvre is in the news. Some of them seem to yearn to be persecuted, as though the challenges of living the faith in the modern world were not enough. No, I'm not just cosplaying the old rites as part of a miniscule element of the universal Church, I'm so important that the College of Cardinals needs to oppress me specifically by who they elect as the new pope!

Do you think I liked the sweeping changes that threw the baby out with the bathwater? Do I approve of the lack of catechesis which means the vast majority of modern Catholics are more ignorant than the unchurched of their own faith? Was I happy with everything Francis did?

No, but he was the pope. And now Leo XIV is the pope, and I am not going to waste time and energy hoping for a "ah yes, the lavender mafia, he's secretly a flaming gay being blackmailed by them to cover up abuse scandals" Real True Truth revelation to blacken his name (particularly when one of those scandals seem to be heterosexual not homosexual).

A surprisingly large percentage of the population lives within shouting distance of an elementary school. Is the Catholic Church supposed to lock people in jail?

The local prior, not the prior provincial (Prevost), accepted the request of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

I would say the stuff that happened in the Diocese of Chiclayo is stronger evidence of poor responses to sexual abuse.

Yeah. Often what happened with accused priests was that before they were officially defrocked, they were sent to live in a religious community where they could be monitored. This particular one happened to be in range of a school. Not the best choice, but choices are going to be limited about "we need to send this guy somewhere and there aren't a lot of places we can do that".

If I'm getting it right, the accused priest wasn't an Augustinian, so probably one of the secular clergy in the diocese. Doubtless the facts will come out in time, but the damage has already been done.