Un panier de crabes, meaning a basket of crabs, is frequently an expression French people use when considering the Vatican. Crabs are good to eat, when they are fished out of the sea, boiled alive and eaten cold or as part of a seafood dish. They also symbolise the idea of threats, intrigues, hypocrisy, treachery and fear. Crabs can pinch you quite badly with their pincers, and they are ugly creatures, but all they do is to defend their own lives. The Latin for crab is cancer, which makes us think of the fatal disease that insidiously spreads through the body before killing it. Unlike crabs, human beings love annihilating each other or at least competing for winner takes all.

Such is the image of the Holy See of the Catholic Church for most of us on the outside, whether we are Christian believers, or whether we doubt, disbelieve or reject in vulgar terms. I keep a vigilant eye on the internet, the blogs, Facebook and the various media articles. The German paper Der Speigel came up with the article in English A Bitter Struggle for Control of the Catholic Church. It is quite a long article in four parts, and there seems to be an effort to write something intelligent for someone other than the vulgar masses. What do I think once I get through the journalistic rhetoric?

Well, the papacy is said to be cheapened, assimilated to returning the keys to a hired car or retiring from the leadership of a manufacturing company. True of false? Partially true? Was this an act of cowardice, though the same can be said of carrying on as John Paul II did to the bitter end? What is in character, and what is likely? Benedict XVI is either a cynical bureaucrat or a man with a vision that transcends the stereotyped conservative and liberal agendas. I prefer to believe the latter, but something nags me from within. As an Englishman, I was brought up to respect authorities and important men with great responsibilities, but I have faced no less in the way of disappointment than anyone else. Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, we are all ill at ease with this challenge to the credibility of all Christianity.

This Papal abdication is going to shake everything up profoundly, and there will be shifts of power. Finally, is Benedict XVI the Mikhaïl Sergueïevitch Gorbatchev of the Catholic Church, the one who oversees the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire and the handover of the spoils to the sharks of the Russian Mafia? What is going to happen once the screws are loosened and people feel they have regained their freedom? The obvious suggestion is that papal power will devolve onto the diocesan bishops, and then it’s the ordination of women after a similar kind of transition and consultation period as happened in the Anglican Communion. That’s something the secular journalists are going to lap up like cats licking the cream.

The future Pope is sure to symbolise the fundamental direction the Church will take – conservative, liberal or status quo. But, a word of warning, I read that the Church in Germany lost as many faithful from 1990 to 2011 as making up the entire largest archdiocese in that country. Would it take women clergy, as clerical as Ms Schori or similar, or LGBT campaigners, to bring back those millions of “lost souls”?

Battle for Rome? The overtones of comparing the present spiritual conflict to the climax of World War II fire the imagination. The last time a Pope abdicated, the world was very different. There is no way of predicting the consequences. This time, it looks to the outside world like an act of “revolt against tradition and the church machinery”. Perhaps, as I suggested in my earlier article, it is a matter of burning the rotten edifice down so that a new basis can be found on which to offer the real Christ’s Church to the world. Some things just cannot be saved and have to be sacrificed. In 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger complained about the “dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires”. The conservatives always used to say that the Pope of Unity always had a trick up his sleeve, but never seemed to have any. Now he seems to be serving everything up on a plate, as irrationally as that, by making the Papacy depend on the strength of its occupant. But, it could also be argued that the rules making bishops retire at 75 and cardinals ineligible for voting in conclaves are just as incoherent. Or is the Pope the only true bishop in the Church? One could argue that it would have been better to take the retirement age rules away altogether!

Then, of course, what does an ex-pope do? We know he is to have rooms in a former convent of nuns built by John Paul II and intends to read, write, play the piano and stroke cats. Yet, he is going to have a secretary. What for? I noticed this glaring contradiction, for contemplative monks don’t need secretaries! I read later in the article that Archbishop Gänswein is to continue doing this job. What job? Then there is a twist, this young photogenic archbishop is going to be serving both the Vatican and the pope emeritus! Eeeek!

There are the rumours connected with Vatileaks, but what’s new? Many of us have read David Yallop’s In God’s Name  and seen the idiotic comedy film The Pope Must Die. All this is very old hat, mixed up with anti-clerical journalistic spin, but based on inconvenient truths, always the same: money, sex and power. Has Benedict XVI just found out? I don’t think so.

We might be permitted to think that the Pope has tried to convey messages in such a way as would escape the crudeness of the secular press. If so, he has underestimated many journalists who are as intelligent, intuitive and as sensitive as he is. There was the episode of Benedict XVI laying his pallium on the tomb of Celestine V. He announced his abdication in Latin, and only one journalist got the scoop by being able to understand that language. Is he now saying to his enemies in the Vatican – All right, have it your own way!?

Why was Ratzinger elected in the first place? Now the horse-trading begins… “God has already decided”, says Vienna Archbishop Christoph Schönborn. Has God much to do with it all? We all get more cynical each time, and there are increasing numbers of cynical Roman Catholics. The Der Speigel article tells us of a new book, Le mani sul Vaticano, probably a revamped Pope must Die, that ends with the election of a Chinese Pope. Lacquered duck ching-chong-chow and flied lice… The horses are lined up and ready to go. Paddy Power has all the bets in, and the Camptown Race begins. All that hardly inspires faith or any notion that this skulduggery has anything to do with man’s salvation in Christ.

There used to be the saying Morto un papa se ne fa un altro – one goes out and another comes in, but this one is still alive, unless they add something to his soup! When the great schism comes, will there be anyone interested enough to report it to the world? Benedict XVI, Bishop Emeritus of Rome, is going to continue having enough work to need a secretary! That work has to be more than writing theological books – or I have a bridge in New York to sell you! He’s going to be but yards away from the Apostolic Palace, and I bet he will be linked up by telephone, internet, private networks – you name it. You can be sure that Archbishop Gänswein knows his stuff about computers and modern communications. Benedict XVI may be seen to be saying his breviary in silence, but nobody will ever know about him having a good chin-wag with John Paul III or whoever it’s going to be.

I mentioned about the cranky stuff from the USA saying that Paul VI was replaced by an imposter and was drugged and locked in a dungeon when the “imposter” died. I cannot imagine anything more likely to fuel a conspiracy theory than this upcoming scenario. Many will not recognise the legitimacy of the new Pope. Sedevacantism could become very mainstream! Personally, I wait and see, but I have not belonged to that Church for a good while. Even if Benedict XVI never says anything, there will be rumours at every turn of the new papacy, whether it is conservative, liberal or status quo middle-of-the-road. Shadow Pope – the words are said even if only by that old nemesis, Hans Küng.

I have myself to be careful about getting influenced by the secular left-leaning press, however cogent the message may seem. The so-called liberals are just as intolerant, just as intransigent and dogmatic as the conservatives. The Catholica Forum people may seem wise and reasonable for some things, but they’re not. Try asking them for the old liturgy and you might as well be asking to be burned at the stake! The Der Speigel article is every inch the creation of that kind of thinking. What do we get when those people get their way? ECUSA and Ms Jefferts Schori and loads of lawsuits!!!

We have got to remain independent, and that’s hard, because we have to have independent information for that. So all I can do is synthesise both sides, make a guess and an opinion – and probably find I am just as wrong as ever.

One possible future for the Church is to run it like a multinational corporation: subsidiarity at every point, rigorous procedures, the kind of thing I translate from French into English for manufacturing companies. Twentieth-century Socialism and National Socialism turned men into machines. The Church would be decentralised and submitted to market forces. Is that what we want? There won’t be any need to convert to something like that, since faith is not dependent on market forces. My own priestly ministry has no market, but I carry on for as long as I believe in it. OK, a decentralised Church, but what stops the various national churches and dioceses from fragmenting like Anglicanism and parts of the Orthodox world? Look at ECUSA. There were first the Continuing Churches and then the ACNA, and then bishops, priests and congregations asking bishops in Africa and South America for oversight. Who is going to own the buildings from the Vatican to my local village church?

Compare the Church with Versailles in 1789 or Moscow in 1989? Is any comparison possible? Fragmentation is the lot of many of our churches once there is no constraint from an inquisition or a secret police force. Is atheism an attractive alternative? Another religion? Evangelical Christianity? The alternative to the Church simply seems to be the big unknown. It looks awful to me… The pessimist sees darkness and the optimist sees a chance for a new beginning, but which one? Are we going to have a series of ECUSA clones all over the world linked by their opposition to “restoration” tendencies and the twenty-first century equivalents of the Ritualist slum priests? Would women priests and gays bring back the unchurched masses? I more than doubt it.

The question of the length of the conclave is another interesting question. The 2005 conclave was a quick rubber-stamp affair, so it appears. This one could be over in a day or stretch on for months. We may still be sedevacantists through Holy Week and well after Easter. I doubt that St Peter’s will have any problems for lack of a priest! Speculating on who will become Pope is idiotic, but there are various emerging tendencies. Just look at Anglicanism and you will see them: traditionalism / conservatism, women bishops and gays, give up Europe and give everything to the Africans or South Americans. Once they get the line sorted out, I suppose they’ll need a macho with a gun or a highly sophisticated diplomat with at least a veneer of piety.

If the future is all about getting people back to church, we haven’t to forget that absolutely everything has been tried. Will mega churches with professional standards of popular liturgical entertainment do the trick? Perhaps, in South America where millions are going to the Evangelicals. Some priests are trying this kind of thing and are very good at putting on pop concerts – but it isn’t working. The problem isn’t the style of worship or entertainment, but something much deeper, credibility. The future of the Church seems to be in Africa, but the Evangelicals are getting in there too. The Africans are very dogmatic about morals, more than the Vatican, and recommend that homosexuals should be killed! The Southern Cone Anglicans are just about the same.

Anything is possible, but something will be needed to stop the onset of fragmentation. Sede vacante begins next Thursday, yet papers will still be pushed and e-mails written from Castel Gandolfo. Many of us will not know what or whom to believe. There just seems to be no solution, at least not one we can imagine.

A miracle or something like Russia in the 1990’s…