I’m beginning to like this new blog I have discovered, at least for the time being and without having corresponded with this fellow. He wrote About that deadline… yesterday.
Having known the Society of St Pius X in France and elsewhere (in the early 1980’s), I can hardly imagine the future direction of the Roman Catholic Church being for anathematising Vatican II, electing Bishop Fellay to become Pope Pius XIII and getting the European Union to establish Catholicism as the official religion with a Gestapo-style secret police to ensure compliance.
African and other non-European candidates for the Papacy will certainly be touted over the next few weeks as the conclave progresses. I have no desire to speculate and I don’t want to know about the contending candidates or what the secular journalists think about them. It’s all so unhealthy!
But I can give credence to the idea that one way out of the conservative / progressive dialectics would be to re-centre the Church outside Europe. It’s no use speculating on the effect of that, except that such a direction of the Church would involve very strict morals and complete insensitivity to European culture and art. African liturgy is very exuberant, too much so for introverted or contemplative Europeans. I suppose the best way of getting an idea of all that would be to know something about churches in Africa. This one is from Zambia:
One thing is for sure, an African Church taking a minimal interest in what’s left in Europe would be better than either a two-bit SSPX dictatorship or a white-suited chief executive officer wearing Gucci sunglasses in partnership with Ms Jefferts Schori and ever-increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy.
Whatever… We’ll see. It’s no use being more than distantly concerned. I think we can take it that the days of the Pope being interested in the classical western liturgy are over.
The Blue Flower 
Thank you very much – I am very happy you’re enjoying my blog thus far. I’ve had yous listed on my page for a while now. I always enjoy your perspective. I particularly like two posts you wrote a while ago: one on Christian anarchism and other on….Christian esotericism, I believe.
Africa, it seems to me, really is an unknown when it comes to Catholicism. Progressives are typically quick to provide footage like the one you linked to – in fact, I think I know the person who originally filmed that material. (If I’m thinking of the right individual, I had a few polite disagreements with him regarding all things liturgical over red wine.) Yet, my conversations with African priests over the last decade have given me the impression that things are bit more complicated. For instance, I’ve had several Nigerian priests insist that it is common for the people to demand an other funeral liturgy if the Mass and internment rites of the first were not performed in Latin. Otherwise, the regular liturgy is usually in the vernacular and when Latin is used, it is often set to African tribal chant. I don’t know how widespread this is, but it is an intriguing idea.
To J.V.
I’d enjoy your blog posts more if you took the trouble to proofread them.
I puzzled for quite a while over the concluding sentence of your ‘About that deadline post . . .”:
>>Though I’ve resigned myself to accepting that such a possibility is slime at best.<<
Somewhere a little earlier I noticed a reference to 'taking stalk'. Is Dragon Dictate letting you down?
CG, it seems to me that you puzzled for too long of a time. 😉 Although, you could have contacted me about my blog via email – I do list on there afterall.
Before you mention it, typing this from an iPhone.
JV, also enjoy your site as well! The minor typos do not bother me at all.
Thank you, Dale.