Not being a Vatican watcher, I was more attentive to the first signs of spring here in France and took the boat out to sea for the first time this year. It was uneventful. As always at the beginning of a season, I wondered whether I had forgotten how to sail, but the reflexes kicked in like riding a bicycle.

I sailed out of the port of Saint Valéry en Caux, which has a very narrow harbour entrance. There was an east wind, so I had to use my paddle to get out of the port, and then my sails filled as I reached the sea. It was a different matter coming back in, because the wind had veered to the south-east and was blowing directly out of the port. I tried a number of solutions, but each cancelled each other out. I approached the port wall on a reach and hoped I would get past the pillar with a bit of paddling and then tack inside the harbour. Too narrow. I was facing the wind and I got nowhere paddling. As luck would have it, a man came along in a small motor boat setting out for a quiet afternoon’s fishing. He kindly towed me into the port, and then I was able to paddle the last few feet to the slipway I used to launch the boat. Lesson from experience: don’t use Saint Valéry en Caux with a south-east or north-west wind without an engine. Le Havre is a lot easier, as it is wider and tacking is possible to cross the port entrance at an angle – if there are no ships… I generally use a beach for launching and landing, but you have to watch the waves.

That’s for the sailing. I ignore the Roman horse fair going on at the moment, the latest scandals involving a Scottish cardinal (the problem being hypocrisy rather than homosexuality in itself) – see Who Knew? – and the media calling for gay marriage, women priests and more of the same. Sometimes you get a more or less intelligent but of analysis, and that I will discuss – because the fortunes of the Roman Catholic Church will effect the rest of us in terms of the credibility of Christianity. Human nature is wont to throw babies out with bathwater!

The progressive anti-conservatives tend to be quite reactive in digging out information and analysis. I point out the Catholica Forum as an example, but of course do not endorse the position of those people in their anti-intégrisme – Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Scylla  and Charybdis, call it what you will. But, they are finding the articles:

The John Cornwell who called Pius XII Hitler’s Pope has written this piece of fishwrap. There is probably no smoke without fire, so exercise your critical faculties. The conservative Cardinal Pell hopes for a Pope who can govern. “I think we need somebody who is a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation and take the Church forward“. I don’t know. Why should new Pope modernise Church just to placate liberals? It’s not a bad article, but it centres more on the pro-life and abortion question rather than the moral condition of the clergy. There will be a lot of pressure from the media to make the RC Church go the way of the Anglican Communion into a new form of Erastianism (the Church as the “spiritual arm” of the secular state).

A badly disguised false bishop tried to get into the general congregation of Cardinals. This story is strange, since the man was not disguised as a cardinal but as a bishop. I have the impression that the intention was not to have the Cardinals believe he was a bishop, but to deliver a protest message. If you really want to masquerade as a cardinal, you need to spend a lot of money at Gammarelli’s and look the part! There are giveaways for any of us who have been to seminary. You don’t wear the fascia like a belt around the waist but much higher up. My old seminary rector, ordained for Cardinal Siri’s archdiocese, reckoned on the fourth button from the top – at least between the chest and the tummy. The rest of this Daily Mail article is entertaining, but I have better things to do.

With Benedict XVI having abdicated, a new Pope would be asked to stay on until he dies. Old news, really and nothing new. Was the Pope right to abdicate or not? We might know after the election of the new Pope (depending on who he will be) or in a few years time in retrospect. One will find in Catholica a lot of ideas of improving the management and organisation of the Vatican – make the buggers work. Yes, that depends on who you have got to run the bureaucracy. The Catholica progressives tend to be pessimistic about whether there ever could be a reform. And then, what kind of reform?

The French traditionalist Forum Catholique often has threads that quickly become tedious through “troll syndrome” which tends to be corrected in short order by XA, the forum moderator. On Rorate Caeli, there is an exhortation – A message to the Conclave by Pope Benedict XVI: Do not let yourselves be pushed around by the media – from the Pope Emeritus from when he was still Pope, asking the Cardinals not to give in to media pressure. Fr Zuhlsdorf is keeping a close eye on Rome. Any Cardinal with a cloud over him in relation to covering up child sex abusing priests who gets elected Pope would be blighted from the outset. The media is incredibly powerful, and modern secular states have no problem with that. www.chiesa (Sandro Magister) is a serious source of information and analysis. Whispers in the Loggia is another Vatican-watcher to keep an eye on. Damian Thompson really has it in for the British Magic Circle hierarchy. Who can blame him?

Benedict XVI is already being challenged for wanting to keep the Vatileaks report secret and only for the eyes of the next Pope – Brazilian Cardinals demand access to the Vatileaks dossier before the Conclave begins. I suppose they could get someone to blow the safe  – and then it would not be the Italian Job but the Vatican Job!

The sedevacantist fringe tends to have little more than opinion. One of the more well-known sites in this category is a real dustbin (trash can for the Americans), showing, among other things, a photo (doctored I suspect) of Benedict XVI making him look like a vampire from a Hammer horror film! Novus Ordo Watch is no better, but it does contain links to media articles beyond the limitations of their own opinions.

Prognostics are impossible. Why should everything not simply continue as it is? It is human nature to seek a break and a change. Some people relish the idea of a civil or world war – just as long as they don’t get killed in it! Why should I care, as one of my critics challenged me? After all, I am one of the 1980’s “lost generation” of seminarians who “blew our chances”. Most had the wisdom to move on and have nothing more to do with the Church. On the other hand, if it is to be business as usual, how long can it continue against the onslaught of the media and secular political correctness, not to mention the power of blogs and forums which makes bureaucratic obfuscation that much more difficult?

The only possible answer is that we’ll see. In the meantime, we can only get on with our lives. Has anyone noticed the drop in the numbers of blog posts everywhere, the paucity of comments and the general atmosphere of uncertainty and expectation?

It is also Lent, and some are making efforts…