I offered my Mass today for the Cardinals going into Conclave in Rome this afternoon. Yes, it does matter to those of us who are “outside” because the way the Roman Catholic Church fares will affect all Christian communities.
I have been reading the articles – and the Robert Moynihan articles sent around by Dr William Tighe. There is some good and noble thinking going on, but we still remain is suspense and anxiety.
In the end of the day, it is not how a Church is governed that matters – with the cat o’ nine tails, keelhauling and fulminating excommunications all round or gentle theological reasoning, by a Pope or college of bishops, by episcopal conferences and bureaucracy, by parish councils. If authority is about the common good, great. If it is for career-building, cronyism and self-interest – then they have no business blaming secularism for people leaving the Church!
What does matter is whether the Gospel of Christ – faith in God and empathy for other people – is still in the hearts of the Cardinals and the one to be elected Pope in a few days’ time. May God watch over the Cardinals and bless them as they accomplish their historic duty.
The Blue Flower 
Thanks for your prayers. I hope for a surprise as it was (for me at least) Benedict XVI in 2005. I owe the current Pope emeritus a good part of my re-conversion to catholicism. I know our faith is first and foremost in Christ and the visibile church only serves as a confirmation to our faith. But a bad surprise in the incoming papal election would mean for me another step into feeling a stranger in my home and a worsening of the fractures that are already corroding my faith. I think I couldn’t stand another 20 years of bad liturgies, superstar Pope, worker’s union Bishops and total confusion as it was under JPII – not without the splinter of hope that, at least, BXVI sparkled in my soul. I am fully acknowledging now the faults of the rad-trad approach I had in my first years as (re) convert, but I’m not still ready to give up all the beauty I discovered in Catholic/Western tradition and try something different, maybe beautiful but equally stranger to my roots that children masses or flattened spirituality,
Simone, you stated the following: ” I think I couldn’t stand another 20 years of bad liturgies, superstar Pope, worker’s union Bishops and total confusion as it was under JPII.”
I could not have expressed it better myself. I simply fail to understand the adulation of JPII by so many. It was all simply media hype and publicity and in the end hogwash. He did much, much harm to the Old Faith.
Some of my RC brethren may find this a bit harsh, but it’s not meant that way. Ultimately I’m not sure it matters a whole lot if there is a good pope or a bad pope, some have been better and some have been worse, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that there is a pope in the first place, at least in the form the office has taken. When the shape of the whole church depends so thoroughly on the style and preferences of one man, there’s ultimately nothing dependable, and there’s a real lack of objective standards. If one opposes JP2 and B16, one effectively denies a single church united over time and makes it the personal expression of one powerful person.. As it happens, I like them both, though for quite different reasons, but shudder at the impermanence of the potentiality of one single-handedly undoing what the other has done. The potential is there right now. I can’t make that look like a plan God would have set in motion.
Hello Ed, I completely agree with you. You may notice that my comment on “Derailing the Train” makes very much the same observation. The living tradition of the Church, and not the opinions of a single individual should be paramount.
I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being a Papalist or an Ultramontanist (!), but Anglicanism as an institution has done no better without a Pope than Roman Catholicism with one. I remember “interregnum anxiety” in many a spiky London parish.
I got an idea about Romanità over a few years, “cooking Roman spaghetti” as they used to call it. It’s all about imposing your agenda while making it look like a continuation of the last Pope’s way of doing things. That’s why you are expected to believe that Paul VI was just a continuation of Puis XII (which he actually was in a way!). There’s a lot of nonsense about the Papacy, just as there is with diocesan bishops and parish priests, with the lot of us.
As for God setting plans in motion, I don’t think he sets any plan in motion. Human beings freely do what they want and that is what happens in this world. Sometimes, one sees a spark of divinity, and we might detect something greater and higher than human nature. The we have something to inspire us…
I think that both official Anglicanism as well as Romanism suffer from opposite extremes; one giving all authority to an individual, the other by given all power to a supposed democratic process, or to Parliament. In both cases the dependence on Tradition has been lost.
In some ways this reverence for Tradition is what has preserved the East, more the Oriental Orthodox than the Byzantines (the Byzantine schism over the old verses new rite in Russia is a problem that also harkens to the issue of authority), from the cultural implosions that have racked the West.
Personally, I believe that it is the hoped for rediscovery of the primacy of Tradition that may preserve Continuing Anglicanism from going down the same path as Rome and Canterbury.
In a funny kind of way, as I remember traditionalists in the early 80’s, I think we will be better off and clearer in our minds in opposition to a “liberal” and liturgically illiterate church than against conservatives. But, I do remember some really kooky cranks in the 1980’s too.
But, Pope Francis is not a liberal doctrinally or in terms of moral theology. We’ll see…