Posted on 03/04/2013 1:36:51 PM PST by dangus
I won't pretend to know who the next pope will be (of course), but I'm getting a guess at who it will NOT be.
Cardinal Tarcisso Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, Italy. The very real banking scandal makes him look bad, and he'd be retiring in a year or two anyway, if Pope Benedict stayed healthy.
Cardinal Francois Arinze, President Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Nigeria. If Benedict was suddenly struck down several years ago, Arinze would've been the presumptive pope. Several of the betting sites thought he was the favorite, until people started realizing that he's already retired.
Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Ghana. His seemingly disqualifying comments to the British press probably were just journalists making controversy, but I can't help thinking that all the crowds who were so excited about a black pope mistook him for Arinze when they heard there was a black pope shoo-in years ago, and couldn't find Arinze among the papabile today; he's a rather low-ranking official. But unlike Arinze and Bertone, he's still viable.
Timothy Dolan, Sean O'Malley or any other American. But not because Rome will be biased against a super-power. It's because the American press has become very savvy and very unprincipled in generating Alinskyite ad-hominem attacks, as those against Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, etc. And anything short of selling every possession of the Catholic church, converting it into paper bills, and throwing it off a building while shouting "Free money for anyone who will slander a priest!" will satisfy those who want not an end to the child abuse scandals, but an endless supply of heads to stick on pikes. There's no way they could "win" in the press. Witness, for instance, the way they labelled someone who risked his life to flee the Nazi Youths as a "Nazi Youth." A very dark horse candidate would be Raymond Burke, prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the court of final appeal at the Vatican.
Who's viable?
Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan is the leading Italian.
Peter Erdo, Arcbhisop of Eztergom-Budapest and three-time president of the European Episcopal Conference is the leading European.
Luis Tagle, Archbishop of Manila is the leading developing world candidate.
Marc Ouellette, President of the Congregation for Bishops and former Archbishop of Quebec is the leading member of the Roman Curia (the papal "cabinet.")
George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia is the leading Anglophone, although even he is a very dark horse.
Sonja Henie’s out.
Isn't the next Pope supposed to be named Peter or Pedro or some variant?
I’m sorry, he is a member, but so are many other people who are not entirely orthodox, which was probably one of the things that led BXVI to resign. Sandri is and has been the Prefect of the Oriental Churches (to no effect) for a number of years now.
I read an interesting article that said that one of the reasons BXVI resigned was that he couldn’t move these people around anymore and he simply wanted to clear the decks (since technically they were all fired the day he resigned) and leave it open to a new pope to put in the right people without having any loyalty to holdovers.
One of the things that I think really stymied BXVI was the JPII holdovers, whom he couldn’t just get rid of and thus had to move from place to place. Perhaps if he had been more of a hatchet man, he could have done it...but that wasn’t his style.
I hope none of them gets to be pope, or we’ll be back to square one (when JPII was ailing and the Church was in free-fall).
Thje College of Cardinals will wait until Congress is in recess.
Then Obama will appoint himself in a Recess Appointment.
Think I am joking?
Note that Obama acts as if he already possessed Papal Infallibility.
“An American woman cannibal real estate agent.”
The HillaBeast IS out of a job at present.
Not after his balloon Mass.
Schoenborn has also done an awful job of keeping ecclesiastical revolutionaries at bay in Austria.
There was an article in the Italian media about a couple of powerful Cardinals (Bertone) in the curia pushing for Scherer if they could get an Italian in the Secretary of State type position.
Along with Ouellet, they’ve also been mentioning Peter Erdo of Hungary who I don’t know much about.
The Church in Quebec, however, is an absolute disaster. There is hardly anyone under 60 in the churches.
Yes, I saw that. Of course, Italians are a dime a dozen, so just about anybody could give them an Italian Secy of State. It would be wonderful someday if we could actually get a GOOD Secretary of State. BXVI tried (Bertone isn’t from the Vatican diplomatic corps) but unfortunately few of his appointments were really that sterling, mostly because he had been around the Vatican so long that he relied on the people he knew.
Evidently Ouellet has done a lot to turn it around in Quebec. But when you come right down to it, the Church in Quebec probably isn’t a lot worse than the Church in Italy (where nobody under 60 goes to Mass anymore and nobody follows any of the moral doctrine).
The country where it’s doing best is probably here in the US, although only in certain areas. Spain is reviving too, again thanks to some good episcopal appointments in recent years, and there are probably other patches of the “old Catholic world” that have come back.
I saw an interesting article that suggested appointing Vigano, the current nuncio to the US, as Vatican Secretary of State. His predecessor here, Pietro Sambi, was very good (died suddenly about 2 years ago), but Vigano has been very aggressive and is really on top of things.
Any current SSPX bishop. And SSPX has lots of members from the under-60s.
Too young
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
Ranjith profiles as a Ratzingerian, meaning a churchman cut from the same cloth as Benedict XVI. Thats especially the case regarding his attitudes on liturgy, supporting the older Latin Mass and rejecting secularizing tendencies in Catholic worship.
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