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.
Over the next four years, Ranjith became something of a bête noire for liturgical progressives. He criticized communion in the hand, saying it was not envisioned by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and became widespread only after its “illegitimate introduction” in some countries. When Benedict authorized wider celebration of the old Latin Mass in 2007, Ranjith openly blasted bishops who didn’t move quickly to implement it, accusing them of “disobedience … and even rebellion against the pope.”
First, he may be a little too traditionalist for some of the moderates in the College of Cardinals – “more Ratzingerian than Ratzinger himself,” as some put it. In 2006, he said of the Lefebvrists that he wasn’t a fan, but that “what they sometimes say about the liturgy, they say for good reason.”
True, but ultimately what matters is faithfulness to Christ and his message.
You can’t lead people who refuse to be led.
“Though no one join me, still I will follow” and all that.
I tend to gauge Ouellet’s qualifications by the people who don’t like him (ie: abortion advocates, gay rights advocates, proponents of female clergy, the separation of church and state crowd, dissident priests, dykish ‘nuns’ in turtle necks with Miss Hathaway haircuts)
The fact that he’s almost universally hated by these groups tells me that he’s touching all the right nerves.
He routinely participates and speaks at (along with Cardinal Collins) various Right-to-Life type events on Parliament Hill, taking the message directly to those who have the power to make changes.
I’m hoping he’s elected just so I can visit the CBC.ca boards that day and rub salt in the wounds of so many ‘disillusioned’ lefties.
Did you read about this Cardinal Ranjith?
I like Tagle.
I haven’t really been following the speculation.
Those memberships on various curial commissions don’t mean a whole lot.
Schoenborn’s been a disaster as an archbishop. Granted, Austria is a rebellious pseudo-Catholic country and so his diocese an province is hard to govern, but still, he’s not distinguished himself.
He won’t be pope. You can bet on it.
Doesn’t stand a chance. He was openly campaigning for it and even if it were true that it’s not wrong to campaign for the office, being foolish enough not to know that it’s a deal-breaker is, in his case, a deal-breaker.
Moreover, his line about “doctrinal orthodoxy but openness to updating the Church to conform to modern culture” is a DoA campaign platform. The idea that there’s some kind of narrowly pigeonholed “doctrinal orthodoxy” that’s different from cultural updating fails to grasp that the theological wars are also the culture wars and cannot be otherwise.
To elect someone as pope who doesn’t “get it” in those matters would be a disaster and there are enough JPII and B16 cardinals who know that “it’s all about the culture wars, stupid.”
If they want an affirmative action African to silence all the affirmative actioneers in the MSM (which they are not so stupid as to want), they can elect Arinze.
Or Malcom Cardinal Ranjith.
The plumping for Turkson in the MSM was nothing other than a head-feint by the MSM. They pushed his “candidacy” so that when he’s not elected, as he will not be, they can then browbeat the Church for being racist for not electing the MSM African favorite.
Even if Arinze were to be elected, the stories would then come out that he’s not “really black” and not “really African” because he spent so much time in Rome in the curia.
He’d be portrayed as JPII’s little lap-dog black “boy.”
They only want an African pope if he’s ideologically in their camp. Anyone else will be “not really African.”
That’s no Ouellet’s fault. It happened long before he became Archbishop. HE wasn’t even living there for much of his early/mid-career. For a while he was teaching out West, if I remember correctly.
I’ve been calling attention to him ever since the day that Benedict announced he was going to resign. The only problem I can see is that I don’t know if he has the “capital” to carry out the Augean purging of the Curia that needs to be done. They might dismiss him as a naive Third Worlder. He may have too many enemies from his time in the Curia.
On the other hand, if he has solid enough backing from the College of Cardinals, from influential members, perhaps he’d be the very one to step on toes and shake things up.
If he’s chosen it will be a long shot and, in my view, clearly the work of the HOly Spirit.
You saw it here first.
No, I was first LOL
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2987469/posts
Who Will Be the Next Pope? Bookmakers Place Their Bets
Monday, February 11, 2013 3:54:37 PM · 54 of 100
Houghton M. to SeekAndFind
A year ago my money would have been on Scola or Ouellet. But right now I’d say it will be Cardinal Archbishop Malcom Ranjith of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
You saw it here first.
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I actually found out about him only a few days ago. Immediately caught my attention, not only for the emphasis on classic liturgy and rubrics, but also because my wife has Catholic connections in Mumbai and Goa, not so far away culturally or geographically (or so it seems that way from North America).
From your posting record you should be reading Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s What Does The Prayer Really Say
regularly. That’s where I learned to know of Ranjith, a number of years ago. He was thought to be in line to head up the Congregation for Divine Worship but then Benedict named him Archbishop of Colombo. At that point Zuhlsdorf did a lot of “reporting” on Ranjith without ever fingering him as papabile. I remember being a tad frustrated at having to read between Zuhlsdorf’s lines and guess at what he “really meant.”
I assume Zuhlsdorf knows of him either from his own years in Rome or through mutual friends in Rome.
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