5 thoughts on “The Pope”

  1. Most cardinals don’t know each other well, so I expect not, and from what I hear, there has been more than a little “what the heck did we vote for?” second thoughts percolating since among some of the red hats. If politics looks like sausage-making, a conclave compresses the meat-making into one week, with a hundred men who don’t know each other well and usually don’t even speak each other’s languages (Latin used to serve that role, but very few are fluent in it now.)

    That said, most Catholic bishops these days tend to the liberal side on economic matters, and so perhaps Papa Bergoglio is in some way a representative sample, if not often a very coherent one. It didn’t help that he grew up in an inflation-ridden corporatist kleptocracy of a country.

      1. Fair point.

        The bulk of the North American and European bishops are some variety of “statist.” In Latin America, you get a higher quotient of outright neo-Marxist. A remarkable journey for a church that, three generations ago, was better characterized as “reactionary.” (It is telling that the most pro-market Pope was the one who had actually lived under full-scale communism.)

        But this is where local cultural elites went over the last century, and too many Church leaders ended up caving into a desperate desire for approval by same. Papa Bergoglio is certainly racking up record levels of approving secular media headlines.

  2. I expect Protestant Jimmy Carter will be extending ecumencial congratulations to the Pope any day now.

  3. The Catholic Church has always backed those in positions of power. It is both a way of keeping the followers from being persecuted and for them to increase their influence. Only when those in power are blatantly anti-Catholic will they actually attack them.

Comments are closed.