Blowing Smoke
Blowing Smoke
Desiring a Church that is at once lax and “reformed,” journalists have eagerly floated the names of candidates who are primarily known for their fecklessness and dysfunctional dioceses. Prelates who can’t even keep heretics and frauds out of their own chanceries are confidently described as the cure for corruption in Rome. What “managerial expertise” and “firm governance” could they possibly bring to the curia if controlling their local Catholic college is too much for them?
Bishops who preside over seminaries that look like ghost towns are said to be “dynamic” communicators. What exactly are they communicating? Despite their Twitter accounts and six-figure-salaried “communication specialists” to monitor their “social media,” they have never had less to say. Some of them, harboring a religious relativism, don’t even think the faith should be communicated. So who cares if they are on Facebook?
The truth is that the media, which is pushing all of this prattle, wants more corruption, not less, more miscommunications, not greater clarity. Their ideal Vatican would operate like a left-wing, trendy, vaguely “spiritual” denomination that mirrors the low morals of the world and voices the bogus pieties of political correctness.
Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley seems to meet with their approval as a potential pope they could push around. He wears sandals, talks about chic causes, attended Teddy Kennedy’s funeral, and employs the brother of a chief Obama aide. What could possibly go wrong? They wouldn’t mind Cardinal Dolan of New York that much either, seeing him basically as a charming and harmless fellow with whom they could chat on the Today Show couch or at an Al Smith roast.
The key to the chattering class is that the pope be politically liberal and “non-confrontational,” qualities they discern in O’Malley. They see in him a community organizing pope to go along with a community organizing president.
For them, the papacy is not a rock but a rug, on which these “ecclesiastical Oscars” can be rolled out. Compatibility with a worldly elite, however, was not one of the qualities Jesus Christ had in mind for Peter, whose fate was to be crucified upside down by them.
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