“For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales!” “Hey guys! Guess who just called! The Devil! And he said we could have this whole great big house on the Esquiline he’s not using. And he promised he TOTally won’t try to destroy us… Isn’t that great news?!” You meet people in Rome who are dazzled by all the Romeness of everything.

I got off the bus yesterday in the brilliant sunshine, and a feeling of gloom and hopelessness settled over me like a dark fog. Fr. Benedict said in an interview recently that people have been very depressed, and I can understand now why. The town looks like one gigantic construction zone, with piles of masonry everywhere, scaffolding, cranes and people in hard hats and steel-toed boots… in which the world’s biggest circus has come to camp for the winter.

Well, I’m off to Norcia for a couple of days tomorrow morning. It seems I have to look for a new house. It’s all very complicated and has to do with the impenetrable masses of Italian bureaucracy surrounding the earthquakes. Never mind, my realtor Luca said, we’ll just ignore it all and find you a nice new house. A “more comfortable” one, he said. With a better kitchen. I’ve asked him if we can please look for a place up a bit closer to the monks’ new place so it won’t be that miserable 90 minute hike up the hill for Mass.

Crux having a bit of fun: “Since Francis is in continuity with tradition, his critics aren’t” Benedict XVI, in his latest book interview with Peter Seewald, admits himself that he was on the so-called “progressive” side during Vatican II, and the accusations of modernism and heresy against their side was abundant. He personally was accused of heresy after his article “New pagans and the Church,” and his bishop, Cardinal Joseph Wendel, wanted to block his appointment as a professor in Bonn for the same reason.

Being a Traditionalist Catholic isn’t about liturgical preferences. “The war on tradition in the Catholic Church that came out of the closet the second Vatican council was never merely a war on the liturgy on the old Latin Mass.” ~

In the City all day, in conversations with various contacts, so not much from me today. Except to report on the rapidly growing consensus that the long game is to impose formally onto the existing structures of the Church an entirely new religion. Over the next nine months look for them to bring in, one at a time (in no particular order): 1) some form of non-canonical female “diaconate” (that we won’t officially call the diaconate, at least not just yet)

~

The Catholic TwittFace world is popping and sparking and buzzing and sizzling with this, like an Italian electrical socket. This anonymous blog in Italian, clearly based in Rome, is the latest coolest thing among the Rome Vatican-watchers. There. Y’all’re running with the cool kids now! (To head off the inevitable barrage of questions: no, I have no idea who he is.) So far we’ve only had it in crappy Google-translate English.

If you leave a comment and it doesn’t appear, it’s usually going to be because of the moderation process, which consists mainly of me scrolling as rapidly as possible through the hundreds and hundreds of spams, clicking “Approve” when I spot one that looks like a real comment and bulk-dumping the rest at the end of each page. 20 messages per page. It’s a pretty annoying method, and takes up an annoying amount of time, but Disqus was just a pain, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off their obnoxious adverts that appeared on the bottom of the page.

“It is the opinion of an Argentine official who works in the Vatican and who, logically out of fear, prefers not to be quoted: Bergoglio “is someone who above all knows how to infuse fear“. That is why he has an influence on the Holy See that surprises many. Although he painstakingly works to impress everyone with an air of sanctimoniousness, austere and mortified, he is a man of mentality of power.