In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading back up to Norcia. I think this will be a chance to reboot, to try to get better at all this praying business, to maybe work on not using Bad Swears, try to figure out what holiness really is and how to find it. I could use some help with expenses, and yes, this is a bleg, but there’s a surprise at the end, and a different kind of request…

We can’t really say everything old is new again. It’s really just more of the same. But we can certainly look behind the headlines to a little bit of recent Catholic history and discover that most of the daily list of horrors coming out of the Vatican and upper levels of the episcopate are nothing new at all. They are, at most, natural developments of what has been going on for 50 years.

He’s the sharply dressed one on the left. (OH! I crack me up!) Helpfully demonstrating the value of “conservatism,” former Primate of Canada and current Prefect of Bishops – whose “conservative values” have left him isolated in the Vatican – takes a moment to chastise the faithful and call them devil’s minions for having dared to ask the pope for genuine mercy. “These methods of anonymous posters are a work of the devil, who wants to divide us.

Notable, perhaps, is the fact that when Benedict XVI resigned, the Romans put posters up around town saying, “Resta con noi”… “Stay with us.” It’s interesting to go back and look at what I was thinking on that day: Those who follow Vatican affairs are always acutely aware of the unfinished work, the hopes and needs of the Church and the world, and this anxiety is felt perhaps even more acutely now.

I am informed by friends that these have appeared, plastered up on notice boards all over Rome. Antonio Socci described it as the City being “carpeted” with them. It says, “Francis, you police congregations, have priests removed, have decapitated the Order of Malta and the Franciscans dell’Immcolata, ignored Cardinals … but is this your mercy?” Romans, as I think I’ve pointed out before, don’t harbour the same silly hyperdulia towards the pope that North American Catholics have fallen prey to in recent decades.

This is the image that keeps coming into my mind. ~

Grand Master Calrisian meets with Darth Parolin. We are also most grateful to the Holy Father and the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin for their interest in and care for our Order. We will be pleased to work with the Delegate whom the Holy Father intends to appoint to consult with us. He will help to nurture and inspire the religious aspects of the Order, and possibly issues of reform that will need to be addressed after the forthcoming elections.

“Oh God, is it over?” ~

Well! I’m out of things for a little while and everyone gets delusions of grandeur! Apparently Pope Francis has been promoted to divine oracle. I’m back in Santa Marinella and I see that things are proceeding nicely along the expected lines. The latest comes from Archbishop Scicluna in Malta: He said they looked at the whole document and “all the questions which are causing most problems,” adding they didn’t just look at the most controversial chapter the document, Chapter 8, “but also at the interpretation approved by the Pope.

So, I’ve pretty much decided not to fly anywhere anymore. Ever again. Ever. I just got back from a trip up to Germany to help out a friend who was coming down to Rome for an academic conference, so I went up to his place to look after his kitties, while he came down here to look after mine. He paid my ticket, and I got a nice little quasi-holiday in the snowy, lovely German countryside.