In Rome we got sun at 06:01. It sets at 20:15.
The Ave Maria Bell is in the 20:30 cycle.
I was at a meeting of journalists, long-time Vatican watchers. It was informative. The personal experience of a few of these vets shifted my view of a couple of the cardinals dramatically (e.g., Arborelius and Abongo) toward the positive. The unhesitating consensus was that Card. Sarah won’t be chosen and the reason was interesting: his seeming hardline about priesthood and celibacy greatly irritated the Eastern Catholics. I don’t want to totally give up on him but I understood the point. They were also quite confident that Table (=disaster) would not be elected, which helped to lower my blood pressure. Strong positives about Card. Pizzaballa in that group. For my part, apart from his accomplishments – which are significant – there is something compelling about the narrative of the man coming from Jerusalem to Rome. It’s been done before!
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Conclave stuff.
Here are the first images of Michelangelo’s majestic Sistine Chapel nearly ready to welcome the cardinal electors for the upcoming conclave on May 7. pic.twitter.com/t6xOR9XuZC
— EWTN Vatican (@EWTNVatican) May 3, 2025
Vatican Media had a photographer on the roof of the Sistine Chapel yesterday when the firefighters were installing the chimney that will signal to the world whether the cardinals in conclave have elected a pope. (We love the VatMedia photographers!) pic.twitter.com/n57Aam05Wy
— Catholic News Service Rome (@CatholicNewsSvc) May 3, 2025
Other conclave stuff.
Rorate has an open letter to cardinal electors with 62 points of concern about doctrine, liturgy, and discipline. “Only 62?”, you quip. It’s pretty comprehensive and one might read it as a status quaestionis for the Church. If anyone will read it. It is way too long and it includes things that just might make some cardinal’s secretary roll his eyes (like the point about the Church’s teaching on usury) and hit the print button anyway because it’s his job to get information to his boss. Thereafter, I suspect that one or two Electors might glance at pages it is printed on before doing something else.
Meanwhile, currently, New Advent has a sidebar panoptic of the site about all the cardinals that Ed Pentin and Diane Montagna made. It’s handy.
The MSM seems to be in lockstep with the globalist, immanentist Deep Church. MSM is saying that the Parolin illness was fake news spread by Americans and trads to hurt his chances. So the deep Vatican and the worldly powers want him to be pope. La Reppublica HERE, Corriere HERE, ANSA HERE, Il Messaggero HERE.
The situation is very wobbly, I think.
An interesting view of Sant’Andrea della Valle.
All the scaffolding is finally removed from Santa Brigida.
Last night’s supper. Fantastic.
White to move and mate in 4.
[NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.]
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Very important question… I have seen you post that pasta dish or something similar to it off and on. How hard is it to eat around the shells?
[It isn’t at all a problem, because you pick the clam meat out of the shell with the tine of your fork, or whatever.]
For what it is worth (showing my age by not using the acronym), Pizzaballa is my man for Pope, although in some respects making him leave Jerusalem, where one is so close to Christ all the time (even in the chaos of the Old City and many of the religious sites—not all: go to St. Peter in Gallicantu, or the crypt at Dormition Abbey, for a relatively quiet and moving experience) would be to require a very heavy sacrifice in his part (which he no doubt would gladly accept in a truly religious spirit). Let us pray.
For those interested in how Thomists developed Aquinas’s usury teaching to allow charging interest in a modern context, I think the following article is helpful:
https://www.academia.edu/122554073/Usury_and_Interest_Forgotten_Contributions_to_the_Thomistic_Tradition
Anyone remotely familiar with the status quo between Rome and the East knows that we will always talk a big game about celibacy in the West, but will never even think about changing that discipline in the Eastern Canon Law. The relationship is too valuable.
Furthermore, the East themselves have a deep reverence and respect for celibacy. You cannot offer the Divine Liturgy without abstaining from sex for a set period of time. You cannot become a bishop if you are married. I would argue that they respect celibacy more than many Latins (who has told our permanent deacons to abstain before ascending to the Holy of Holies?).
For that reason, I don’t buy what these media gurus claim about the eastern cardinals.
Has Erdo’s name received much mentioned, or has the buzz about him never really taken off? If Cardinal Pell were still alive to organize for him, I think he would’ve had a great chance.
Note also that in the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, May 7 is kept as the Invention (Finding) of the Holy Cross, the date having been moved from May 3 to accommodate Saints Philip and James on that day. A good auspice indeed.
https://sicutincensum.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/the-feast-of-the-invention-of-the-holy-cross-in-jerusalem/
Given how long Dr. K’s letter at Rorate is, i suggest it would have been better to organize the points from most urgent to least rather than as they were. For example the prohibition of advocacy on behalf of sociopathic sexual depravity should be much more immediately visible, while the permissibility of capital punishment – being a much less frequent event – doesn’t merit such a prominent placement.
I really do like that chimney photo.
There appears to be a very significant chance that we are going to get someone who is a Francis-lite, or maybe even not so lite. I can live with that if whoever it is will at least let up on Traditionis Custodes.
Please feel free to disregard this but I thought it was interesting enough to share. St. Vincent Ferrer, in a letter to Pope Benedict XIII, offered an interpretation of Daniel 12 in which the death of the antichrist would occur after 1290 days of his reign, followed by 45 days until the end of the world. Just for fun, I calculated 1290 days prior to the death of Pope Francis and got the date Oct. 10, 2021, the exact date of the opening of the Synodal Path….
I agree about Cardinal Pizzaballa.
A true Franciscan…
Surprised that Francis didn’t banish the stove and chimney to cut down on carbon emissions.
Replace it with a steam generating device. Release all that hot air.
The New Advent sidebar shows 80 cardinal electors as traditional or centrist. This is only 60% of the total 133, not enough for a 2/3 majority. If accurate (and how could predictions about a papal election be accurate?), the math suggests that the best outcome would be a compromise centre-left candidate. Prevost is very close to the right place on that median scale.
@Monstrance, don’t give them globalists ideas.
I find it interesting that you, Fr. Z., noted the point about usury, because that one stood out to me too. So far as I can see from my limited experience of life and history, it has been a long time since the leaders of the Church have consistently and widely taught the inherent evil of charging interest on a loan, and I think that all of sudden to spring that teaching on Catholics would be unsuccessful in two ways: it would be ignored, and it would do more harm than good, because Catholics have generally not received the intellectual formation to receive such a teaching: outside of certain groups, which are perhaps over-represented on the internet, how many Catholics have even heard it, let alone be able to articulate and defend it? Moreover, in a system of fiat currency, in which inflation is deliberately engineered, I’m not even sure that the teaching is applicable.
Thomistking: There was an article many years ago in the Journal of Law and Economics that developed a model that could explain the Old Testament prohibition on charging interest based on the economic circumstances which existed at the time. If my memory serves me well, which may not be the case, the argument was that money prices were declining, so that a loan which charged no interest still required the borrower to repay the lender more than was originally borrowed in real terms ( that is $100 repaid next year could buy more than $100 can buy today.)
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The more I learn about him, the more I am hoping that Cardinal Pizzaballa is elected. I think the cardinal electors could see him as a “compromise” candidate.
Called it!