I have a text group which includes very bright, highly credentialed men, of high caliber and “work” experience, including a religious, curial official, rooted Roman, etc.
This is something that appeared today in the “stream”. I’ve edited it and pasted it together for the sake of giving advice to “trads” who can be – we must admit it – sometimes their own worst enemies. It is hard to blame most of them (some I DO) because they’ve been so beaten on, badly treated, that at the twitch of an abusive … let’s confine this to bishop… they flinch and lash out.
I take this to be sage advice.
The understandable sense of relief felt by many is setting some up for bitter frustration because they have turned relief into expectations. And expectations lead easily to pressuring for things supposedly guaranteed to happen while they are just wishful thinking. In other words, the Devil is or may be setting up some commentators and the trad blogosphere for what they do best: creating more hostility towards liturgical sanity and doctrinal orthodoxy and for being a bunch of nagging fools. I say: “Shut up, pray for the man, keep doing your thing and stay out of sight. Winter is not over. The wolves are not dead yet.”
ANOTHER: Agreed, beware hysteria.
The best way we have, the only one in fact, to help the new Pope is to pray and fast for him and for the Church, to strive to be better Catholics, to be the opposite of modernists not only doctrinally but also humanely. If he doesn’t behave like the other one – shouldn’t take much – there is no reason to pressure him and the good guys around him into hating you because you want to see your (often childish) agenda implemented by them NOW. There is no reason to create a Prevost mythology about how good he was all his life. The only reason they have forgotten what was being said about the “most likely candidates” barely TEN days ago is precisely that sense of relief. We have Francis PTSD. And like veterans with it they risk putting everybody into situations that reinforce the PTSD because it is the only world we have become capable to live in.
I am enriched by the perspective – decades of experience at high levels in Rome.
There’s much to mull over here.
By now, I’m one of the longest functioning clerics in internet work (since 1992). I worked in the PCED. I’ve paid my dues over three pontificates precisely in this matter of traditional sacred worship. Over the last few years, we seen newcomers rise up, especially with interminable videos, who fan the flames in a way that isn’t healthy.
Right now, it would be a good idea to sacrifice CLICKS for prudence and the long term. I say to them….
Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio.
I don’t expect this of 99% of the readership here, who are so well-meaning and dear to me, but if you are one of those flame fanning video makers out there and you cannot instantly render that Latin into smooth English without looking it up, perhaps you should pipe down a little. Even if you can… especially so… you should!
The combox is CLOSED.
UPDATE:
From an SSPX priest friend:
>>I agree with everything you just said…. This is an important message. Even the SSPX attitude is pray, watch, and see. Expecting Peter the Roman and being upset when he doesn’t materialize is stupid and self-defeating.<<
Perspective and experience matter.
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I’ve closed the combox for everyone… except for myself. I am open to email about this. Use the contact form.
The reason I post this is because someone brought to my attention a “substack” … thing… I am still a little uncertain about what substack is… in which I was attacked for what I posted. above. Apparently, giving Pope Leo more than a couple weeks in order to JUDGE him as a modernist, or something, in the line of Francis, is too long. It seems that waiting to see what his concrete actions are over a reasonable period of time (I don’t know how long that is, exactly, but I think it is more than a couple of weeks) is some sort of “surrender”. And I am not even sure about to what it is I have allegedly surrendered.
I think what might have happened, is that the writer in question had a sort of brain freeze, like that which eating ice-cream too quickly can produce, at the words “shut up”, at which point he stopped reading and then got out the proverbial green ink. For example, he wrote: “But now that the man in white wears lace and quotes Augustine, we are told to be still.”
That’s just plain unworthy and cheap to level at both Peter K and myself.
I will hereunder repost an important part of that message in the body of the post:
If Leo XIV starts to do weird things, then we will have to call those things weird. If he teaches heresy, we will have to call it heresy. But he starts making slow adjustments, slow moves at first, let’s see how they play out before jumping on them with both feet.
For example, today Leo appointed a woman religious as Secretary for the Dicastery that handles religious. That’s where Francis had put a woman “in charge” (although that’s impossible because she lacks the episcopal character). Some people are sure to run around with their hair on fire now shouting, “See! See!” What I sense, however, is a move that will return that dicastery to something like normalcy with a Cardinal prefect clearly in charge. Also, he returned the headship of the JP2 Institute for the Family to its proper structure by putting the Grand Chancellor of the Lateran in charge of it, as it always had been before: getting Paglia out. Paglia is not completely gone, but he isn’t going to screw around with the JP2 Institute anymore. That’s a win.
To my mind, a major tell will be his replacement at the Dicastery for BISHOPS. It may be that he chooses someone we have hardly ever heard of before. Okay. Again, we shall see what happens.
Leo XIV is a canonist. He is also, as people who know him have been reporting, not going to move abruptly. He has a HUGE mess to clean up. It took years to create that mess. It won’t be cleaned up in a week.