CONSIDERING HOW SOON we will likely have the answer to who the next Pope will be, it is really stupid how many stories making or pretending to be making predictions of that have been in the media. If there is one thing that isn't known, it is what the inclinations of most of the 133 or so Cardinal Electors going into the conclave is and even less so what happens within that closed system might change any minds from what they are today. Even some of the more level-headed people who know something about some of the Cardinal Electors and have some idea of the process are making predictions, such as that this is likely to be a short conclave lasting at most four days. Well, that may well be the case but given the inability of anyone to make predictions like that in the past, who could possibly know that well enough to make a confident prediction?
I would like it to be a law that media outlets that issue predictions have to follow up to see if those predictions came true or not. But that's not going to happen.
It's interesting how many non-Catholics seem to be getting into the act. It reminds me of one of my favorite examples of this kind of thing, Americans who go four years without ever watching a figure-skating spectacle immediately becoming self-appointed experts of the Winter Olympics figure-skating finals and having a totally convinced and righteous opinion as to who should win. Though in that case the silly phenomenon is harmless.
I won't make a prediction about the conclave but I will predict that if the new Pope doesn't open up ordination to married People, rather fast, it will be ever more a moot question because Catholicism is a sacramental religion and for those sacraments that ordination is required for, the most basic actions of being a Catholic will grow ever rarer for ever more of those who were baptized into the Church. I wouldn't expect the next Pope to do the right thing and open ordination to Women, and married People but if they don't do something rather dramatic to get more priests into the parishes, the Church will shrink very fast. It was one of the worst things about Benedict XVI that he was more than OK with that, he wanted to drive those who didn't agree with him out of the church - it should be a law that an academic theologian isn't electable as the pastor of the Church. JPII didn't do much to improve things, either. His scandal filled papacy during which the child abuse scandal broke drove a number of those Catholics I knew away from the church even before Benedict made that his policy.
I sometimes watch the mass from the Cathedral in Montreal. I wasn't surprised to see how few there were at weekday masses but seeing how few there were at mass at the Cathedral there yesterday really shocked me. It's not in the Bible Belt or some college town in the North East of the US, it's a major church in a province which was once synonymous with Catholicism. I don't know if having a larger number of priests, some of whom are married and, perhaps, often are more in touch with real life than so many of the unmarried me of the Church are but they've been praying for those vocations that have been drying up for decades, this month is dedicated to praying for that. While the Cardinal Electors are trying to discern what the Holy Ghost is telling them about a Pope they should understand the message of those prayers having been unanswered so definitively. Maybe they will, I was hoping Good Pope Francis would but he left that problem unsettled. I wouldn't begin to predict what's going to happen on that question.
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