The Conclave

[matt]

Seems more like a wankfest.

Why can't they just vote online?

[pim]

You don't get it. This is the world's last medieval monarchy. Pre-modern Europe had the Pope as spiritual head and the Holy Roman Emperor as temporal head. Both were elected by particular electoral colleges. For the pope it's the cardinals and for the Emperor (not the Roman Emperor of ancient times) it was a group of nobles called simply an "Elector". Since the Holy Roman Emperor was always a Hapsburg and therefore German-speaking, an elector was a "Kurfürst". So a prince could also be an "elector".

So Pope and Emperor were similar in that the Pope dealt with the "God" stuff and the Emperor dealt with all the worldly stuff - and they were each elected in a similar way.

The office of Holy Roman Emperor doesn't exist anymore. Napoleon did away with it in 1805 after conquering Europe and it was never revived. That leaves the Papacy which is a relic of the ancient way things were done. The whole idea of the Protestant Reformation was to do away with things like Popes but they never managed it. What makes you think your grandstanding about it on NTB will make any difference?

Another poin you're missing: the sexual abuse scandal is so profound that it's interfering with this ancient method of selecting Popes. One cardinal (the Scottish one) has already recused himself from the process because of a dark cloud hanging over him in relation to old allegations of sexual misconduct, and two American cardinals have big question marks over their heads for similar reasons.

As I keep saying, this moral crisis regarding sexual misconduct and the culture of cover-up and sheltering the guilty parties is also the most profound spiritual crisis for the Catholic Church for the past 500 years. Even the scandals of the late 1940s when the Vatican gave Nazi fugitives travel documents so they could escape to South America is not as big a scandal as this one. This crisis is bigger than when the Papacy lost the Papal States in the 1870s and was confined to a plot of land in Rome that we call the "Vatican".

The unfortunate thing is that because these days the media use terms that are OTT and they always engage in hyperbole ("shock" resignation; "horror" budget ) it becomes difficult to convey genuine shock and horror. But this crisis is profound in that it rocks the Catholic Church to the core. When the Papacy lost all its Italian territories in the 1870s it had to redefine itself and it went for morals. It repositioned itself to be the moral conscience of the Christian West which gave it a completely different type of power. Just how powerful the immense moral authority of the Pope was can be seen in the role of Pope JP2 in destroying Communism, not just in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union itself. It's hard to exaggerate the prestige and moral authority of the Catholic Papacy. It's been huge. You mightn't like that fact, Matt, but there it is. Deal with it.

It's this moral authority that the paedophile crisis places at risk. The fact that it even interferes with the ancient process of papal selection is not something I expected to happen, but it's happening. This is the most profound crisis for the Roman Catholic Church since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on his church on Wittenberg back in 1518 which unleashed the Protestant Reformation.

Seems that the Catholic Church is due for another Reformation. A good Reformation every 500 years clears out the cobwebs ...