Sorry for the heavy emphasis on personal history in these messages from the Eternal City, but I must begin my second report by noting that there has never been a moment in my memory that I could consider myself an enthusiastic member of the society in which I lived. My head and heart have never thought and beaten together with its visions and desires.
Yes, it is true that I grew up in the bosom of the “old Church” and had all of my basic sacraments according to its Traditional Liturgy. But in those days, that particular and seemingly unchangeable community still put you on dire warning about the evils of “the world, the flesh, and the devil”. Complicating the story still further was the fact that my parents, New York born, International Ladies Garment Workers Union members, and then small toy shop owners though they were, were right wingers of a European variety—-visceral enemies not just of the communists but of big time capitalist oligarchs as well. They were of one mind and heart with nobody.
By the time I finished High School in 1969 as the student most likely to succeed and moved on to my inevitable reaping of my worldly harvest, another deadly blow arrived. I discovered two things in that fateful freshman year: first of all, that I actually knew almost nothing about the real teaching of the western civilization that was my heritage; and, secondly, that my passionate desire to embrace that heritage in its entirety was now being thrown an unexpected curve ball from the one previously “immoveable force” in my tumbling universe; from an unfamiliar, post-conciliar Church with its hideous Novus Ordo, which I loathed from the very start.
It was in that same freshman year that I was brought by my professor of history to my first meeting of the Roman Forum, where Dietrich von Hildebrand told us all that we must dedicate ourselves to fighting for the return of the “old Church” and the fullness of its Traditional Liturgy. A final blow, this time condemning me to outsider status even in the Catholic world! But a happy blow nonetheless, which I joyfully share with all of you—-who, as I mentioned yesterday, feel that we are the honest-to-goodness Insiders, working as we do for the victory of the integrity of the Faith, notwithstanding the contempt with which we are generally treated by those momentarily holding the balance of power at the center of things.
Alright, enough personal memories. Now, back to the question at the focus of our attention, which is whether “anything good can come from Groucho Marxist Rome”.
Always remembering that we are looking for the answer to that query from the standpoint of those who are “on the outside looking in”, I expected the worst from the influence of “the world, the flesh, and the devil” the second that I climbed into the cab taking me from the railroad station to my room on the other side of the Tiber at the Piazza San Giovanni della Malva. But hold onto your hats!! Gino, my twenty-something year old Roman cabbie was a Trad! An enemy of the European Union, George Soros, Bill Gates, and a total anti-Vax man who had suffered for refusing the jab just like me.
I couldn’t believe it. And when he found out that I was writing articles for an American blog read by people of the same mentality, he let loose with every weapon at his disposal! “They claim it is going to be Parolin or Zuppi” he said. “Maybe so, but whatever you think about him, Trump has blown one big whole in the entire Globalist Agendy. Reset, 2030 is dead. Francesco II may appear on the scene, but their overall cause is ultimately lost”.
Now you can understand why, when he left me off at my desination with a big comradely embrace, I was ready to rush to a nearby cafe for a celebratory glass of wine (actually, three). “The world, the flesh, and the devil” could not ride to its destination in one Roman cab at the very least, piloted by a member of the youth that Cardinal Kasper believes are pining away for yet another Bergoglio to lead them to the Promised Land. If he had ridden in Gino’s taxi to some progressive latrocinium (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05495a.htm) he would have used his cell phone to call his friends for a modernist assisted suicide.
Returning to the theme of the moment, my fifty-three year long “outsider” experience of visiting Rome has always been that there is an all too plentiful supply of devilishly worldly flesh crowding and pushing one hither and thither on the streets and in the cafes and restaurants of the Eternal City. Peace, quiet, and Rome have never been synonyms in the caput mundi through whose precincts I have pushed my ever more decrepit body. The rumor mill spewed out warnings of vast mobs sobbing out in unceasing and deafening tones the words “Santo Subito”; hordes arrogantly shoving their legacy newspapers, with front page affirmations of the schismatic German proclamation of an assured election of Buenos Aires Segundo in everyone’s face. So vivid was the picture presented that I could already imagine him snarling at Catholic believers of Traditionalist ilk.
But this is not the Rome that I have seen. Maybe I am deceiving myself, but I cannot remember ever encountering an Eternal City this empty, at least in Trastevere and in the main part of the town on the other side of the Tiber. My impression is that the basic consuming and tourist infantry of the “world”, which, already had “voted with its feet” and shown its lack of interest in showing up at the audiences of Pope Francis a good long time ago, is not interested in gawking at the preparations for the Conclave either. Even the movers and shakers, who were very quickly aware that there was no need for much effort on their part in keeping the chaplain for the New World Order on their side, appear to exhaust their energies in paying their regular installments to their media mouthpieces and maintaining their personal contacts with their still enthusiastic high prelate fellow-travellers.
I must remember to ask my favorite waiters if they are making any money from the masses begging both for the rarely available table and a transhumanist Pope to boot.
Last night, I crossed the Ponte Sisto from my apartment, to head for a major outsider encampment: the Church of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. All the usual suspects where gathered there, gnashing their teeth in the outer darkness; in their case, through rosaries, litanies, and a Mass on the Feast of St. Pius V pro eligendo pontifice.I spent an hour afterwards chatting with even more people that I have known for years and pretty much expected would be there with the others “on the outside looking in”.
Once again, let me post my warning before going on. I am an historian and not a journalist. I have no personal “inside information” whatsoever. All I know is what I know from what I hear other people tell me, and what I then run through the mill of my mind concerning what has happened at conclaves gone by. So, for what it is worth, let me take a stab at giving you all at least something to chew on.
What my ears heard and what my mind sewed together, was that the cardinals now getting ready to enter the Conclave tomorrow are in a great, big confusing pickle. Yes, there are favorites that are hoping for a quick election. Moreover, as definitely was to be expected—-given such a quantity of recently chosen Princes of the Church who really do not know one another, who are unfamiliar with the protocol to be followed by them, but who are, generally speaking, much more “men of their times” than we are, they appear to be talking more than is usual. That talking seems also to be taking place on their own web sites. Is all that talking good for Parolin, Zuppi, and Tagle? I hope not, even if it means that when I leave here on Saturday a confused Conclave will not yet have come to a conclusion that I would desperately love to hear in St. Peter’s Square rather than in Greenwich Village.
Let me end this second report with some frank, final, outsider questions regarding the influence of “the world, the flesh, and the devil” over whatever good or evil may come out of Rome in the course of the next week. How much do we really know about the Catholic sentiments or lack thereof on the part of the mass of cardinals who were chosen by Pope Francis? The confusion that they face does indeed evoke a good deal of the confusion of the Conclave of 1378 that I mentioned yesterday, which worked under strange circumstances and with certain new rules that confused its members in those far off dangerous times as well. How “loyal” will they really be to their patron, the “dictator pope” so clearly painted for us by Henry Sire? How loyal were Stalin’s apparatchiks, who swiftly rid themselves of Lavrenti Beria, his most famous lapdog, and then, bit by bit, began to attack his legacy? How much resentiment might they feel? Or fear that they have been and continue to be manipulated? Who might Beria be in their eyes? How much are they being left alone by the Global Oligarchy, confident that it has already done its work in corrupting the Church, and convinced that it can leave the mopping up operation to be completed by confused, “insider” puppets on their own steam?
That Oligarchy, the natural force standing behind the crippled and suicidal remnants of a once glorious Western Christendom, has indeed, as Gino the cab driver indicated, been seriously poked at—even if erratically—in Trump’s last Hundred Days and more. That Oligarchy, as I have spent the last year and more trying to indicate, is an alliance of criminal forces—intellectual criminals, libertine criminals pure and simple, and criminal word merchants— that has been shaping our current world of perverse criminal ugliness since the first period of troubles faced by our saintly ancestors in their medieval attempts to build the Social Kingship of Christ. As alliances go, this never been a unified coalition: a fact of life that can provide us with a great deal of hope.
Still, that alliance has two valuable assets working on its behalf. Wounded as it now is, however slightly that may be, it feels a vulnerability that may allow its divided constituent elements to maintain a unity under the slogan of “No Enemies on the Side of the Anti-Catholics”. Injured “animals” often fight with a desperate continued strength. Even more importantly, this natural criminal force has behind it the supernatural Enemy of Mankind and his much more unified Satanic “counter-genius”.
Under these circumstances, let us muster all the charity that as “Outsiders feeling like Insiders” we possibly can. Let us pray to the Triune God, with all the might that we can, for each and every one of the voting Cardinals as though they are ready to hear our tempestuous storming of Heaven. Let us shout out our prayer as though there were “No Enemies on the Side of the Electors”: Give us a St. Leo the Great! Give us a St. Gregory the Great! Give us an Innocent III! Give us a St. Pius V! Give us a St. Pius X!”
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