George Weigel: A Date to Remember

The following comes from George Weigel at First Things:

Papal approbation being no bad thing, I was delighted to learn that Pope Francis, in a homily a few weeks ago, had suggested that his congregants learn the date of their baptisms and celebrate it—which is precisely what I have been proposing to audiences around the country this past year, when discussing my book, Evangelical Catholicism.

I usually begin by confessing that marking and honoring the date of my baptism hadn’t really occurred to me until a quarter-century or so ago, when I began working with evangelical Protestants on pro-life and religious freedom issues and noted that some of them had an interesting way of introducing themselves at a meeting. Whereas the normal American way of breaking-the-ice is to say, “I’m John Doe and I work at Boeing” or “I’m Jane Smith and I’m an attorney,” these folks would begin rather differently: “I’m John Doe/Jane Smith and I was born again on such-and-such-a-date,” usually in the past 10 or 15 years. Contrarian that I can be on occasion, when things got around the table to me, I’d say, “I’m George Weigel and I was born again on April 29, 1951 . . . at which point I was 12 days old.”

Which got a few interesting conversations going about sacramental regeneration, etc.

Then, when I was working on the biography of John Paul II and was reminded that the first thing he had done on returning to his home parish in Wadowice as pope was to kneel and kiss the baptismal font, memories of those men and women who remembered the day of their rebirth in Christ as a crucial way of identifying themselves came back to me. And I started taking April 29 much more seriously (shocking an usher when, on the 50th anniversary of my baptism, I went to the church where the deed had been done—amidst great caterwauling on my part, I’m reliably informed—and asked him to help me find the baptismal font, which had been moved in a post-conciliar wreckovation, so that I could kiss it).

As I explain to my audiences after I ask how many of them know the date of their baptism (average “yes” response: 3 percent of any group), baptism and the new evangelization, baptism and mission, go together. We are baptized into mission and for mission. Indeed, viewed through the prism of the new evangelization, the day of our baptism is the day of our being commissioned as missionary disciples.

This link between baptism and mission is made explicit in the biblical readings at Mass for the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. In the A cycle, which we are using this liturgical year, the Old Testament reading is from one of the Servant Songs in Isaiah, establishing the link between the baptism of Jesus and the mission of the Servant of the Lord: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations. . . .”

Then, in the reading from Acts, Peter tells Cornelius about “the word which was proclaimed throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism which John preached: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil; and God was with him.”

The very next verse—“And we are witnesses to all that he did”—points out our responsibilities as missionary disciples: We, too, are to “do good” and to help heal “all those who [are] oppressed by the devil.” As Pope Francis reminds us, we are to be like medical workers in a battlefield hospital after a terrible battle. We are to offer others the possibility of encountering the mercy of God, and the possibility of learning the truths about right-living that the encounter with the divine mercy affords us.

Baptism is baptism-into-mission. Thus a papally-endorsed suggestion from your scribe: Learn the date of your baptism, celebrate it each year—and be re-energized for mission because of that celebration.

The Church Persecuted

The following comes from George Weigel at First Things:

Each issue of the admirable ecumenical journal, Touchstone, includes a department called “The Suffering Church.” It’s a title that Catholics of a certain age associate with purgatory; in Touchstone’s vocabulary, however, “the Church suffering” is the Church being purified here and now by persecution. It’s a useful reminder of a hard fact.

For that hard fact too rarely impinges on the Christian self-awareness, much less the Christian conscience, of the Church Comfortable, the Church Lax, or the Church of Nice—even though the historical commission created by John Paul II in preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000 made clear that Christians today live in the greatest tribulation-time in Christian history. Indeed, that historical commission suggested that more Christians were killed for fidelity to Christ in the 20th century than in the previous nineteen centuries of Christian history combined. As I’ve noted in this space before, “martyrdom” is not just a matter of Richard Burton and Jean Simmons turning their backs on Jay Robinson’s madcap Caligula while Michael Rennie/St. Peter looks on benignly in the classic Hollywood romance, The Robe; “martyrdom” is going on around us, all the time.

Thus a single page of a recent issue of Touchstone noted that some 1,200 Protestants are being imprisoned in shipping containers in Eritrean desert camps where “torture is routine”; that Mostafa Bordbar, a 27-year-old Christian convert, was arrested and charged with “illegal gathering and participating in a house church” in Iran (a sobering reminder to those bears of little brain who discern a new “moderation” in Tehran these days); that Kazakh Christians, many of them converts from Islam, are “encouraged,” by the arrest and imprisonment of their pastors, to refrain from evangelism; and that a Muslim leader in central Nigeria regularly abducts Christian girls and women and holds them captive in his home, in order to compel their conversion (or reversion) to Islam.

As these micro-dramas are being played out, Christians live in daily fear for their lives in Syria and Egypt, two imploding societies where the majority Muslim factions and sects can seem to agree on one thing only: It’s open season on Christians. Within two decades, perhaps less, Christianity may well have ceased to be a living ecclesial reality in many of the places where Christianity was born, not to mention the cities where sub-apostolic and patristic Christianity developed; the sole exception to this pattern throughout the Middle East and North Africa is Israel.

Thus Tom Holland, a popular historian and author of The Forge of Christendom (an intriguing book exploring the ways the late first millennium’s expectation of an imminent End Time shaped the West’s triumph in the second millennium), said recently at a London press briefing that “In terms of the sheer scale of the hatreds and sectarian rivalries” afoot in the Middle East today, “we are witnessing something on the scale of horror of the European Thirty Years War.”

At that same conference, my old friend and colleague Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Religious Freedom Center in Washington, raised some pointed questions about western media ignorance—or worse—about this persecution. Shea noted that a fourth-century Coptic church dedicated to Our Lady was recently destroyed in Egypt, even though it was on a shortlist to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The church was 200 years older than the UNESCO-listed Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, whose destruction by the Taliban in 2001 was widely reported and universally condemned; yet the mainstream media treated this grotesque act of anti-Christian religious and cultural vandalism in Egypt as a non-event.

So what is to be done? Support those non-governmental agencies that work to sustain the pastoral life of Christianity in its historic birthplace. Demand that U.S. diplomacy take religious freedom in the Middle East more seriously. And make the cause of these and other persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ a regular part of liturgical prayer, remembering the Church Persecuted in the General Intercessions at every Mass and praying publicly for the conversion of the persecutors.

Yes, their conversion.

George Weigel on the Canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II

The following comes from George Weigel:

I doubt that Pope Francis has heard of Ernie Banks, the Hall of Fame shortstop. But like “Mr. Cub,” whose love for baseball led him to exclaim “Let’s play two!” before Sunday doubleheaders in the 1950s, the pope from the end of the world seems to think that papal canonizations are better in tandem: hence the Sept. 30 announcement that Blessed John XXIII and Blessed John Paul II will be canonized together on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 27, 2014.

Predictably, the decision caused some unhappiness in some quarters.

Some Poles wanted John Paul II canonized by himself. Some who welcomed the decision to canonize John XXIII are disgruntled that “their” pope has to share the billing with the pope they think hijacked John XXIII’s Vatican II. The aggrieved Poles should (and most will) recognize that, while John Paul II brought uniquely Polish insights and experiences to the papacy, he now belongs to the entire world Church. The aggravated partisans of John XXIII should, but probably won’t, concede that the “John XXIII” they’ve have constructed in their imaginations bears little resemblance to the real John XXIII, and that the charge of Council hijacking is ludicrous.

In fact, it might be reasonably speculated that Pope Francis liked the idea of a papal canonization doubleheader precisely because it will underscore the continuity between John XXIII’s intention and John Paul II’s authoritative interpretation of Vatican II: Vatican II was intended to prepare the Church for the challenges of evangelization in late modernity, an intention realized by John Paul II’s use of the Council’s teaching to launch the world Church into the new evangelization of the third millennium.

Vatican II differed from the previous 20 ecumenical councils in that it provided no authoritative keys for its proper interpretation. Unlike other councils, it defined no dogmas, condemned no heresies (or heretics), commissioned no catechism, wrote no new canons into the law of the Church. Vatican II did give the Church 16 documents of differing magisterial “weight,” but it provided no interpretive keys to its body of teaching. The result was 20 years of argument, sometimes quite bitter. And in those arguments, as Benedict XVI put it, the idea of Vatican-II-as-rupture-with-the-past (which seemed to detach the Church of the future from its historical and doctrinal moorings) contended with the idea of Vatican-II-as-development-of-the-authoritative-tradition-of-the-Church (the tradition providing the reference points for grasping the true meaning of the Council).

At the very outset of his pontificate in 1978, John Paul II said that the full implementation of Vatican II would be the program of his papacy. He kept that pledge, providing authoritative interpretations of virtually all of the Council’s documents through his own encyclicals, apostolic letters, and post-synodal apostolic exhortations. Perhaps most importantly, he called a special meeting of the world Synod of Bishops in 1985, to assess what had gone right, and what had gone not-so-right, in the 20 years since Vatican II closed on Dec. 8, 1965. That synod, in turn, offered the Church a connective thread with which the various pieces of Vatican II might be woven together into a full tapestry, by describing the Church as a communion of disciples in mission. Catholicism begins with Christ (hence discipleship); those disciples are joined in a community, a “communion,” that is different from any other association because it is the mystical body of Christ; that “communion” exists for mission—to spread the Gospel and offer men and women the possibility of friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The liveliest parts of the world Church today are found where Catholics have embraced this vision of a communion of disciples in mission; the dying parts of the world Church are those that cling to the false idea of Vatican-II-as-rupture. Pope Francis, who urges the Church to avoid being “self-referential” and to get about the business of spreading the healing message of the Gospel, is very much a pope of the new evangelization, which he understands to be a fruit of Vatican II.

And that’s why it’s entirely appropriate for him to canonize John XXIII and John Paul II the same day.

George Weigel on "The Christ-Centered Pope"

The following comes from National Review:

Perhaps the most revealing detail in Pope Francis’s lengthy interview, conducted by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro and published yesterday in English translation in the Jesuit journal America, is the pontiff’s reflection on one of his favorite Roman walks, prior to his election:

When I had to come to to Rome, I always stayed in [the neighborhood of the] Via della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and I went there to contemplate the painting of “The Calling of St. Matthew” by Caravaggio. That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. . . . This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.

The Calling of St. Matthew is an extraordinary painting in many ways, including Caravaggio’s signature use of light and darkness to heighten the spiritual tension of a scene. In this case, though, the chiaroscuro setting is further intensified by a profoundly theological artistic device: The finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew, seems deliberately to invoke the finger of God as rendered by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thus Caravaggio, in depicting the summons of the tax collector, unites creation and redemption, God the Father and the incarnate Son, personal call and apostolic mission.

That is who Jorge Mario Bergoglio is: a radically converted Christian disciple who has felt the mercy of God in his own life and who describes himself, without intending any dramatic effect, as “a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” Having heard the call to conversion and responded to it, Bergoglio wants to facilitate others’ hearing of that call, which never ceases to come from God through Christ and the Church.

And that, Bergoglio insists, is what the Church is for: The Church is for evangelization and conversion. Those who have found the new pope’s criticism of a “self-referential Church” puzzling, and those who will find something shockingly new in his critical comments, in his recent interview, about a Church reduced “to a nest protecting our mediocrity,” haven’t been paying sufficient attention. Six years ago, when the Catholic bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean met at the Brazilian shrine of Aparecida to consider the future, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio, was one of the principal intellectual architects of the bishops’ call to put evangelization at the center of Catholic life, and to put Jesus Christ at the center of evangelization. The Latin American Church, long used to being “kept,” once by legal establishment and then by cultural tradition, had to rediscover missionary zeal by rediscovering the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Latin American bishops, led by Bergoglio, made in their final report a dramatic proposal that amounted to a stinging challenge to decades, if not centuries, of ecclesiastical complacency:

The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . . 

A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that “being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

The 21st-century proclamation of Christ must take place in a deeply wounded and not infrequently hostile world. In another revealing personal note, Francis spoke of his fondness for Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, one of the most striking religious paintings of the 20th century. Chagall’s Jesus is unmistakably Jewish, the traditional blue and white tallis or prayer-shawl replacing the loincloth on the Crucified One. But Chagall’s Christ is also a very contemporary figure, for around the Cross swirl the death-dealing political madnesses and hatreds of the 20th century. And so the pope’s regard for Chagall’s work is of a piece with his description of the Catholic Church of the 21st century as a kind of field hospital on a battlefield strewn with the human wreckage caused by false ideas of the human person and false claims of what makes for happiness. Thus Francis in his interview on the nature of the Church:

I see clearly that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.

Read the rest here. 

George Weigel on Tribulation Compounded by Blasphemy

The following comes from George Weigel:

As the Revised Standard Version renders the 14th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas remind the proto-Christians of Antioch that it is only “through many tribulations” that we enter the Kingdom of God. The New American Bible translation drives the point home even more sharply: “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Christians in the United States who imagined that, whatever tribulations or hardships they have to endure, they would not include speeches by the president of the United States and the policies of the United States government had better reconsider, in light of President Barack Obama’s April 26 address to the annual Planned Parenthood Gala at Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

It was an appalling speech that had the sole benefit of clarifying the last-ditch commitment of the present administration to the most open-ended abortion license possible. And it drew a line in the sand that those committed to the biblical view of the sanctity of human life cannot ignore—and must challenge.

Planned Parenthood is a multimillion-dollar industry, funded in no small part by the federal government, that has been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children and is currently responsible for over one thousand such deaths every day; yet the president described Planned Parenthood’s work as “providing quality health care to women all across America.”

Pro-life advocates’ efforts to craft state laws requiring Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists to follow the minimal sanitation and safety standards required of true medical facilities are, according to the president, a matter of “shutting off communities that need more health care options for women, not less.”

The clinic-regulation laws that have been passed in states across the country are, the president charged, part of an “orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health”—as if abortuaries that do not meet the health and safety standards required of your local McDonald’s are contributing to anyone’s “health.”

Moreover, such laws are an attempt to mandate “government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor”—as if a butcher like Philadelphia’s Kermit Gosnell, who severed the spinal cords of infants born alive in botched abortions, was any woman’s personal physician.

Perhaps because the Obama speech to Planned Parenthood coincided with Gosnell’s homicide trial, the president did not utter the word “abortion” once. But the timing notwithstanding, that omission was hardly surprising in an address that may have set a new standard for deliberate misrepresentation of reality. For it requires willful moral blindness about reality to say that “what Planned Parenthood is about” is helping “a woman from Chicago named Courtney” make sure she could start a family, by providing “access to affordable contraceptive care to keep her healthy” in the face of a fertility-threatening disease. Today, President Obama noted to applause, “She’s got two beautiful kids. That’s what Planned Parenthood is about.”

About the millions of “beautiful kids” (many of them African-American) who were never born because of Planned Parenthood, the president of the United States had not a word to say. Not a word of remorse. Not a word of compassion, for either the slaughtered innocents of our time or the mothers suffering post-abortion trauma. Just a celebration of “your right to choose,” without the slightest moral pause over the question, “Choose what?” 
But there was worse. For President Obama concluded his remarks as follows: “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you…”

And that is nothing short of blasphemy.

Too harsh? No. For in its discussion of this grave sin against the Second Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 2148) teaches that “it is also blasphemous to make use of God’s name to … reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or to put them to death.” That is precisely what happens in Planned Parenthood abortuaries. And on that, the president of the United States called down the divine blessing.

Pray for him. Pray for the United States, which is in very, very serious trouble.

George Weigel: The Bishop of Rome as Christian Radical

The following comes from First Things:

It was a brief greeting to former colleagues. But if you read Pope Francis’ recentletter to the Argentine bishops’ conference closely, you get a glimpse of the man, his convictions, and his vision.

First, the man: Jorge Mario Bergoglio has remained very much himself, rather than adopting what some might deem the pontifical style. Any pope who can write his former colleagues in these terms—“Dear Brothers: I am sending these lines of greeting and also to excuse myself for being unable to attend due to ‘commitments assumed recently’ (sounds good?)”—is a man at home in his own skin, and one likely to remain that way.

Then, the convictions: Pope Francis believes that the Church in Latin America took a decisive step toward a new future in 2007. Then, at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held at Aparecida in Brazil, the leaders of the Church moved far beyond the “kept” Catholicism of the past—the Catholicism that was “kept” by legal establishment or, more recently, cultural habit—and embraced a robustly Evangelical Catholicism in which, as the pope wrote, “the whole of ministry (is) in a missionary key.”

The move from “kept” Catholicism to Evangelical Catholicism is for everyone, the pope seems convinced. “Kept” Catholicism has no future anywhere, and not just because of aggressive secularism and other corrosive cultural acids. “Kept” Catholicism has no future because it doesn’t merit a future: or, as the pope put it to his former colleagues, “a Church that does not go out, sooner or later gets sick” in the hothouse atmosphere of its own self-absorption, which Francis has also called “self-referentiality.”

When the Church is about itself, rather than the gospel and the invitation to friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church betrays the gospel and the Lord. How? The “self-referential Church” falls victim to “a kind of narcissism that leads to spiritual worldliness and to sophisticated clericalism,” which in turn are obstacles to what the bishops at Aparecida called “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”

That joy, Pope Francis quickly added, is “many times united to the Cross.” But the joy that comes from the embrace of the Cross helps the ordained ministers of the Church “to be each day more fruitful, spending ourselves and unraveling ourselves in the service of the holy faithful people of God.” And if the pastors are seen to pick up the Cross and live joyfully in the embrace of the Crucified and Risen Lord, the people of the Church will find the courage to do the same: thus the entire Body of Christ becomes a powerful witness to the truth that it is in self-giving, not self-assertion, that we find happiness.

As for the pope’s vision, Francis seems willing, even eager, to lead a Church that takes risks in boldly proclaiming the gospel. “It is true,” he wrote the bishops of Argentina, that “something can happen” to a Church that “goes out,” just as things can happen to someone who leaves the safety of home: Accidents can happen. But “I wish to say to you frankly,” the pope continued, “that I prefer a thousand times an injured Church than a sick Church,” a risk-taking Church to a Church palsied by self-absorption. Thus the vision toward which this pope “from the end of the earth” is calling the entire Church: all Christ, all gospel, all mission, all the time.

The Bishop of Rome as Christian radical is going to take some getting used to. Expect serious disorientation in those ideological redoubts where the old battles over the now-superseded Church of the Counter-Reformation remain all-consuming (e.g., the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Lefebvrists). Some may find it hard to reconcile Christian radicalism with orthodoxy. But, as I argue inEvangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church, that’s precisely what orthodoxy is: the adventure of radical conversion ordered to mission. The 266th Bishop of Rome would seem to agree.

George Weigel on the Sede Vacante

The following comes from George Weigel at NRO:

Rome, March 1 — The elderly Carmelite who concelebrated the 9 a.m. Mass at the Church of S. Maria in Traspontina this morning was doing fine until he got to that part of the second Eucharistic Prayer where the commemoration of the pope is made. Then he paused, verbally thrashed a bit, and finally said “tutti i nostri vescovi [all our bishops]” before moving on.

It was a reminder that the Sede Vacante, the period when the Chair of Peter is empty, strikes home with particular force in Rome — and not just because it creates a bonanza for stamp and coin collectors, who scramble to obtain Vatican postage and Vatican coins with that rare “Sede Vacante” mark on them. Everywhere else in the wide world of Catholicism, the Church prays, every day, “for . . . our pope and . . . our bishop” at the Eucharist, its central act of worship. But here in the Urbs, the city blessed by the blood of the two great apostles (as a slogan emblazoned on a tower of the North American College proclaims), there is no “our bishop.” The pope is the bishop of Rome. And when he dies, or renounces the Chair (as Pope Benedict XVI did at 8 p.m. Rome time last night), the Church of Rome is singularly bereft. Kinshasa and Cracow and Ho Chi Minh City and Lincoln, Neb., still have their local bishops; Rome is uniquely orphaned. For the Universal Pastor of the Church is its local bishop, and when the Chair is empty, Rome is empty. And you can feel it.

That same swirl of emotions was evident in Rome on February 22, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter in the liturgical calendar. How does one celebrate that feast eleven days after the successor of Peter has announced that, in conscience and after long prayer, he is going to renounce the Chair? How, under these circumstances, were preachers to interpret the Bible readings at Mass that day: from Peter himself, instructing the elders of the Church in what amounts to the first papal encyclical, to shepherd the flock of God, and from the Matthean account of Christ’s giving the power of the keys to Peter after his confession of faith?

There is not the slightest doubt that Pope Benedict XVI had the right to renounce the Chair, which is clear in canon law. There should not be the slightest doubt that he did so for the reason he gave on February 11: that, after long prayer and a deep examination of conscience, he had reached the conclusion that, as he could not give the Church the service it deserved because of what he described as his waning physical and mental capacities, he should renounce the Chair and retire to a private life of prayer in intercession for the entire Church. Reckless Italian media speculations that Benedict abdicated under pressure from others, or that he just couldn’t take it anymore, should be treated with the contempt they deserve. If the world ought to have learned anything about Joseph Ratzinger in the past eight years, it is that he is a man of conviction and conscience. And his conscientious decision ought to be honored as just that: a conscientious decision that was an act of self-abnegation, not of willfulness or self-assertion or, conversely, cowardice.

Nonetheless, by doing what has never been done before — none of the analogies to previous renunciations of the papacy really work, as they all involved various pressures and craziness — the pope who embodied the solidity and endurance of Catholic tradition for tens of millions has shaken the Church as it has not been shaken in a long time: perhaps since May 13, 1981, when John Paul II was shot in his front yard, St. Peter’s Square. Roman theologians and scholars whom I respect believe that something has been broken in the existential relationship that many Catholics have long had with the papacy. I think that’s a premature judgment; but it may be prove to be prophetic. Much will depend on Benedict’s successor and the decisions he makes about both his predecessor and his own longevity.

Benedict XVI’s

 advisers have not made that successor’s already-daunting task any easier by convincing the outgoing pope that he should be known as “Benedict XVI, pope emeritus”or “Roman pontiff emeritus” and that he will continue to wear the white cassock, albeit without the mozzetta, that white half-cape. So to underscore the obvious that has been made a bit obscure by what seem to me ill-advised decisions, it must be stated, on this first day of the Sede Vacante, that there is no bishop of Rome, no Roman pontiff, no pope: today, and until the College of Cardinals elects the next holder of that office. And then there will not be “two popes.” There is only one pope, one bishop of Rome, one Roman pontiff, one holder of the power of the keys, one source of authority in the Church. Period.

Read the rest here.

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