Francis Leo was named Archbishop of Toronto after he had been a bishop of any kind for under seven months. (The kind of bishop he was? Auxiliary. In Montreal.) He was installed as archbishop a month and a half later (2023.03.25 – I was there).
A zippy 21 months after that, Leo was elevated to the College of Cardinals, and now, for unknown reasons, calls himself Frank, leaving open the possibility that we had been deadnaming him all along. The official Vatican organ wrote about him – but about almost no one else being thus elevated at the same time.
Leo is broadly competent, young enough, and unencumbered by factions that openly hate him. Pope Francis is none of those things.
The Vatican is under malign management at present. But, as the saying goes, the Holy See must have been doing something right to have stayed in business all this time. Cooler heads are at work inside the labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy, and they are setting the stage to actually prevail.
Francis Leo is blatantly being speedrun into position to be elected pope. Quite possibly the very next one.
Internet tradcaths, as incestuous as gay identical twins, are single-issue politicians. The only thing they ever cared about was Francis’ restriction of the Latin mass. Anything else they complained about was just time-filler. (“Support us on Locals.”)
Tradcaths now have gotten half of what they wanted. Bluff has been called. Expect crocodile tears as each commentator appears on every other tradcath’s channel in sequence to performatively rend garments. (“Subscribe to my Patreon.”)
Let’s see if Dave Nix reacts as pissily to Pope Francis’ demise as he did to Shia Lebœuf’s miraculous conversion to Catholicism. Such bile, while rote at this point, would at least be honest.
Spoiler: Francis’ requiem mass will not be conducted according to a Tridentine missal, and won’t even be in Latin. “It figures,” tradcaths will snort.
Posted: 2024.12.11 ¶ Updated: 2025.04.21