Double standards (2), (3), and (4)

It is difficult always to be certain what PF has said, because throughout his pontificate there has been a persistent risk that he has been misreported or misunderstood. I prefix that very important caveat as I continue to list amusing examples of Double Standards.

(2) PF told Cardinal Mueller that he had decided not to reappoint curial officials after the expiry of their five-year term. Mueller was to consider himself to be but the first victim of the new convention.

There seem to be uncertainties about whether PF has been applying this norm uniformly ... or, indeed, at all.

(3) PF talked loudly about Parrhesia in the distant days when he hoped it would encourage Synodal Fathers to say what he wanted to hear them saying. It is rumoured that he has more recently been much more reticent about uttering the pi word.

(4) PF is described as favouring Subsidiarity especially in the new exciting sense of allowing Germanophone hierarchs do do whatever they like. But ...
    (a) a few months ago, a Roman Instruction stripped diocesan bishops of the right to authorise new religious communities within their jurisdictions without the prior inspection and sanction of the Congregation for Religious.
   (b) a draft document did the rounds in Rome, according to which young clergy in the Roman Colleges, whoever are the ordinaries of the home dioceses that pay for their education, would be required to concelebrate rather than being allowed to get into the disgusting habit of saying a daily private EF Mass. [Does anyone know what became of this proposal?]

4 a & b are very understandable. The great renaissance of Catholicism which began in the last decades of the 25-year Wojtyla-Ratzinger dyarchy disproportionately influenced the young of both sexes. Hence, the demise of old communities now reduced to impotent senility was accompanied by a mushrooming of young religious orders which either prefer the Old Mass or, with a broader menu, elevate the Old Mass to optable equality with the New. Hence also the growth of vocations to the Sacred Priesthood in the Ecclesia Dei communities but, much more strikingly still, also in the Church at large. This has led to a new phenomenon: young priests who for pastoral reasons do willingly say the New Mass (although not necessarily always with the ritual options most fashionable in the 1970s), but who derive their ars celebrandi from the Old Mass which is their personal gold Standard; and who will, if pastoral needs do not demand otherwise, instinctively say their daily private Masses according to the Old Missal.

It is not surprising that there are those for whom these new cultural manifestations are less than unambiguously welcome. Now an older generation, but still luxuriating on the emotional highs of the late 'sixties, they peer from under their dear drooping eyelids into the faces of the young. Is it remarkable that they discern in those faces the sure prognostics of their own transience?