Even elderly readers may remember those sweet pages in children's puzzle books where the Tiny is invited to join up the dots; and ... behold! ... as if by magic a picture appears before his very eyes. Or her eyes. Or its eyes. Oh ... d*mn ... why can't you do the pronouns?
Dots. It's a bit like that in Rome now, it seems to me. How would you join up these dots:
(1) Bishop Becciu has renounced the legal rights of his cardinal's status (echoes of Henry VIII's order that the Blissful Martyr be henceforth referred to as 'Bishop Becket');
(2) A prosecutor has been appointed in Rome; and
(3) Cardinal Pell ... he who found so much money stuffed down the backs of so many sofas in so many Roman dicasteries ... is in the air flying back to the Eternal City.
So what do you get from these dots? Vide infra ad pedem.
The mystery of the $A700,000 which made its way to Oz is entertaining those people who love to make connections (aka 'Conspiracy Theorists'); and folks are suddenly remembering old news stories ... such as the reports last year that BB devoted quite a lot of Simon bar Jonah's shekels to a film ... do we use the term 'biopic'? ... about Sir Elton John.
Some transpontine readers may be in need of context here. Sir Elton is one of our National Treasures, a status based upon his friendship with an unwholesome woman called Diana Spencer. He is a homosexual, and, when he visited Oxford, an undergraduate newspaper recorded him as calling Pope Benedict XVI an "arsehole". That detail failed, I think, to get into the national press: I suspect this omission might just possibly have happened because it is important to censor from the record anything that might make people realise just what a very nasty piece of work this National Treasure is.
Vladimir Vladimirovich, however, is a bit deficient in respect towards our poor little island and even its equites auratae. So, in Russkieland, the film had its 'gay sex' sequences censored. I'd better not say "Good for him" because you might attack me for being too soft on Russkies (I'm not ... timeo Scythos et venena ferentes ...).
BTW, I wonder what Vladimir V P makes of the troubles facing the Armenians at this moment. The World really does need a Russia mindful of its historic role as protector of Christian minorities in the Middle East. Because it rather looks as if some of Mr Erdogan's sidekicks might be tempted to a dash of 'ethnic cleansing' in the spirit of the genocide of Armenians in the first decades of the last century, a genocide which of course never happened. (What a busy lot they are ... plundering Greek marine resources ... terminating Kurds ... making Hagia Sophia into a mosque ... it does them immense credit that they also have time to ... er ...).
Earlier in his pontificate, PF was quite brave in being explicit about the Armenian genocide. It would be nice if he said something now, before any new genocide happens to Christian Armenian people. Which, of course, is impossible because, er, there never was an old genocide.
Some of you might not like the following bit: PF seems to me less focussed on slandering traddy clergy than he used to be in his old, carefree days. I wonder if the erudite, specialist researcher in Brighton who used to collect Papal Insults has been able to add many new gems to his lexicon in the last year or so. Have the delights of Coprophagia featured in recent numbers of Acta Apostolicae Sedis? And some orthodox edicts have emerged from the CDF with PF's say-so. Could it be ... has he belatedly realised that high church clerics and ecclesiastical millinery are no longer the Enemy's main threat to the Kingdom of God in this Third Millennium??
Or is he just too busy, what with one thing ... and another ...
Which brings me back to the dots.
Keep connecting the dots Father. Please do. You are reinforcing what some of us thought guessed suspected. I am not a conspiracy theorist.
ReplyDeleteActually, it was not $700 AUD sent to Australia but 700 euros which is about $1.2 million AUD. And that transfer of money and it’s possible disbursement is being taken very seriously by Australian authorities. Where did the money go? I don’t know but it would no doubt be interesting to find out, especially as that money was off-budget - itself a bit dodgy, n’est ce pas?
ReplyDeleteI am confident it was even 700 THOUSAND Euros...
ReplyDeleteElton John is indeed a very unpleasant fellow as many of the canonical National treasures are, no names are necessary. They are prone to pontificate about things of which they know nothing.
ReplyDeleteI write as one who knows they know nothing as I go towards what I believe some call gerontotranscendence.
I have it on good authority that many many people spend fifty, sixty, even seventy or eighty or ninety (I have witnessed that more than once) years in a state of stunned selfishness, and only become better people at the point when they think they have just a few years left.
ReplyDeleteI say, to the bad elderly people (what a horrifying sequence of three words - bad elderly people - but you know that there are many such people, all of whom NEED OUR PRAYERS) who might wonder what I have to say to them, as they approach the inevitable point in time where they will either have passed away, or be impossibly old ---- ad multos annos, amici, I say --- because I want them to have at least a few good years on this earth after they stop being bad people, which is what any of us would want for any of us who spent decade after decade of our youth, our middle age, and our early senescence in a state of stunned selfishness.
(whose fault was that? who are we to judge?)
ad multos annos, amici, and may you be better than you were, and may I be better than I was, too.
As for me I was a much better person when I was younger, and surrounded by evildoers who, as much as they resembled our poor semi-vacanteist pontiff, were people who rarely prayed
(I wish they had prayed more, even if they were unfriendly to the very core of their heart, and were phony when they pretended otherwise - one imagines God loves the prayers of the phonies in this world even more than the prayers of the sincere ---- and perhaps nothing amuses God more than the frequent prayers of old phonies ----- but I ramble, as only someone who has long lived with Death, our poor disgusting younger sibling, just around the corner, is prone to ramble,
with poor little Death living just around the corner every day of my life since youngest childhood, like a neighbor one has to be polite to, while one wonders whether it would not be better to just SHOUT AT OUR EXCESSIVELY MORBID NEIGHBOR THAT WHAT IS BAD IS BAD AND WHAT IS GOOD IS GOOD .... well I am prone to ramble just like anyone who has seen much that is bad in this world for many decades is wont to ramble - try and forgive me, and say a prayer too for my almost unloveable neighbor(s) from back in the day)
but as I got older, I learned to stay away from evildoers ---- which may have been the wrong path. AFTER ALL DO NOT THE EVILDOERS OF THE WORLD NEED PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT THEM .... and how can you really care about someone you have promised yourself, as a gift to yourself, to completely avoid???? HOW, I ask you????? So, as much as I would like to never give another thought to our abortion-friendly, insult-loving, gluttonous, and rather unpleasant choice of the nasty elderly cardinals of our day as their hubristic insult to good people everywhere, I keep the poor man in my prayers every day ......
I care about those elderly people who have been evildoers most of their lives and who are on the cusp of being almost decent people, but it wears me out to be the sort of person who cares about people like that, who ALMOST NOBODY ELSE really cares about. I am tempted not to care, but then I remember that Humility is God's favorite friend, or one of God's favorite friends, anyway. I need people to forgive me, too, and to wish the best for me. Like I said, sometimes I feel so so worn out. God will bless you if you pray for me.
Anyway, I am old myself, and I have prayed for people who were just as bad as poor Bergoglio, and I have seen one or two of them end their lives with nothing but kindness and love in their hearts. If you see something like that even once you will never forget it.
A brief pastiche in prose of some of my favorite (long-winded) religious poets, might include (if the pastiche were written for the purpose of describing the situation regarding the Third Millenium, as alluded to in the third from last paragraph of this post) ......
ReplyDelete-a line imitating Christina Rossetti describing God's delight at the weak prayers of hypocrites (among which I number myself);
-a line imitating John Milton, personifying Death as an annoying and unwanted neighbor who we want to give advice to, even though we know he probably just won't listen...
-a line imitating Peguy about the stunned selfishness we feel, sometimes for decades on end, and which sometimes fades away as old people get older ...
- a line from Bernanos about the experience of watching a selfish and unkind old person develop into someone less selfish and maybe even kind, as an experience that is very easy to remember ...
and a hope , simply expressed among all the pastiche, that our semi-old bishops and cardinals, et cetera, follow the path of being better people as they get very-old, a phenomenon which sometimes happens.