\nSo, they’ve finally chosen a new guy to be Pope – the 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was for more than 20 years the head of the “congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith”, which the BBC calls the “Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy” but is commonly known as the successor to the Inquisition. I find it strange that they elect somebody who, let’s face it, is unlikely to be Pope for very long. Then again, perhaps they don’t want another celebrity Pope, somebody who would “be” the Catholic Church.\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\nThe fact that the new pope is a conservative is no real surprise. Shaula Evans over at Tzuredzuregusa noted a few days ago that she hoped that she didn’t like the idea of Cardinal Marc Ouellette of Qu\u00c3\u0083\u00c2\u00a9bec being the new pope, because his views were “aligned with the pope” and he had issued an open letter to Canadians attacking “advances in GLBT civil rights in Canada”. The problem is that a majority of current Cardinals were appointed by John Paul II, and that no doubt includes most of the younger cardinals who were eligible to vote in the recent conclave. And you won’t get the Pope being liberal on matters like homosexuality, never mind gay marriage; it’s also too much to ask that they will give up their lying to married couples about condoms either.\n<\/p>\n
\nToday I read in an Algerian cafe here in Kingston a copy of the Daily Mail<\/em>, which is a right-wing British newspaper well-known for its indulgence of such quackery as the “Bible Code” (famously debunked when somebody found a similar prediction in Moby Dick<\/em>), a story about the Irish “prophet” Malachy, or St Malachy who was canonised by Pope Clemente III in 1199. He had given a list of the Popes through something linked to all of them. Apparently the new Pope’s characteristic is “Gloria Olivae” <\/em>or “glory of the olives”. The symbol of the Benedictine monastic order is the olive, and Jon Christian Ryter, author of Whatever Happened to America?<\/a>, “a well-written, shocking expos\u00c3\u0083\u00c2\u00a9 of the globalists’ plans to dominate all of the nation-states of the world”, here<\/a> mentions three possible ways the olive reference could play out: peace or a deceptive peace, a Middle Eastern origin, or a Benedictine background. He did not mention the possibility that the new Pope might assume the name Benedict.\n<\/p>\n \nThe problem with this, of course, is that the “Malachy prophecy” has been well-known in the Catholic world for centuries, and thus could have been consulted by the cardinals who choose the Pope. It’s in their interest to add a kind of mystical legitimacy to their organisation. Given that Ratzinger has no connection with the Benedictine order or the Middle East, the easiest way to “fulfil the prophecy” is to simply call himself Pope Benedict. (The Benedictines have insisted that this pope will come from their order, which Ratzinger does not.)\n<\/p>\n \nA few of the other connections are rather tenuous also. Pope John XXIII was described as “shepherd and mariner”, and people link this with his being patriarch of Venice prior to being Pope. Of course, the canals of Venice are just the city’s transportation system. This no more makes you a mariner than living in London and using the Underground makes you a railwayman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, they’ve finally chosen a new guy to be Pope – the 78-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was for more than 20 years the head of the “congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith”,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-h8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}