Last night reading through my normal long list of blogs and aggregated news sites there were several times I was tempted to remove some blogs from my RSS aggregator. Doomsday liturgical prophets were all set to make references to the liturgical calendar as if it was the Aztec one.
For me Pope emeritus Benedict XVI reflected a liturgical vision that I totally agreed with and really I was informed by his vision as reflected in his books such as The Spirit of the Liturgy. To go from someone that I was in total agreement with to a new Pope that might not have exactly that same vision can be a bit of a let down.
Still it is rather amazing that so many people who knew next to nothing about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio yesterday are all experts on him today. Amazing how smart Google can make you in a day. This is kind of like the commercial about sleeping in a a Holiday Inn Express.
I will try not to make the same mistake since my own knowledge was prior to yesterday just a papabile biography on him. Yet really is even the information at hand via a search engine indicative of a man who is going to put the liturgical world upside down and turning over the slow changes that Pope Benedict XVI made? That an apparently humble man is going to force on the church a totally different liturgical vision? Likely I will probably have prudential disagreements with Pope Francis regarding the liturgy in years to come. Hopefully though I won’t go into freak out mode that Pope Francis is not exactly the same as Pope Benedict XVI in these matters.
I was happy to see last night when Father Z finally had internet access his take on the new Pope. This was an excellent example of how liturgical traditionalists should respond. He also nicely covered Pope Francis’ first Mass.
Taylor Marshall’s post on the subject is quite worthwhile Traditionalists and Pope Francis: Can We Take a Deep Breath and Please Calm Down?
I also really liked LarryD’s reflections regarding this. His blog like my own often does parodies regarding bad liturgy and the thought process behind them. His blog has the awesome animated GIF of a giant liturgical puppet getting it’s head blown off so he is not exactly neutral regarding the liturgy.
The Crescat, who also does not suffer liturgical foolishnes lightly, also has a good post on the subject.
The new pope took the name Francis in honor of St. Francis of Assisi because he is a lover of the poor, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Tom Rosica told CNN.
Also, the new pope should be known as Pope Francis, not Pope Francis I, Rosica said.
Well if that is accurate it is very interesting. So we can add to the list of firsts concerning Pope Francis. He is now also the first Pope to take his name from other than a bishop or really even a priest. In the first millennium of the Church the majority did not have a new regnal name, but kept their own name. When regnal names first started to be used with John II the name was taken from either an Apostle or a previous pope.
St. Francis himself was a Deacon and as the Catholic Encyclopedia says.
So great, indeed, was Francis’s reverence for the priesthood, because of its relation to the Adorable Sacrament, that in his humility he never dared to aspire to that dignity.
So we have a Pope named after a Deacon. This might seem odd and it struck me that way at first, but really it is also highly appropriate. Since “Deacon” means “servant” and one of the pope’s titles is “Servant of the servants of God (Latin: servus servorum Dei).”
So far from what I have read the new Pope’s humility is rather obvious and lived out. It also takes a rather audacious humility to choose St. Francis as a regnal name. A name rather hard to live up to as St. Francis so closely imaged Christ. Yet really that is what we are all called to do. Plus it is not that we try to imitate some saint, but that we imitate Jesus who they tried to image.
There has been a lot of stories about Pope Francis’s humility and it is interesting the way the media has focused on this fairly positively. It is quite a contrast to the media’s normal focus and endorsement of celebrities whose lives rarely show a well-developed virtue of humility. It is also a contrast regarding the coverage of the election of Pope Benedict XVI where his humility was really never highlighted as it should have been.
Hopefully the Pope in a General Audience will be giving specific reasons as to the choice of his name as the last two popes have. I would not be surprised if the choice also indicated other Francises while primarily focusing on St. Francis of Assisi.
Shortly after the smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel turned from black to white and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was deemed the world’s new Roman Catholic leader, hundreds of people took to the Web to register domain names with the new pope’s title.
Web hosting and domain registration site GoDaddy told CNET that it racked up more than 100 domain registrations within the first 10 minutes of the announcement. By the first hour, 479 new domains were registered. And, as of this writing, 647 domain names have been registered at GoDaddy.
“The election of Pope Francis is causing hundreds of new domain name registrations,” a GoDaddy spokesperson told CNET. “Technology and religion came together this afternoon following the announcement of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I.”
The newly registered domain names contained keywords such as Pope, Francis, Bergoglio, and Habemus Papam, which is the Latin translation for “We have a pope.” Interestingly, a forward-thinking GoDaddy customer already registered the domain name PopeFrancis.com in April 2010.
…
Most likely those registering domains with keywords relating to the pope, don’t have much to do with the Catholic Church. Known as cybersquatting, anyone can register a name, sit on it, and sell it to whoever will pay top dollar. According to the BBC, PopeBenedictXVI.com was sold for more than $5,000 in 2005. (source)
No doubt this has nothing to do with the faithful, especially since GoDaddy is not exactly the domain name registrar that faithful Catholics would want to use. Maybe there should be a faithful Catholic domain registrar GoPapa.
Firsts thoughts – Wow!
I was at work when I first saw tweeted “White smoke?” Then Twitter seemed to slow to a crawl as I waited for confirmation. As soon as it was confirmed I left work and headed home. The drive home seemed to take forever, but I was able to listen to EWTN and even watch the live stream at traffic lights until I got home to watch.
The experience was quite different this time around. Last time as soon as I heard “Iosephus” I knew who was pope and was jumping up and down. This time I didn’t quite catch the name and when I heard Franciscus I was wondering which Cardinal’s name started with Francis? Doh! The fact that the new Pope’s name was Francis just did not seem possible. Wow am I glad I didn’t put any money in a Papal Name pool.
I am totally blown away by the regnal name Francis. Pope John Paul I introduced the first new regnal name in over a thousand years with the double name. Before that it was Pope Lando (elected in 913) who was the last one one that had a brand new name and in this case it was his own. So a different regnal name that was not the person’s own name must go back much farther. I am guessing that like Pope Benedict XVI he has taken on the name to specifically honor two people, in this case St. Francis of Assisi and St. Francis Xavier the great missionary Jesuit.
A Jesuit Pope named Francis – who would have thunk it.
I note sure what to make of my tweet the other day. Prophetic or pathetic – perhaps both.
If a Jesuit was elected pope, we would finally have one loyal to the pope. #jesuitbashing #sorryfaithfuljesuits
— ➡️Curt Jester⬅️ (@CurtJester) March 11, 2013
Again #sorryfaithfuljesuits
When I had read over the various biographies of the top papabiles the main thing that came to mind is that really I would have been happy with pretty much any of them. I had no hands-down favorite concerning the ones that were on the top of the list. I did generally like the idea of having a Pope from outside of Europe just as a symbol of the universality of the Church. So having a Pope from Argentina with connections to the European continent is a pretty cool thing. So it will take some time getting use to Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, and I am eager to learn more about this man. Much more than the fairly short bios I have seen. I was impressed with his demeanor today and look forward to the direction his papacy will take. Whatever agenda I might have for the papacy, I hope instead it is the Holy Spirit’s agenda.
It is bitter-sweet that this time around I don’t have a giant catalog of books to catch up on regarding a new Pope. With Cardinal Ratzinger I already had a small collection of his books which I greatly expanded during his papacy. So it is both grief and release there is not a Ratzinger-size catalog to pursue.
I still feel like a drank a couple hundred cups of coffee as I have that buzz of excitement I am still slowly declining from. There are many great reasons to be Catholic and besides the truth we also get all the tradition and pomp of a papal election.
Stolen from Facebook.
Reuters had run a piece talking about the now as being the “most difficult periods in Church history.” Common ignorant fare, but it at least had the advantage of inciting Thomas L. Mc Donald to give a history lesson on a large list of what were actually some of the most difficult periods of the Church. A good piece with some nice rhetorical flourishes.
Reuters with a team of people have been updating the article throughout the day. Apparently it wasn’t dumb enough to start with and had to be tweaked to bring out more inanity.
Venerable Pope Pius XII died on 9 October, 1958. I was born a day later and thus was born during an interregnum. Really much of my life was an extended interregnum. Moving beyond the See of Peter being empty, for me the throne of the Heavenly father was also empty and in fact nonexistent. I had my own chair to sit in issuing infallible opinions.
As for the various popes who lived during my lifetime they just did not enter into my life at all. In my early teenage years I saw a poster much like this one.
I must have vaguely interpreted the person in the poster as some religious figure, possibly even a pope. Being naive about “the pill” I had no idea really what the poster represented other than it must be a reference to the obvious religion and science divide. I might not have known about the pill, but science class told me all about what the Church did to Galileo Galilei. For whatever reason this poster stuck in my mind.
It would be some years before I even thought about a pope at all. It was during the running of the TV mini-series “The Thorn Birds.” At one point they are in Rome and have a scene with the pope. It was really the first time I had thought of a pope other than as some figure in Mediaeval history. The idea that there still existed a pope at all seemed so odd to me. Sure I understood there were religious believers, but a pope in this day and age?
The fact that it was this miniseries that brought my attention to the fact that popes continued on might seem especially odd since in high school I had spent a year singing in the small ensemble choir of a Catholic parish. My mother, aunt, grandmother had all entered the Church recently as converts from Methodism. Although since faith was something never talked about in my house I didn’t know this at the time. When my mother dragged me to Mass and I assumed they had always been Catholics. I went to Mass to please my mother and since I love to sing got involved with the small choir. While pleasing my mother was laudatory, no doubt I was quite prideful in my atheism laughing at the faith of others interiorly while I knew better. My parent’s divorce ended my brief foray into Catholicism. The liberalism of the parish and the priests was high even among Portland, Oregon standards. Why I reflect on this at all is that there was never any mention of a pope or any idea that there was something beyond the parish other than a narrow social justice focus. I was apparently living just fine without a pope, and seemingly so was this parish.
It would be several years after The Thorn Birds that a pope came on my radar at all again. It was Blessed John Paul II’s trip to New York in 1979. The lens that I received this trip through was via the media. So my impression of the pope was that he caused traffic jams and enabled hordes of people hawking cheap plastic souvenirs. No doubt I heard about him again when he was shot, but it didn’t make much impression on me at the time.
In the succeeding years I would see reference to JPII every once in awhile. In my own move from liberalism to conservatism I would hear mention of him via a conservative political lens and started to view him somewhat favorably. Besides his being pope for a church of a nonexistent God he seemed pretty decent to me. On talk radio I also started hearing more about him in regards to the pro-life cause especially his phrase “Culture of Death.” The Temple in Jerusalem had the Court of the Gentiles. I had my own Court of the Believers. I would allow religious believers to walk in this court and I could even admire them. They just were allowed to enter into this outer court as long as they didn’t get too close to me.
I reflect on all this now since it seems so odd to me my previous disregard of the papacy and the fact now I am now on pins and needles waiting for white smoke. The palpable excitement, or is that papabile excitement? The incongruity between my previous papal blind spot and the thrill of a papal election. St. Catherine of Siena called the Holy Father the “sweet Christ on earth” and I have come to really appreciate this. Really though I am so thankful that there really is a Christ and that he started his Church. Sweet Christ might seem so sacharine, but it leaves no bitter taste in my mouth to repeat that phrase. Faith for a sinner such as myself is such a total gift and surprise that I am still taken aback by the wonder of it all. I wonder in my faith while also revealing in the mysteries of the faith and Jesus who died for me.
It can be easy to be caught up the worries and our own agendas regarding a new pope. We develop our own checklists of what the new pope must do. Unfortunately I can forget to put a check next to “Go out into the whole world and spread the good news.” There can be a certain amount of anxiety mixed in with the excitement. Still I come back to what Maureen at Aliens in This World had written on the date of Pope Benedict XVI resignation
Whatever happens, the Lord will no doubt send us a pope: maybe a saint, maybe a scourge, maybe a martyr-to-be, probably just a decent guy. The Lord loves His Bride, His fishing boat partners (koinonia), His Church. It is the Lord who rules us and fathers us; the Pope is just his prime minister and vicar.
God will never leave us orphaned. We will have a new Papa soon.
Im just glad that my own long interregnum is over as I await a new pope.
What if they ran a Conclave like a Science Fiction Convention? Really they are all dressed up with funny hats anyway. Instead of voting for a Hugo they vote for the pope. Plus the whole ballot burning and the stoves and chimney have a decidedly steampunk flavor. The papabile could set up tables to provide and autograph any books or pastoral letters they have written. Maybe the Cardinals could dress up as their favorite saints. A kind of Cardinal Occupy Sistine play (Cosplay).
Well maybe not.
Really what I would like to see is a ClaveCon where the faithful can get together and wait for white smoke. Again you could have the fun aspects of a Science Fiction convention in dressing up and instead of Klingon’s and Anime characters there is certainly a treasury of Catholic history to pull from. Maybe even dress as your favorite Cardinal that you want to be pope. People trying to break into the Cardinal’s pro-conclave meeting shouldn’t have all the fun. Some large screen displaying the chimney of the Sistine Chapel along with perhaps EWTN’s coverage would be nice. Or maybe a screen with a stream of MSM coverage to laugh at waiting for a “crows ear” moment. Of course praying for the Cardinal-electors and the new pope would be an integral part of ClaveCon.
It would be fun to be surrounded by a group of faithful Catholics when it became time to shout “Habemus Papum!”. What fun when the proto-deacon of the College of Cardinals first says the first name of the new pope and you try to guess the last name based on it. Maybe a pope name pool with minor prizes with the entry fee being of course paid using PayPal (punningly appropriate).
Fun idea, but logistically not possible. We don’t exactly get much ramp up time or ability to plan ahead regarding papal elections and getting a convention center. Still the perfect religious order to arrange this would be Conventual Franciscan Friars.
The Weekly Benedict eBook – Volume 51
This is the 51st volume of The Weekly Benedict ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Benedict. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use. This is the wrap-up edition.
This volume covers material released during the last week for 22 February 2013 – 28 February 2013.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 51 – ePub (supports most readers)
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 51 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Benedict eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan goes over “A few bloopers” in regards to how Catholics see the Holy Father and what the Pope can actually do.