For the next three weeks or so, the news is likely to be all about one dead guy who, as Kristjan Wager put it, “represented a bigoted organization, covering up for child molesters”. I now add to my current depression the worry about what the Trump/Musk regime and its gaggle of grifters will get away with while nobody is paying attention.
With any luck, I’m overreacting.
Update: I haven’t been following Francis because I don’t really care; but I guess he was one of the good guys after all. Robert Reich posted a eulogy on his substack; so I defer to Reich’s better knowledge of Francis himself; but I keep the same opinion of the Roman Catholic Church and the same worry about what more important news might be missed.
Don’t worry, Trump; and his goons will find a way to make this all about them. Maybe they’ll claim for “security reasons” Vatican City has to become part of the US, with Donald Jr. and the new Pope.
I am very sloppy at the moment. This site has needed an edit function forever.
It does have a Preview function, which is the next best thing.
Whether or not he was a ‘good guy’ depends on where you draw the line; I will say that he was probably about as progressive as you could get and still have a chance of being elected Pope in what is fundamentally an extremely conservative organization. The more Conservative wing of the church hated him, mostly because he was a Jesuit, who are the people who actually think and teach, and they automatically distrust and hate anyone who actually thinks.
(I said the same thing with ‘as progressive as you could get and still have a chance of being elected Pope’ about John Paul II, and he wasn’t particularly progressive, just good at faking it on the world stage.)
Sadly most of the growth in the Catholic Church has been in the more actively Conservative wing, so there aren’t a lot of potential replacements as open to dealing with the rest of the world as Francis was.
jenorafeuer: yeah, “good guy” might be a bit of a stretch; but I think he was clearly better than what a lot of the alternatives might have been, and might be shortly.
So y’all are saying Pope Francis was sort of like democracy as described by Churchill: the worst we could get, not counting all the others.