Letter #73, 2022, Thursday, June 9: Endings

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Letter #73, 2022, Thursday, June 9: Endings

[2022-06-09]

[Engleză]

In Rome in recent days, there is much talk about “August 27” and “August 28” — and on what “endings” there may be in the fall days that follow those last days of August.

Why August 27?

Because on that day, Pope Francis has announced, the Pope will hold a consistory to create 21 new cardinals, 16 of whom will be eligible (because under age 80) to vote in a papal conclave.

In this action, Francis, after nine and a half years as Pope, will put his own stamp definitively on the character of the College of Cardinals.

Here is a list of the names of the new cardinals:

Cardinal Electors under 80 who will be able to enter a conclave to elect the next Pope:

1. Archbishop Arthur Roche (British) — Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments

2. Archbishop Lazzaro You Heung-sik (South Korean) — Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy

3. Archbishop Fernando Vérgez Alzaga (Spanish) — President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and President of the Governorate for Vatican City State

4. Archbishop Jean-Marc Aveline — Metropolitan Archbishop of Marseille, France

5. Bishop Peter Okpaleke — Bishop of Ekwulobia, Nigeria

6. Archbishop Leonardo Ulrich Steiner — Metropolitan Archbishop of Manaus, Brazil

7. Archbishop Filipe Neri António Sebastiăo di Rosário Ferrăo — Archbishop of Goa and Damăo, India

8. Bishop Robert Walter McElroy – Bishop of San Diego, California, United States

9. Archbishop Virgilio Do Carmo Da Silva — Archbishop of Dili, East Timor

10. Bishop Oscar Cantoni — Bishop of Como, Italy

11. Archbishop Anthony Poola — Archbishop of Hyderabad, India

12. Archbishop Paulo Cezar Costa — Metropolitan Archbishop of Brasília, Brazil

13. Bishop Richard Kuuia Baawobr — Bishop of Wa, Ghana

14. Archbishop William Goh Seng Chye — Archbishop of Singapore

15. Archbishop Adalberto Martínez Flores — Metropolitan Archbishop of Asunción, Paraguay

16. Archbishop Giorgio Marengo (Italian) – Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

New cardinals over 80:

1. Archbishop Jorge Enrique Jiménez Carvajal — Archbishop Emeritus of Cartagena, Colombia

2. Archbishop Lucas Van Looy — Archbishop Emeritus of Gent, Belgium

3. Archbishop Arrigo Miglio — Archbishop Emeritus of Cagliari, Italy

4. Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J. – Professor of Theology

5. Msgr. Fortunato Frezza – Canon of Saint Peter’s Basilica

***
More than half…

So what will be the composition of the College of Cardinals after August 27?

Of the present total number of 116 cardinals eligible to vote in a conclave (that is, under age 80), this is a chart of how many were chosen by each recent Pope:

11 were created by Pope John Paul II (9.5%);

38 were created by Pope Benedict XVI (32.8%); and

67 were created by Pope Francis (57.8%).

The total of the cardinals created by the two former pontiffs, John Paul and Benedict, was 42.3%, considerably more that the 33% plus one vote required to block the election of a candidate.

Now, after August 27, with the creation of 16 additional voting cardinals, at least for a brief time, raising the total to 132, that percentage drops considerably, to just 35%, only slightly more than the 33% plus one vote needed to withhold the necessary 2/3s approval. This is how the percentages look:

John Paul II: 11 (6.3%)

Benedict XVI: 38 (28.7%)

Francis: 83 (62.9%)

A full two-thirds of the 132 voting cardinals — the required two-thirds majority to elect a Pope in the days after the August 27 Consistory (of course, this number changes continually as some cardinals age and surpass age 80 and lose eligibility to vote, and some pass away even before age 80) — would be 88 cardinals.

Now, after this upcoming August 27, 2022, Consistory — the name for the gathering at which cardinals are created — Francis will have named 83 of the cardinals, just a few less than the 88 (two-thirds) required for a papal election.

***
Election rules

Pope John Paul II changed the rules of papal elections in 1996. Previously, a candidate had to secure a majority of two-thirds to be elected Pope (two-thirds plus one vote if the number of cardinals does not divide by three).

John Paul II ruled that the voting could shift to a simple majority (50% plus one vote) after about 12 days of inconclusive voting. (Note: the cardinals chosen by Pope Francis are, of course, well over the 50% majority of the College.)

In 2007, Pope Benedict passed a decree reverting back to the two-thirds majority, thus encouraging cardinals to reach consensus, rather than one bloc backing a candidate with more than half the votes and then holding out for 12 days to ensure his election.

If, after three days of balloting, nobody has gained the two-thirds majority, voting is suspended for a maximum of one day to allow a pause for prayer, informal discussion and what is described as “a brief spiritual exhortation” by the senior cardinal in the Order of Deacons.

At the end of the election, a document is drawn up giving the results of the voting at each session, and handed over to the new Pope. It is kept in an archive in a sealed envelope, which can be opened only on the orders of the pope.

The only clue about what is going on inside the Sistine Chapel is the smoke that emerges twice a day from burning the ballot papers. Black signals failure. The traditional white smoke means a new Pope has been chosen.

***

There is much more that could be said about the College of Cardinals, but this is sufficient for the moment.

More on all of this in future letters.

***

But why are people also talking about August 28?

Because on that day, Pope Francis has just announced, he will leave Rome and travel to a town in the very center of Italy, near the Gran Sasso mountain, named Aquila, where Pope Celestine V — the only Pope who resigned the papacy in the more than 700 years prior to Pope Benedict’s resignation in 2013 — is buried.

There is a great feast of pardon celebrated on that day, and Pope Francis has announced he will attend it.

But this proposed trip is very unusual.

It is the first time Pope Francis will have ever gone to Aquila.

In Rome in August, it is usually so boiling hot that it is not customary for the Pope to travel at all.

Nor is it customary to have an event like a Consistory in August, in such enervating heat — temperatures often rising above 100 degrees.

Yet, Pope Benedict XVI went to Aquila, and to the tomb of Pope Celestine V, in 2009, and there, at the tomb, he took off his pallium, a cloth he was wearing around his neck in sign of his papal authority, and placed it on the tomb of Celestine, leaving it there.

Four years later he resigned.

(Here is a related report that I wrote 12 years ago, after the visit to Aquila of Pope Benedict, but long before his resignation, that might be of some interest, link).

So… many of Rome are now openly saying that they wonder if Pope Francis may not be considering resigning the papacy in the near future, after the August 27 Consistory, and after the August 28 visit to Aquila, where Pope Celestine, who resigned the papacy in 1294, is buried, and where Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned the papacy in 2013, when in 2009, four years before he resigned.

Still, others say Pope Francis has no intention of resigning, and leaving the Church in the peculiar situation of having two “retired Popes,” but may be about to issue new regulations defining the parameters of… papal resignations.

See this story for one discussion of this view by the respected Italian Vaticanist Andrea Gagliarducci: link.

***
History continues

All of this may serve as a prologue to the excellent essay I send below.

It is by American Catholic scholar Patrick J. Deneen.

Deneen argues against a certain liberal and secular American worldview, espoused most emphatically almost three decades ago now by political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a famous book called The End of History and the Last Man (link).

Deneen maintains that this secular worldview has been granted great authority, more than it deserves, in the thinking of our elites.

This has resulted, among other consequences, in the marginalization of the traditional Christian worldview.

This traditional worldview, Deneen argues is, in the end, much more realistic than the secular worldview, and its marginalization and rejection has misled our society and culture, until now we face various disasters, and the unfolding threat of various, perhaps avoidable, miseries in human affairs.

Given that all of us, including the papacy, and the Church as a whole, and various societies around the globe, have come to see that the liberal state was not the end of history, but only a brief stage… given that we must continue to live in this real world… given that Pope Francis may be preparing the “ending” of his papacy (and the beginning of another) by his choice of new cardinals… given the Pope’s announced plan to go to Aquila on the day after the Consistory, to the tomb of Pope Celestine V… and given that all of us must concentrate mightily to prepare for the economic, social, political and health challenges now looming on every side, due to the poor choices of many in positions of authority (and make no mistake, the situation is quite serious)… given all this, it seemed fitting to re-publish this excellent essay immediately, here and now. —RM
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The End of Fukuyama (link)

Liberalism Needs Its Enemies

By Patrick J. Deneen

May 23

Recently I appeared alongside Francis Fukuyama at a conference held at Michigan State University.

The conference – sponsored by the LeFrak Forum on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy – was devoted to the theme “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” the title of Fukuyama’s latest book.

The panel was designed to provide a stark contrast between a view that would seek to redeem liberalism, and one hoping to bury it.

I think, it’s fair to say, we fulfilled our assigned roles, disagreeing fundamentally on the cause and destiny of our discontents.

I began first by emphasizing our deeply unfortunate state of affairs — pointing to unhappiness especially on the left over deep and pervasive economic inequality, and, on the right, cultural degradation that has given rise to steadily increasing “deaths of despair” — and linked both “discontents” directly to the expected consequences of liberalism’s core assumptions about human nature and the nature of human political and social order.

Fukuyama praised liberalism as arguably the most humane and decent regime ever to have come into being.

He argued that there was no alternative that could possibly appeal to a people that valued prosperity, dignity, respect for law, and individual rights and liberty.

He agreed with my portrait of our “discontents,” but disagreed that they were endemic to liberalism itself.

In short, we looked at the same world and reached radically different conclusions about what we saw there.

Fukuyama advanced three main claims, all of which he asserted were drawn not from the more abstruse realms of political theory (at a conference dominated by Straussian political theorists), but grounded in empirical observations about the world. His three main claims were:

Liberalism arose in the aftermath of the Reformation as a solution to the wars of religion, and provided a way of arriving at peace and political stability without requiring metaphysical or theological agreement by citizens.
What we today regard as the ills of liberalism (economic and social) in fact are pathologies that do not necessarily arise from a healthy liberal order. They are, rather, contingent and accidental and thus can be cured without killing off the patient.
Liberalism should look to its many past accomplishments for evidence of future results. Because liberalism abandoned an effort to achieve “the common good,” it allowed for the flourishing of individual goods that culminated in a wealthy, tolerant, and peaceful political order. Its ability to provide prosperity and peace are proven by appeal to evidence and reality.

The three points are related. Because liberalism was premised upon the abandonment of a vision of human order based upon a conception of the common good (Claim #1), and instead rested on a modus vivendi of tolerance and limited government that protected property rights, it allowed for the flourishing of global peace and prosperity (Claim #3).

Its current “discontents” can be cured by restraining the extremes of the economic libertarianism, woke-ism, and post-liberal conservatism (Claim #2).

A genuine liberalism at once lies in our future, but can be seen in our recent past in which these three elements were muted or non-existent.

[continued below]

While Fukuyama claimed to the realistic political scientist and historian in the company of ethereal theorists, basing his claims upon reality-based evidence of liberalism’s acceptable costs in comparison to its greater benefits, reflection on the empirical soundness of his claims suggests otherwise.

All three claims evince a strained effort to conform his perceptions of reality to the demands of his theory.

Whether through selective history, wishful thinking, or a nostalgic fantasy of how the future will imitate a particular moment of the past, Fukuyama proves to be anything but a realist.

His is a fantastical liberalism that rests ultimately upon a tendentious and highly selective retelling of evidence from the past and the present to extrapolate a vision of the future that is at once implausible but also one that shrouds the vicious nature of the liberal regime.

My responses, in brief and to each point, follow:

1. Fukuyama, like many of the participants at the conference, appealed to the familiar story of liberalism’s origins as offering “articles of peace” in a time of religious fratricide and war.

Sursa: www.InSideTheVatican.com

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