Rumours And More Rumours

We will remember this one as such a pleasant guy…

Another week, another rumour of (please, God!) resignation of Nobody’s Darling, Pope Francis The Godless. This time, there is a fact and a rumour.

Monsignor Marini, good guy and long-suffering liturgy specialist of our guy, has been made a Bishop. This is the sort of gifts that are made before going away.

The rumour is that Francis might be thinking of a motu proprio concerning the discipline of abdicated Popes, as in: can he call himself emeritus, how may he dress, etc. This has some people thinking, adding rumour to rumour, that Francis is preparing his own exit and wants it cleaner than the unspeakable mess caused by Ratzinger; a man who, wanting to pull a Celestino without getting the blame, invented the application of the emeritus stuff to the office of the Pope.

I am, personally, not interested in the motu proprio. Whatever Francis does, his successor may well undo. I would not read much into something that might just be the result of Francis just being tired that even Celestino still has much more prestige than him.

The appointment of Marini, though, is, to me, a much bigger affair, then it really looks like one of those appointments made before the farewell. I am always too optimistic, and the good Lord gave me a remarkable ability to see the glass as half full. But this is another one of those things – and a fact to boot – that make you think.

Mind, it can still be that we are all wrong, and that this is just a sort of confirmation bias, made worse by our long suffering under this man. But one after the other, these little signals start to add up…

Pray for the end of this Pontificate, and for a successor that God, in His Goodness, may shape into a decent Pope.