djt is doing bad things to the far-right brand rn, especially in europe. So I have hope.

And as far as Wrestlemania Easter is concerned, Easter had the biggest story moment. Holy shit. So I think this pope has opportunities to re-establish what it means / looks like to be righteous. That feels like too much hope but that's fine i can have...

hope4pope

sorry that didn't turn out to be a very serious reply

I totally forgot it was easter. I guess there is some relevance. I can understand why the lore of the pope makes him a big deal (jesus's nth-removed best friend!), and the whole "easter, jesus, death" think.

I've worked indirectly with a church of radical leftist catholics (this is not an exaggeration, these guys fucking rule) but I don't know how large the fraction of catholicism they represent.

I very much want a reason to have optimism for the world, and these thoughts gave me new things to consider which adjust me a small notch more optimistic. The positive delta for hope for humanity is not much, but we've been increasingly starved for such positive deltas for so long that this small morsel feels like a feast.

with so many other things to be worried about the uncertainty around how the next pope will be is pretty low on my list

yeah that's pretty fair

It's hard to really say for sure whether the next pope will be better or worse, or what impact they will have.

But I do think the pope's influence is somewhat diminished by how hyper-polarized the world has become today. No homophobic Catholic will hear the pope say that gays aren't so bad and have their minds changed, they'll dig in their heels and complain that now the pope has gone woke too.

I hear that Frankie was stacking the College with his boys, like 80% of eligible voters were appointed by him. The new guy is still going to be top dog of the world's biggest reactionary institution but I don't think he's going to be the flog 'em and hang 'em type.

I'm pretty sure most of the cardinals that decide the next pope were appointed by this one, so I don't expect they'll be that different. But there's more than a billion catholics, so even minor differences can have big effects.

ex catholic, many feelings about this sorry.

Francis is in and of himself a complicated figure of course. He did a lot of good for sure and I feel he was one of the better people to be leading the church. I like him a lot and he has a kind of really cool background. Dude was a chemical lab technician for a while, from Latin America, actually lived reasonably non-extravagantly and cared about the poor. Despite memes, his last appearance was NOT the JD vance castigation, but calling for a Gaza ceasefire. The whole "trans people are nuclear weapons" and "letting the abuse scandal fester" bits sucked though but every pope would do this also.

Overall I don't see things getting markedly better with his death. Some people hold out hope for a radical vatican 3 that makes it ok to be gay and stops calling trans people evil and lets women finally receive one of the even sacraments they've been barred from (fuck you timothy and your stupid fucking epistle). Vatican 3 will not happen, though. Vatican 2 was already so controversial it sparked a huge sedevacantist movement and the church is still struggling to actually institute all of it.

Overall I'd say we can look to the history of the church a bit for a picture of what a "moderate" pope looks like with fascism on the rise: Pius XII. Fascism was sweeping europe and killing millions, Pius was content to lightly complain about Germany and focus on excommunicating all communists from the church lol. There's a lot of controversy surrounding him and he was a mixed sort of figure, who did some good! But I hate his guts so you get the very biased version.

The church is very content to work alongside fascist movements. Naziism just went a bit too far for them, but spain's fascism was entirely compatible and theologically sound. If you look into the theology of this stuff you find the church is very very comfortable with totalitarianism, as you might expect.

As a whole I don't expect huge changes even if one of the insane evil guys gets it. Despite everything most Catholics barely practice the faith and are effectively Protestant lol. I've seen my own family flirt with sedevacantism because they're much too far right for Francis.

As with most things it's really down to local concerns. The person's church and diocese is going to provide the biggest influence on them and a changing pope doesn't necessarily change the local conditions a lot.

alternatively next guy starts the childrens crusade 2

but genuinely, if it's another cool guy I will permit myself a Liberalism and pop open a bottle of something nice and celebrate. like it's still a death cult but it's MY death cult and I still feel nice when my death cult guy says something epic

Hey my local catholics are awesome anarchists; they rule also! They do a ton of excellent, concrete work for local people, provide food and housing etc etc.

Leftist catholics aren't super common, especially because of the various communist purges the church went through and the nature of the institution, but they do exist. in some areas there's some cool syncretic liberation theology stuff happening.

We could be neighbors! Maybe YOUR catholics and MY catholics are the SAME CATHOLICS :0

Nothing to apologize for, I appreciate this post a lot. Your perspective is showing me a lot of things I didn't know about before (I didn't know "Vatican 2" was a thing, for example, or what a "childrens crusade" was) and I appreciate having this perspective.

I have nothing to add, only a "thank you for posting, this is a very good post"