‘The Conclave would be anything but a meeting according to a set script. It’s going to be a dynamic interplay of persons and interests mixed with prayers for guidance from above.’
IT’S sad but understandable. Even while the late Pope’s body was still warm, Filipinos were already beginning to speculate on the identity of the next pope. With the hope, expressed or implied, that he be a Filipino.
Someone I know even suggested on Facebook that Filipinos start a petition urging the Conclave to elect Cardinal Tagle as the next Pope! As if that would move the Conclave, when the only one with the power to move the Conclave is the Holy Spirit! (Hehe).
Actually, the Vatican could make a lot of money and shore up its financial situation if it allowed text votes, with the caveat, of course, that in the end the voting would only be to gauge public sentiment but would in no way affect the outcome of the secret ballot. Such a system will be so much better than a second or third collection, which I suspect are usually never as big as the first.
But imagine text voting? With Filipinos said to send about 400 million texts daily – that’s about four texts for every living Filipino conveying the newborn and the infirm – the income into the coffers of the Vatican would be significant if this is allowed for, say, a five-day period!
The nice thing about this process of selecting a Pope from (theoretically) among all baptized Catholic men in the world is that nothing is pre-ordained. In fact, it’s said that you “enter the Conclave a Pope and exit a Cardinal,” meaning that usually the one eventually chosen is not one of those whose names are bandied about as “papabile.” So better not to publicly boost someone unless you want that someone to be “evicted” ala Pinoy Big Brother.
Speaking of PBB, is it true that the results there are pre-ordained? Someone who used to work with the network running the show once claimed it was so, with all the voting and all the inclusion of new faces every now and then just designed to add drama to what would otherwise be a boring process. If true, it’s done in such a way that viewers are captivated for various reasons: the conflict thrills them, the love triangles thrill them, the exposed torsos thrill them – all hiding the fact that this is like The Truman Show, where the producers are just following a script.
The Conclave would be anything but a meeting according to a set script. It’s going to be a dynamic interplay of persons and interests mixed with prayers for guidance from above.
In the end, just as PBB fans await the exit of evicted duos outside the house of Kuya, Catholics worldwide and those captivated by the whole process will just have to await the eventual emergence of the white smoke from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, the most significant house of God used for this very purpose.
Pre-ordained it is not, which makes the wait even more exciting, even for lapsed Catholics like me.
