Comment: the Mighty Lobby and fear of the Past Plus: the pains of a spiteful Vaticanist

With the storm less strong at the moment, we will be quite honest: we were not very bothered by the words pronounced by Pope Francis to the religious of CLAR and that we were the first to bring to worldwide attention. Considering the whole text, we are pleased with most of it: on the "gay lobby" that is mighty and powerful within the Vatican and his denunciation of it, on Vatican corruption, on new age sisters, on old orders with no vocations and a Materialistic approach to the assets given to them by Catholics for the work of God and not for their own selves... Was he critical of an apparently Traditionalist group? Possibly (we do not know to which specific organizations he was referring). On the other hand, he never stops talking of his greatest spiritual influence, his grandmother, who could only be counted as a Traditional Catholic these days... 

So, while he is strong in his call for Catholics not to be afraid of the future, he seems to be somewhat very afraid of the past. In his own meditation for his daily mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae today, the Pope said, "We take the values of this culture a little bit from here, a little bit from there ... They want to make this law? All right, let’s go ahead and make this law. Let’s broaden the boundaries here a little. In the end, let me tell you, this is not true progress. It is adolescent progressivism: just like teenagers who in their enthusiasm want to have everything and in the end? You slip up ... It’s like when the road is covered in ice and the car slips and go off track... This is the other temptation at the moment! We, at this moment in the history of the Church, we cannot go backwards or go off the track!"

Quite true about "teen Progressivism". But would it be so bad to move backwards if that meant having more Catholics with as firm a faith as that of his own nonna?... Better than having a powerful "lobby" manipulating this same faith...

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In a very belated article on the Pope's words to CLAR, a certain Vaticanist who has not had a big story for some time says today:

The reference to traditionalism sparked an immediate reaction among professed Ratzingerians who pointed to a discontinuity with Benedict XVI. But these censors got it wrong. It was the then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself who spoke about the “Pelagianism of the pious".

Traditionalists are very grateful to Benedict XVI, but they are surely not "Ratzingerians". Which is why no Traditional website spoke of any "discontinuity" with the previous pontificate because of these specific words.

On the other hand, the Vaticanist above is the one, in fact, who can be numbered among the "widows" of the past pontificate: he used to fed big stories in those years, provided by those who thought he was a friend of the Pope, when he was nothing of the sort. It is not our fault that he and other Italian Vaticanists (and a famous American one) slept on the job for almost 24 hours in one of the most exciting stories of the young Pontificate - actually, the most exciting story, because it is in fact the first one that bridges the critical events of 2011 and 2012 (including, but not limited, to "Vatileaks") and the current Pontificate, through the mention of the mighty Vatican "lobby" by the new Pope; a lobby that, all things seem to point, was not exactly foreign to those events...