Weigel's 'The Next Pope' has a crimped, Americanist vision of papacy

Weigel's 'The Next Pope' has a crimped, Americanist vision of papacy
I prefer Garry Wills to George Weigel any day of the week and twice on Sundays. George pines for the anachronistic Church which feared the Enlightenment. His book sounds like the Cliff Notes version of miniseries The Young Pope, which chronicles the mythical American Pope Pius XIII. Both are a waste of time.

Scholasticism is dead.  It's last gasps were the 5 Dubya and Veritatis Splendor. I tear down the encyclicals from Mirare Vos to Vertiatis in The Illuminati Respond to the Papal Anachorinists, which is 200 pages longer than Weigel's and is better reading.  The anachronists pine for the days when the people had no access to the scriptures. Those days are gone.

The heretic hunting of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has been replaced with its atonement for the conspiracy of silence in dealing with the abuse of children. No longer do authors like me get the free advertising that condemnation brings. Pity that.

The Church of the future will not rely on the papacy, which according to the Third Secret of Fatima and St. Malachy, is fated to end. It will likely expand the Council of Cardinals to continental patriarchies (or even Matriarchies). Francis can only take us so far. For the Church to survive, it needs to go further. It certainly will not go backward. Church Militant and its sedevacantist fellow travelers are a dying breed. The counter-revolution of St. John Paul has ended.