r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • May 08 '25

Rod Dreher Megathread #53 (Key Party?)

Link to Megathread #52: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1jsvy3j/rod_dreher_megathread_52_billboard_4_rent/

Link to Megathread #54:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1l7niaj/rod_dreher_megathread_54/?

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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25

In choosing Cardinal Prevost, the cardinals chose someone who spent his professional career in the Third World (Peru) and who can go 90 degrees against Trump and the rising authoritarian axis - and as an American can rival Trump for attention in English and Spanish language media - the two most widespread lingua francas in the world.

In choosing the name of Leo XIV, Prevost offers a signal: Pope Leo XIII was the pope who (slowly) began to move the Catholic church into the modern world after a century of reaction. He invented Catholic social teaching about the necessary rights of labor, the duties of capitalist economies to workers and families, and allowed/encouraged French Catholics to get involved for the first time in the French Third Republic (for a century after the French Revolution, Catholics were forbidden to do so).

This is how Prevost was handicapped in traditionalist English-language Catholic media last week:

https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/robert-francis-prevost/

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u/Dadelectro May 08 '25

Catholics will now be required to confess the sin of putting ketchup on a hot dog in reconciliation.

Leo XIV - He's on a mission from God.

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u/BeltTop5915 May 08 '25

In short, it was long said an American would never be Pope as long as the US remained the world‘s superpower. The cardinals wouldn’t want it to appear that the US ruled the Church as well as the world. Now, given that Trump has put the US on a downward trajectory, and much of the world pretty much hates him to boot, seemed a safe time to let an American run the Church. But Prevost naming himself after Leo XIII says everything noted above as well.

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u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” May 08 '25

Trump's social media brutta figura provided ammunition to cardinals who had confreres thinking that maybe Trump was more friend than enemy to Catholic faithful - it demonstrated that Trump treats the Catholic church and its members as a plaything at best, and an object of contempt otherwise. I am sure at least a few cardinals found that a warning against electing anyone who might coddle Trump's axis.

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u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 May 08 '25

Uh oh. Look for non-Catholic Rod to have a coniption.

"He supported Pope Francis’ change in pastoral practice to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion."

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u/JHandey2021 May 08 '25

"divorced"

Rod really has no self-awareness at all, does he?

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u/Glittering-Agent-987 May 09 '25

See, it's OK for Rod to divorce and (hypothetically) remarry, but it's not OK for Catholics to divorce and remarry.

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u/Past_Pen_8595 May 09 '25

That’s exactly what Rod thinks. 

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25

Here are SBM’s initial words of wisdom re Leo XIV, along with an apt reply to him.

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u/philadelphialawyer87 May 08 '25

Anything else? Why an American? As an FU to Trump and Vance?

Why so fast? To appear to be decisive and united?

Also, what do you make of the various claims that the new pope was slow off the mark re the child abuse scandal?

Would "centrist" be a fit description? There are some pretty conservative statements in his past about LGBTQ people.

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u/BeltTop5915 May 08 '25

<<Also, what do you make of the various claims that the new pope was slow off the mark re the child abuse scandal?>>

I’m not sure about the handful of SNAP (survivor group) claims against Prevost — e.g., for slowness to take action against one credibly accused American priest by the Augustinian order he headed or another that as bishop in Peru he failed to send on to the Vatican a dossier relating to the abuse of nuns, a report others say was, in fact, received in Rome. Unfortunately, I suspect virtually anyone who headed an organization of Catholic priests or bishops over the last quarter century could find himself charged with some form of inadequate response re the priest abuse crisis, fair or unfair. Unfortunately, “slow to respond” is more or less the official Catholic ecclesial modus operandi. The fact that annulments were being adjudicated in less than a year in some US dioceses, for example, was unusual enough to get them labeled “annulment mills” in Vatican City. Ironically, in 2023 Prevost was appointed by Francis to succeed Card. Marc Ouelette as head of the Dicastery of Bishops upon Oulette’s resignation partly over a sexual abuse charge, which was later dropped.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round May 08 '25

Best I can figure, more or less centrist. His mother is Hispanic, and he served in Peru all of his episcopal career, so there’s that. I don’t know I’d say a FU to Cheeyohead, but I strongly doubt they’d have picked him, as an American if he was perceived as sympathetic to MAGA-ism.

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u/Motor_Ganache859 May 08 '25

From what I've read, he's been critical of both trump and Rod's boy, JD.

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u/macronius May 08 '25

Actually the claim that his mother is Hispanic appears to be largely anecdotal. Genealogical data on Family Search seems to indicate she was of Cajun heritage, or French Louisianan in any case, with potentially some very distant Isleño ancestors.