Pope for the future

[ad hoc]

Francis is coming to my town at the beginning of June. This is going to be chaos innit? Better sign up for airbnb and fleece the flock.

[ad hoc]

I sort of half started this thread to see if I could add tags, but i can't, even though new threads get that "Tags: None" message.

[Duncan Gardner]

Plenty of taigs if not tags should show?

[elguapo4]

He can judge the 2019 melting snowman competition.

[ursus arctos]

Francis doesn't really get the kind of crowds that Wojtyła did, but I imagine that it doesn't require multitudes to overwhelm local facilities.

[Diable Rouge]

Francis is coming to my town at the beginning of June. This is going to be chaos innit? Better sign up for airbnb and fleece the flock.

Guess Romanian Catholics would be concentrated in Transylvania, given the Magyar connection?

[ad hoc]

The Székely (where I live) are fervently Catholic. There is a pilgrimage here to my town every year at pentecost of Hungarian speaking Catholics from all over the world that attracts approx 400,000 each year (in to a town of 40,000). Frank's visit this year is the week before so I'm not quite sure how it will get managed. I'm guessing that rather than a weekend of massive overcrowding, we'll have 10 days

[ad hoc]

Transylvanian Hungarians as a whole are more divided between Catholic and Calvinist and Unitarian (the Unitarian Church was founded in Transylvania )

[Gerontophile]

Interestingly, Louis CK's surname is Szekely.

[ad hoc]

Yes I knew that

[Lang Spoon]

Transylvanian Hungarians as a whole are more divided between Catholic and Calvinist and Unitarian (the Unitarian Church was founded in Transylvania )

Was the Unitarian Church founded under Ottoman rule? It seems the kind of church that would have more chance to thrive under an empire that didn't care about Christian heresies in the main if the tithes kept coming in (which I'm guessing is how Hungarian Calvinism survived too) than under say the Hapburgs.

[ad hoc]

Transylvania was never under Ottoman rule

[Lang Spoon]

It was a vassal State at critical periods, no?

[Heliotrope]

When he was in my town in 2015, part of the city was fenced off, with a few security checkpoints, so there were long lines to get in. Other streets around the perimeter were closed off to traffic, which was great. People liked that part so much that now there's a Free Streets day each year when a big stretch of some street is for pedestrians and bikes only, just for a few hours. Anyhow, I wonder if the huge security situation was just an American thing.

[Lang Spoon]

They closed off the entire Phoenix Park and surrounding streets (including mine) last year. Crowd was like a quarter of the expected but.

[ad hoc]

It was a sort of allied principality which remained semi independent

But I suspect that wasn't behind the founding of the Unitarian Church. Transylvania in general was always more Hungarian than fully Hapsburg. And there was a genuinely multicultural ethic* which was not really about making everyone RC.

(*Feudal as fuck and not in any way liberated or liberal. But peasants were peasants and not really subject to ethnic prejudice - just class prejudice)

[ad hoc]

A sign of how Catholic (and what type of Catholic) this place is can be gleaned from the reaction to this news, which is broadly "Fantastic, the Pope is coming here! I'm so proud! But I kind of wish it didn't have to be this Pope. He's going to come and tell us to be nice to immigrants and poufs isn't he? Shit, why couldn't we get one of the better Popes?"

[Duncan Gardner]

Potential pontiffs in the running

Pope Ardal O'Hanlon II (born Dougal McGuire). Imagine Trigger and Woody's lovechild, says wiki

Pope Erdelyi Tamas I, II, III, IV (stagename Tommy Ramone)

Pope-ess(cu) Transylvia's Mother (nee Skinhead O'Connor). She's incomparable

(Other Shane McGowan and the Popes are available)

[ad hoc]

This (one of the few independent news sources in Hungary) reports on the reactions of some of the more fervent FIDESZ supporters to this visit. Includes phrases like "This is not the pope, this is satan" and also there appears to be a new word "sorospapa" (the Soros Pope). He wants people to be sympathetic towards refugees you see, like the satan that he is.

https://444.hu/2019/01/20/maga-a-sat...-hivok-szerint

[ad hoc]

He's coming tomorrow. Schools are off today for some kind of pre-poping reason. He's just going to be here for a couple of hours of pontificating (literally, obviously, because he's the actual Pope) at an open air mass. Give 'em enough pope.

Forecast is for torrential rain, which is a shame (and I genuinely think it's a shame because I do realise that there are a lot of people for whom tomorrow is a deeply meaningful event)

[Duncan Gardner]

Speaking a a veteran sometime Catholic I am less sympathetic. After waiting 30 years for an international tournament I wasn't going to gurn about some hailstones

[Benjm]

On the upside, there's a decent business opportunity there for someone who has a couple of thousand plastic vials handy to capture the Holy Rainwater.

[Nefertiti2]

Great to see his Holiness in a Dacia

https://twitter.com/StirileProTV/status/1134409010428436480

[Snake Plissken]

One of the funniest things I've ever seen was at Clonmacnoise. This dad and his two daughters were mucking around at the lectern where the Pope gave mass back in the 80s and Dad was trying to get a picture of them.

"You can be a Cardinal and sit there, listening. While you can stand there and pretend to be the Pope. Right, hang on while I line up the photo... right, now say something that you would say if you were the Pope"

At which point the girl immediately pointed at her sister and yelled at the top of her voice "ARREST HER!"

[ad hoc]

TVR1, which is more or less the equivalent of BBC1, is broadcasting permanent Pope news. Priests in the studio, trying to find things to talk about while he's not visible, such as a 20 minute history of the popemobile. Romania has around 5% catholics, and the vast majority of the population is orthodox.