TEN PREDICTIONS ABOUT THIS PAPACY

I'm not a soothsayer and I may be wildly wrong in what I'm sensing is developing as this papacy gets underway:

1. A key goal of the cardinals who elected Leo may be "unity."

2. What many Catholic leaders mean by "unity" is "keeping the hard right in the fold."

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3. "Unity" as it's spoken of in Catholic circles is a both-sidesing approach that refuses to take a side on critically important issues like, Does the humanity of LGBTQ people count in the very same way the humanity of everyone else does?

4. In 1860, "unity" was about saying that "both sides" — pro-slavery and abolitionism — were right, had good points.

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5. You can't both-sides moral issues that require you to take a stand for what is fundamentally right and against what is fundamentally wrong.

6. The media, particularly secular media, will bear down hard on themes of "unity," "healing," bridge-building, with this pope.

7. It's in their best interest to do that because they want to mute the witness of the Catholic hierarchy to Catholic social teaching.

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8. If as some people have predicted, Leo continues and even enhances Francis' stress on synodality, he'll be building a catch-22 for himself when it comes to trying to "unite" around women's issues and LGBTQ issues.

9. A majority of Catholics have long since rejected — this is the sensus fidelium — official Catholic sexual moral teaching as plainly wrong, and synodal discussion will increasingly tell Catholic leaders this plainly.

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10. Catholic pastoral leaders have sacrificed the future of the church to maintaining the clerical system as it now stands, and their bitter resistance to admitting that sexual moral teaching as it now stands needs to be reassessed and that women and LGBTQ people have rights equal to those of straight males is all about maintaining clericalism.

"Unity" comes with a very steep price.

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