The Church is exhausted, waiting for change. Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, the writer and theologian, says that the fatigue is so acute that cardinals he knows are hoping for another John Paul I: “Somebody smiling, somebody calm and private who writes letters to Pinocchio and will give the Church a couple of years to relax.” James Carroll says that he’s been thinking more in terms of another Mikhail Gorbachev: “You know, I used to think we needed another John XXIII. Now I think we need a Gorbachev, someone who says that the days of the Party are over.” Father Richard McBrien, the Notre Dame theologian, hopes for “anyone who’s not beholden to one of those groups”: in particular, the lay order Opus Dei, which was founded in Spain in 1928, and was a friend to Franco’s state through four stultifying decades, and which John Paul II revived as the first personal prelature—accountable only to him—in Church history. It is now the most politically insistent order in the Catholic world, and said to be the richest.
La idea del catolicismo que se tiene por ac