Conservatives and traditionalists in the Catholic Church still have hope that the next pope will restore Church traditions lost under Pope Francis.
These include the end of the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass and a less ambiguous papacy when it comes to matters of faith and morals. This hope exists even as a very ill Pope Francis meets with his hospital advisers to craft even greater, radical reforms. His latest edict, for instance, was a letter to liturgists reminding them that the liturgy should be kept simple and that ceremonial pomp should be avoided at all costs.
Simplifying the already Protestantized Mass would reduce it to a ceremonial on a par with Unitarian or a United Church of Christ services.
But what of the pope that will come after Francis, the iconoclast?
It is unlikely he will be a conservative but rather a pope who will further Francis’ revolution in ways that will shock the Catholic world. Francis’ revolution has already been won; the Church just needs a pope who will varnish the woodwork and transform it into a permanent ceramic.
Prophets, psychics, mystics, pundits: all have their views on who will be the next pope. St. Malachy’s (1094-1148) 112 Latin descriptions of future popes from the time of Pope Celestine II (1143-1144) to the present, has Pope Francis as the last pope although the counting from the 12th Century onward gets complicated when one considers the various “anti-popes” in between; this throws Malachy’s prediction off-kilter.
So there may be many popes after Bergoglio. Just because Malachy couldn’t “see” anyone after the last pope on his list, Peter the Roman, doesn’t mean the line of succession ends. The “ending” the saint sees is more likely a foreshadowing of a change in the nature of the papacy, a change so radical that the Chair of Peter becomes unrecognizable in the traditional sense.
What’s most likely to happen is a change in the pope’s role: A switch from sovereign pontiff to mere figurehead with zero administrative power and no say over faith and morals.
Confession: I play psychics like some people play horses. I think I’ve gotten good at it. Most psychics – especially when it comes to politics – are embarrassing; they can’t help but play partisan favorites when they allow their ideological beliefs to influence predictions. The web is full of these charlatans, especially woke women readers who convinced their subscribers that Kamala Harris would coast to victory back in November, or that Donald Trump wouldn’t survive his Inauguration.
Craig Hamilton-Parker, a psychic-medium in the UK, has been right about Donald Trump since 2015. He’s right more than he’s wrong. His impeccable Trump record got me listening to his recent Pope predictions. These predictions confirmed more or less what I felt anyway: He predicts enormous, shocking changes in the Catholic Church sometime after a new pope is elected in 2025.
Though Parker cautions that these changes won’t happen immediately – they will occur over the reign of several popes – when the cycle is complete, the Catholic Church will have reconsidered all of the doctrines developed since the Council of Nicaea while incorporating much of the (formerly rejected) Gnostic Gospels in its belief system.
The end result will be a “democratic” Catholic Church that will draw in large numbers of people of other faiths, “a Church completely transformed.”
Parker has no stake in anything Catholic. He’s more or less an ashram-oriented Hindu, oddly conservative in many ways but true to what he sees whether or not it fits into his belief system.
He sees a future pope kneeling before a saint from the East. He says the saint could be a non-Christian holy person – Pachamama in the flesh? – although he never mentions the possibility of a saint from Eastern Orthodoxy, which makes sense especially if the role of the papacy is reduced to a figure head or a “first among equals,” as it was in the first centuries of The Church.
He believes the next pope will speak German, meaning he could be German, Swiss or Austrian.
“I saw a new pope in 2025,” he says.
“Visions come to me in a flash. They can come unconsciously as a flash. I saw the future pope and I saw that he was speaking in German. He is also associated with the image of a swan. That’s an odd symbol because I’ve never seen swan symbolism associated with the papacy.”
Early last year Parker predicted that Francis would start to become very sick in January 2025. Since he is not one to predict death, he only says that there will be a new pope sometime in 2025.
When he started to name possible new popes he began with a blunder.
He mentioned Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, OP, Archbishop of Vienna from 1995 to 2025. Schonborn retired in January of this year at 80 years old, so his participation in a future papal conclave is not possible.
(Schonborn, it should be noted, was famous for his ecumenical Masses in Vienna’s historic St. Stephen’s Cathedral, where priests and lay participants beat drums and did dances around the high altar.)
While a non-Catholic can be excused for not recognizing when a cardinal is no longer pope material, the prelate Parker puts his money on is Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, 71, former head of Germany’s bishops who became controversial when he openly questioned Catholic doctrine.
While Marx’s name should give Christians pause – adult porn meets communist super hero – the ex-theology professor started out as a conservative when he was made a metropolitan-archbishop by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. Marx was then elevated to the cardinalate in 2010. With the election of Pope Francis in 2013, Marx shed his conservatism and became a radical proponent of welcoming migrants and heralding the dangers of climate change. On a 2016 trip to Israel as head of Germany’s bishops, he hid his pectoral cross — an action that many critics called a “denial of faith.”
Marx’s critics say he has a “history of opportunism” and that he’s “driving the Church into schism and secular meaninglessness.” Bishop Joseph Strickland of Texas said in 2022 that “Cardinal Marx has left the Catholic faith.” Marx is famous for his statement that the Catholic catechism “is not set in stone.” In May 2015 he hosted the “secret synod” at Pontifical Gregorian University in order to sway the larger Synod on the Family to accept his contention that homosexuality is not a sin and the Church must “normalize same-sex relations based on a theology of Love.”
Marx also believes the Church should sanction same-sex encounters, like chance meetings in bars or steam baths.
He believes the question of women’s priesthood should remain open.
In Germany he is a vocal critic of that country’s conservative Alternative for Germany Party. The year 2018 saw him celebrating the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. On many occasions he has stated that Catholic teaching owes a lot to the writings of Karl Marx.
Parker also mentions papal contenders Cardinal Kurt Koch of Basel, Switzerland, a noted ecumenist, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk of the Netherlands, and Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne.
Cardinal Woelki, although head of the conservative minority of bishops in Germany, has stated that same sex couples in long faithful relationships should be able to have their relationships blessed by a priest in the same manner as heterosexual couples. Woelki, however, once reprimanded a priest for blessing same sex couples and he once preached that homosexuality was against “the order of creation”. The theological struggle going on in Woelki’s head is more than obvious; the switch-hitting is perhaps the result of the pressure he was under from the German media to be more like Cardinal Marx.
As for the two remaining German speaking cardinals, only one is authentically conservative, Cardinal Eijk, who has a license in moral theology and a doctorate in philosophy. He also happens to be a physician of internal medicine and has a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. A truly saintly intellect, in 2001 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Some believe the hemorrhage was caused by his intense work in attempting to stem the tide of the increasing secularization and loss of faith in Dutch society.
But according to the Hindu sage Parker, it is definitely Marx who will win the crown, the cardinal who has been called “a lightning rod in Francis’ papacy.”