Understanding Vatican Diplomacy

A clear 21 minute summary.

As a child, the town I grew up in was roughly evenly divided between Catholics, Lutherans, and Methodists. Despite attending a public school, we all ate fish on Fridays during Lent, and nobody thought much about it.

I don’t say much directly in public, but I have now been sober twice as long as I was a drunken/drugged dipshits. Part of that transition involved a couple of members of The Hermetic Intercessors of the Lamb, and a man named Larry G., who was a bit older than my father, and he’d been a radioman on a TBF Avenger late during WWII. Larry had been sober as long as I am now when we met in 1995. He had sought to complete the Ignatian Disciplines as part of his spiritual growth, but his priest waved him off - “You’ve completed the twelve steps, right?”

For a variety of reasons, I became very interested in the history of western civilization, and seeing The Messenger in the theater in 1999 was a triggering event. This was the first time in adulthood that I spent a two year period focused on a specific issue. I am a product of a culture, at a specific place and time. Not long after I finished the Dawood translation of the Quran I received the White Tara initiation from Gehlek Rinpoche. I try to be kind to my associates who are members of the Abrahamic religions, but my patience for religiously motivated extremists was gone years ago.

Anyway, that’s a bit of history behind how I came to be watching this video on a Thursday night. I knew bits and pieces about the current diplomacy of the Holy See, now I’m much better informed, and more than a little bit impressed. One small cog in this machine passed away recently, I’ve been involved in his funeral arrangements, and just like Larry G., I’m wishing I’d spent more time talking to him about how things worked.