"If you can read this you are a pope"

This pope dying leaves an opening.
And it’s a profound, meaningful one of great import.

Will the conclave bring in someone else with his vision, love, and progressive values —
or will they add to visions of a dictatorial, bigoted, and unimaginative hellscape with an evil pope?

It’s neither irrational nor Catholic of me to care about this.
The marginalized, the poor, the huddled masses, the oppressed are always going to need champions —.champions need champions.

and especially in this time, where it seems we’ve chosen to betray them, and ourselves, for some escapist space mission.

My heart hurts.
I am grateful for this pope.
And I’m prayerful that the rock will move and reveal someone good for the job the planet and her people need.

Charlotte Clymer wrote a complex tribute/piece —
as a gender queer woman, someone whose existence the Church has refused to affirm,
and whom the state is actively trying to debate out of reality.
She doesn’t smooth over his contradictions —
she names the violence, the failure, the slow and often painful shifts.
And still, she wrote:
“I’m far more grateful for Pope Francis than I am disappointed in him. I thank my lucky stars that the infamously socially-conservative Vatican was, for a time, led by a man who wasn’t content with the bare minimum or settling for what he could see but, instead, always seemed to be considering what might be possible.”

That matters.
That kind of opening — however incomplete — still matters.
Especially from within a fortress built to resist change.

We’re not in the conclave.
We’re not going to get Jude Law to give it a go IRL.
This isn’t good television.

We’re really here.
Carrying ourselves forward as matter.
Mattering.

There is no gatekeeper to knowing.
No right-colored robe or right incarnation that makes you more human than human.

But a space has opened.
And what fills it — with power, with silence, with possibility — still depends on what we dare to notice, to ask, to imagine to become.

As Robert Anton Wilson said:
“If you can read this, you are a pope.

Archival proces notes from conceptual performance piece, THE POPE SHOW 2018