Greetings, parish orphans, and retrogrades.

It's Monday morning, April the 29th.

We're nearly into May, the pre-summer month of 2024, which means we're into the middle part of the year.

I'm a big calendar guy, and I'm always thinking in terms of the calendar.

And I'm looking ahead to the first day of May.

And I'm looking ahead to this 12th year of the Francis Pontificate that we're now in, 11 years complete.

And I happened to, as I'm looking over the landscape, have found a great article. And it's a great article by a master wordsmith in the, I think,

English Catholic world, Damien Thompson, who I've long admired his writing.

He wrote on the 27th, an article for unheard called The Francis Haunting, sorry, the scandals haunting Pope Francis, scheming cardinals are sharpening their knives.

It's one of those titles on unheard.com that you don't know what it means, but the Twitter entry for this article by Mr.

Thompson, Damian Thompson, excellent writer, made it sound more like a great summary of Francis's

pontificate. And Damian Thompson left very, very few stones unturned in his survey of the Francis 11 years.

There were, there are times, I'm just going to read it for you.

And there are times when I'm like, he could have gone a little more into this.

Usually he wound up going into a topic or an event of the Francis Pontificate in more depth

later if he didn't at first blush.

But I would just submit to you by way of introduction that Francis is getting progressively

sicker. He's approaching the end of his life, which means that we all are approaching the next

conclave. And there are scheming cardinals as always in the Vatican, what does Damien Thompson mean

they're sharpening their knives?

He's made about three-fourths of the cardinals of voting age are all Francis-made cardinals

at Francis consistories.

...