Red Hats White Hat

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Notes of Concern…

                               …Jackson Blair

The Red & The White

When you are the Pope you get to stand at a window many stories up the façade of St. Peters and look down at crowds of people on many occasions. It must be a thrilling moment looking at all those adoring faces tilted upwards making every effort to see you and to receive your blessing.

This is a rainbow moment for a Pope.

But often his view is limited to a sea of red birettas. When he is on the throne of St. Peter quite often all the best seats are filled by the Princes of the Church, the many cardinals sporting all those little red caps called birettas.

One wonders as he looks at them is he trying to decipher which might be papabili, or front-runners for the role of Pope? Which of them might be his successor. We have no idea if in his power to make new Cardinals he gives any consideration to adding to, or subtracting from, various potentially influential groups of eventual “Cardinal electors” who will meet in the Sistine Chapel to identify the next successor to Peter the Apostle.

So when a conclave to anoint a Pope is called the world witnesses a sea of red marching into the chapel and a ceremony filled with tradition, symbolically locked in as the door closes and Swiss Guards take up their positions.

I note this symbolism because it came to be in an age when there were not televisions, radios, smart phones, and ways to smuggle notes into the conclave. I cannot help but wonder how these meetings are affected, if at all, by current technology.

As you know, when ballots are taken they are then burned. If black smoke arises for the waiting faithful outside the Vatican to see, then the ballot has failed to produce a new Pope. However, if the smoke is white, Habemus Papam, we have a new Pope.

The other day I was reading about a group of women who are dissatisfied with the role of women in the Catholic Church. They plan to ensure pink smoke rises at just the proper time to bring attention to their plight.

Oh boy! (or perhaps Oh girls! would be better.)

Out of over one hundred red birettas will arise one white zucchetto, the name given to the hat worn by Popes.

And for the first time the fellow wearing the white hat has not only the entire world to worry over but also one little fellow residing inside the walls of the Vatican who knows what it is like to wear the white hat.

Changing paradigms.

Teachable moments.

History in the making.

It will be quite interesting to see this play out.