Episcopabiles

What are the Four Main Questions or Areas of Especial Concern that feature in the main part of the interviews of a Nuncio when he is seeking to discern and then appoint a candidate for the episcopate?

Sitting by a big old log fire in a large and drafty old house, with a certain Fr Brian, once upon a time, the learned old clergyman leaned over and whispered to me, after the waiter had served the drinks including a Gin and Dubonnet - what the Queen drinks for a tipple at DBLs he explained, that he felt that there were 3 main moderne battles that the Catholic Church was engaged in and which it was probably losing all round without a genial exception. Those 3 main battle areas he said, pushing some olives across the coffee table toward my standard tipple of the older Bond kind - a gin and tonic with a slice of lime, were the following:

- Contraception;

- Abortion;

- Euthanasia.

Roger that. He explained to me that there are other areas where the Catholic Church is having some major successes, chiefly in medical provision and education of university undergrads, but that in those 3 areas above mentioned, the Church was losing the debates and mightily after stiff resistance from a resistant population round about who feel these moral choices are a choice of personal taste, not for catholic incels to get too involved in, no thanks. I sipped my ancillary somewhat prosaic lemonade and listened attentively, nice to have some feedback on such subjects. He continued into the evening and mapped out the successes and failures of such debates, reporting at the end of a nice dinner featuring some Lobster Bisque that most people feel privacy is important, catholics who are too conscious of Big Brother fail on these privacy tickets all round - they are too struck in the temple by the old rhetorical devices of the Fawkes Era.

Funnily enough, the old schema of hot subjects that the Nuncios used to interview candidates on that they were keen to promote to the episcopate, though this was before 1968, included a foursome involving precisely those areas - yikes:

- Contraception;

- Abortion;

- Feminine ordination;

- Homosexuality among the incel clergy.

That was the story before the watershed year for episcopabile ordinations, before 1968. Nowadays a new raft of concerns and issues is arising and appearing on the Nuncio hitlist with which to interview candidates on, and these include the following:

- Homosexuality among the Clergy;

- Female ordination and the rights of Trans people;

- Terminating Auntie through Euthanasia;

- Capital Punishment and 007 Activity.

The views of the candidates are thus quarried by the interviewing Nuncio before he makes a judgment and pops his thoughts into a votum for the Conference chairman and the Congregation in Rome on new Bishops, plus for major Sees like Cardiff or Edinburgh or Glasgow or London, then the Pope himself is consulted and appraised of the related interviews and searches and the like. It is a new generation and the major debates and controversies have moved on since 1968, even since 1984, and now since 2013, but overall, the tendency is to locate more and more of those media debates and twitterstorms in the minds of the young people now up for episcopal ordination. Now since 2013, all candidates for the episcopate have to swear loyalty to the Wokist Popes of the new era, without exception, so it is a different Church than the one that existed in 1968, plus a Licence is required, plus an age requirement of 35plus, plus privately an oath not to ordain without a mandate - CIC 378. Also, in some countries where bishops are key figures in both the civil and the church spheres, the Prime Minister is often consulted on his own secret service files on the said candidates. But more and more too, the learned doctor Archbishop of Canterbury is consulted too on such meritorious and well-deserving candidates, just in case the anglicans have some useful and telling intel on the candidate in question in the Nuncio process. God is the source of most vocations so sometimes the Archbishop of Canterbury will retire to his boudoir and his private chapel at Canterbury and there consult with the fates. The barristers and magistrates of the Ecclesiastical Law Society will often have stories featuring catholic clergy involved in secret and discreet injunctions and processes that are well out of the public eye - look at the case of a well-known clergyman in Oxfordshire who quietly and cunningly took out an injunction against an obsessive female fan at the local courthouse - another case that went by, largely unnoticed by the media and the local press. Once these major hurdles have been surmounted, then usually the way ahead is cleared by our own very dear and very understanding British secret services - SIS for short, unless of course the American CIA intervene with their own special raft of demands and assurances and questions about some specific candidates, whether say any have been involved in international criminal dissent from governments, and whether any have been compromised by professional FBI Sting Operations involving computer criminality, though there is a forthcoming legitimate debate as to whether a press of an electronic button especially inadvertently by the older sort of slightly doddery clergyman who can barely use a calculator is indeed sufficient grounds for criminality or mens rea on the web, leaving aside the pro-active purchasing and downloading of dodgy images of an illegal kind. Unfortunately not everybody gets through these kinds of searches of the files of the FBI since the FBI like to run those Stings on the upper classes and upon clergymen and clergywomen in particular though not all the time do they release those files and Stings to the local or national press. Rarely will a GB candidate boast a file or profile at the more exhaustive and dangerous NSA on homeland security, unless they have secret but just visible links with Antifa or the FSB or Wikileaks or Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. Renditions notwithstanding.

So it is, and nowadays quite a complex process, and not everybody that is obvious to their people and to their colleagues gets through so fast as once before, or so easily as once before, in the age before hte internet. Everybody nowadays, with one or two exceptions duly noted among clergymen who like to keep their carbon and web profiles to net zero, tends to have some plasma profile on the web, so it is a matter of time before these profiles emerge and surface. CIA checks can be pretty exhaustive. In my own case if one punches in the name R into a computer search programme one invariably comes up with a vocal and powerful local leader of an intelligence unit in Britain!! I never knew until recently why I had so many interesting 007 style friends. So all is possible nowadays in the age of the internet or shall we say with Mark Zuckerberg the metaverse. So it is possible to become a new moderne bishop but it is always metaverses notwithstanding.