Although I remarked on Ivereigh's book earlier, I just watched this interview today, and I thought it had some interesting moments. At the end of the day, I'm not sure Ivereigh will have answered Arroyo's questions to everyone's satisfaction, but he raises some interesting questions. At around 15:17 into the interview, they take up the issue of Pope Francis' election and the question of pre-conclave "politicking."
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A pope is nothing these days without a good hagiographer. That was surely the downfall of Pope Ratzinger. Not that he couldn't have found a Grub Street scribbler craven enough to take a few bucks, a few introductions, a few Catholic TV gigs, perhaps even an honorific position at a Catholic university, in return for a glossy coffee table compendium of cheap praise. They're a dime a dozen, as a fast tour of the Catholic blogosphere will attest. Since about 99% of "Catholic" bloggers are either former protestants in whom certain elements of conversion are strangely absent, or cradle Catholics in whom certain elements of subversion are strangely present, the Catholic blogosphere can be considered as a minor league farm system for spreading the gospel of the current papal talking points in an appropriately pop starrish, Faberge egg setting. Oh well, his loss.
George Weigel, the mayor-emeritus of Grub Street and popular biographer of JP2, used talking heads centers instead of blogs to advance his career as a for-profit hagiographer, but the principal is the same. Now, in Austin Iverleigh, we have a straight-up propagandist for progressive V2 Catholicism, who up to this point has made his bones churning out leftist Catholic pieces for such publications as The Tablet, providing proper "formation" for up and coming Catholic journalists and flak-catchers, and upgrading the bruised reputations of such as Cdl Cormac Murphy O'Connor. We will see, of course, but the content of his swiftee biography seems to me entirely predictable.
I am writing this after listening to Little Raymond's interview of Ivereigh (not Iverleigh), and to my ears it is double talk. Very polished double talk, but double talk so palpable that even Little Raymond skewers it fairly effectively a couple of times. Catholics are going to be carpet bombed by exactly this type of double talk over the next year, as the Kasper-Bergoglio pastoral threshing machine begins its harvest leading up to next October.
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