What if the pope suppressed what-if questions? But this one is easy, or should be: Of course the pope could suppress the Rosary. The question here is not would the he suppress it, or should he suppress it, but only could he. And of course the pope has the power to suppress a devotion. An obvious example of this is when, in 1959, John XXIII suppressed devotion to the Divine Mercy. (John Paul II later lifted the suppression, in 1978.) This kind of thing happens all the time. Now, the Rosary is so beloved, so traditional, so rooted and fixed in Catholic devotional practice that the chances of any such thing happening are all but zero; but there’s no reason the pope couldn’t do it.
Article at Catholic World Report asks: Could the pope suppress the rosary?
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • October 18, 2021 • Catholic Church; Catholic Devotions; papacy
Last month on Twitter, someone proposed a weird papal thought experiment in the form of a weirder prognostication. Mike Lewis had a screenshot and thread. Suppose, the unnammed twitster mused, that the next pope is Cardinal Burke, or Cardinal Sarah, or “anyone similarly-minded.” [Okay. And?] “Leftist extreme ultramonatanes [Head. Desk.] would have a hard choice: rally behind the pope without question (as they currently do), rethink their extreme [!] interpretation of ultramontanism, or break in some fashion.” Well, Monty, I’ll take door number one. And it’s not at all a “hard choice.”
A few people — responding to my post about Bishop Strickland and whether Nancy Pelosi gets to call herself a Catholic — have tried to split hairs between saying that Nancy Pelosi is “not a Catholic” and that she is “not a member of the Catholic faith.” But Alt! they cry. Strickland is not denying the indelible mark of Pelosi’s baptism. He’s just saying that her manifest grave sin means she’s no longer a member! One can lose their membership, you know, juridicially speaking and all, without losing the mark of baptism. People apostasize, they go into schism, they pack their bags and head for the Eastern Orthodox Church like Rod Dreher. Okay, well, this splitting of hairs only gets one so far.
Fr. Frank Pavone, despite being forced by anonymous “Church authorities” to resign from Trump’s re-election campaign (i.e., in an “official” capacity), keeps insisting that Catholic clergy somehow ought to be calling out the immorality of “Democrats.” No one can seem to find out to whom Pavone is accountable. At the same time, random strangers in social media keep trying to bully Catholic voters who plan to vote for Joe Biden. Actual Church teaching takes a dim view of both stances. [