After conclave, what place will true faith hold in corridors of power?
Second story: Extremist Hobbs continues bitter battle against Arizonans' well-being
To provide some other news and events, here are two articles I wrote that went to press on May 8, 2025, in the other publication I’m with, the national weekly Catholic paper The Wanderer (the issue dated for May 15).
I’ll be posting my regular Substack.com article for the week here later.
_____
How Pained He Must Be — Time For God To Reform Confusion And Chaos In Church?
By DEXTER C. DUGGAN
How rare is it that the reader of an article in real time may know more about its outcome than its writer? How’s that for a mystery?
Amid the firsts being noted for the May 7 conclave to choose Pope Francis’ successor, that mystery steps forward — that the cardinals’ choice would be known to the world before this writer had heard.
He simply couldn’t know because, due to hardcopy deadlines, he had to submit the story before they ever began voting to fill the Chair of Peter, starting on May 7.
Regardless, the choice would be revealed to all, the speculation went, before too many days of balloting had expired.
The problem was, the conclave might be covered journalistically only partially like the Kentucky Derby — with horse experts explaining the needed facts. While experts in, say, dolphin racing insisted that their views deserved not merely equal time but instead the emphasis, no matter how far off the mark — downright nonsensical — this would be.
Dolphin racing isn’t pertinent to the enterprise of the moment, but the dolphins have strong lobbyists, and a rooting section in dominant media. If dolphins don’t get a leg up, at least a fin.
Doctrine only an afterthought?
Editors decide what’s played up, or down. One headline proclaims that the remaining important issue is whether the next pope comes from Africa or Asia.
Hey, does doctrine count for little to nothing, but liberal politics is the lodestar?
Actually for Africa, the problem is that so many of its clergy and people ARE faithful Catholics. Hey, whoever in the privileged Western classes wants Catholics saving preborn babies?
I recall when the UK “Conservative” Party then-Prime Minister David Cameron was down in Africa, telling the brothers that he would “accompany” them into approving “gay marriage.” Why, how old-days super-colonialist of Cameron.
Speaking of horse racing as part of papal-selection coverage, the New York Post posted on May 6 that betting markets were active on various fronts: “Online betting-prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi started taking bets on who will succeed Pope Francis within hours of his April 21 death, raking in a combined $17 million and counting,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“But an event of this magnitude provides ample other betting opportunities, too,” the Post story added, “including over the papal name that the new pope will select, his nationality and even the number of rounds of voting that will be required before white smoke wafts through the Sistine Chapel chimney, signaling his selection.”
That might be the ultimate reduction of this key Church process to a secular shell game, a Democratic Party touch, with ultimate values treated as merely a religious intrusion.
Listening to everyone?
An ill-tilted commentary posted on May 6 at USA Today said: “Francis championed the importance of listening to everyone, from clergy to people in the pews, and he put a particular emphasis on those who have been marginalized.”
This USA Today piece continued: “Still, some Catholics believe Francis’ effort to build a more welcoming and inclusive church actually fueled division among many of the faithful who have little interest in building bridges with LGBTQ+ Catholics or easing rules for divorce and remarriage within the Church.”
No one seriously can claim that “Francis championed the importance of listening to everyone” when he was busy silencing those who offended his own touchy spots, like religious people with a sense of awe and reverence that he apparently found inappropriate.
As for, for instance, “building bridges with LGBTQ+ Catholics” — they lack an understanding of the personal reform and penance they need that Francis unfortunately misled them about.
The Francis papacy, it certainly could be argued, reoriented the business of the Church to the U.S. Democratic Party agenda applied globally. No longer did U.S. Democrats have to worry or feel ashamed about a Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI being onto their game because these popes already had seen secular dictators in action in Germany and Poland under the National Socialist or Communist banner.
Liberal media had their view that the priority is the Church’s eagerly accepting their stand that the Church is a social-welfare agency — with maybe a little religious coloration thrown in to keep “superstitious” Catholics happy so they’ll agree to enabling secular victories.
Hell is real for the bad, heaven for the good
On the other hand are actual Catholics who know that the Church is the gateway to the Everlasting. Even if bad people refused to help the needy on Earth, the bad people go to everlasting hell, while poor but virtuous people, even if deprived throughout their lifetimes here, enter bliss forever.
The Bible says so plainly. But the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris School of Delusion says the immediate future is all that need be acknowledged while they scheme to get their way for one more day. Doesn’t it make everyone feel fulfilled when Dr. Jill “My Luxuries Come First” Biden gets to fill out the report cards?
Then there’s bad Canadian Catholic and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his application of MAID — Medical Assistance In Dying — to truly troublesome citizens.
Like permissive abortion, killing the already-born innocent with euthanasia is a liberal priority. The secular state has ultimate command over your life. And once you’re too much trouble, you’re disposed of.
The State Is Great while justice and truth are too boring to be bothered with.
When dominant media that could and should stand up for innocents instead are all in on wiping them out, there’s not much defense left unless a Donald Trump takes an interest in Justice.
Not for the first time, left-wingers should take a bow for creating a demand for Trump, thanks to their own threatening, callous, dictatorial priorities.
With major media, and lesser ones, having arrived in Rome from around the world since Pope Francis’s unexpected death on April 21, they’ve repeated all the basics and then some about what was coming up. True, learning is by repetition, so just stating some facts once probably is insufficient.
Sights seen so often
But global viewers had, for instance, seen cardinals in their red robes so many times that they may have had time to count every single button. And to what benefit is such wardrobe knowledge? Perhaps just another tidbit to accompany actual video visits to the hierarchs’ favorite tailor shops. And restaurants. And their scanning menus.
However, do we really need ABC’s David Muir walking through St. Peter’s Square — looking over his right shoulder a little so the camera behind him catches his profile — before he gets to walk through the Sistine Chapel, with the cardinals’ desks all neatly arranged there.
Francis appointed a comfortable majority of the cardinal electors, but disagreements within a family aren’t unknown. If Daddy gives his kids jobs, must they take them forever, especially if he’s no longer around? And the Church has pressing financial problems.
Confusion and chaos
Pope Francis’ media admirers may like the confusion and chaos that came with him, but those may have been the deficiencies of an ill-suited administrator who meant well. In addition to his South American leftism that distorted his way of looking at the world.
Argentinians aren’t fated to fail this way. Libertarian President Javier Milei has been a tonic to correct that nation’s negative choices, though he was deeply opposed from afar by Francis off in Vatican City.
A chainsaw in Milei’s hands could have been a better symbol of national health than, unfortunately, a Bible in politically faltering Francis’ hands.
It’s God’s Church, after all, for the benefit and salvation of all of His children. Perhaps by now the Father will bring about some clarity, even if through this May conclave’s broken instruments
_____
Arizona Extremist Dem Hobbs — Continues Her Bitter Battles With State Legislature
By DEXTER C. DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Although the majority of Arizonans don’t live in the state’s high country, where blizzards might occur, there continue to be blizzards aplenty at the state Capitol in the desert territory of Phoenix, with left-wing abortion fanatic and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs regularly vetoing bills by the dozens.
In addition, Hobbs tried to appoint so many unqualified people to executive positions that, early in her four-year term, in 2023, Senate Republican President Warren Petersen created a new committee to review their fitness before a vote on whether to approve them.
Radical Hobbs also drew attention by flying homosexual banners from her ninth-floor executive office windows.
As a routine open-borders Democratic extremist, border-state Hobbs had to trim her position, in order to appear less scornful of the large majority of Arizonans’ concern for border protection.
In a May 5 news release, conservative Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh criticized Hobbs, the news release said, “for jeopardizing the safety of Arizonans by irresponsibly vetoing legislation that protects communities against criminal illegal aliens by promoting collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts.”
According to the release, Kavanagh said: “The mass number of criminal illegal aliens flying under the radar and threatening the security of Arizona communities is not only a statewide matter — it’s a nationwide concern.
“Unlike other state legislatures and governors that are working together to craft new laws to support the Trump administration’s federal immigration efforts,” Kavanagh said, “Arizona’s governor, with the support of state Democrat lawmakers, continues to virtue signal and recklessly veto any measure that mentions immigration enforcement.”
Hobbs is part of the left-tilted local establishment protected by media outlets.
Hails from Northeast
Kavanagh’s Wikipedia biography says he was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1950 as the grandson of German and Irish immigrants and was a police officer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, retiring as a detective sergeant after 20 years. He currently is a professor of criminal justice at Scottsdale, Ariz., Community College.
The state Senate news release said that Kavanagh’s SB1610 “would have required county detention facilities to, on request of ICE, provide the personal identifying information of and access to persons arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, aggravated assault on a law-enforcement office, or any other offense that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person. These are the same crimes that were the focus of Congress’ Laken Riley Act, which garnered bipartisan support.”
However, the senator said, “Hobbs continues to give her veto stamp more attention than the citizens she’s required to protect. People are fed up with the massive tsunami of dangerous criminals who have entered this country illegally.
“With this bill,” he said, “we were supporting the federal government’s deportation efforts by requiring detention facilities to supply inmate information to ICE. I am dismayed by the governor’s veto actions, which demonstrate she’s choosing chaos over sanity.”
Hobbs’ brief May 2 veto letter said she expects “state and local governments to uphold the law and work with the federal government to secure the border. However, this [bill] places extreme burdens on local law enforcement... I will continue to work with the federal government on true border security.”
Meanwhile, in a May 6 news release, Senate President Petersen gave an update on the work of the bipartisan Senate Committee on Director Nominations (DINO) that he created in February 2023.
Petersen said committee members “are tasked with gathering information and evaluating qualifications on the governor’s executive appointments in order to recommend a course of action for the Senate to take on each individual.
“Arizona Revised Statute 38-211 requires the Senate to confirm the governor’s appointments,” Petersen said, “and we are doing just that, while also weeding out unqualified, highly partisan, incompetent, or corrupt individuals who should not be holding any sort of leadership roles within the state of Arizona.
“Since its inception, the DINO committee has held hearings for a total of 20 nominees. Of those, 14 were confirmed by the Senate body and two were rejected. Three nominees are awaiting their vote before the Senate body. Seven directors were withdrawn by the governor’s office before they could receive a hearing. We currently have four nominees awaiting their confirmation hearings, and we are continuing to schedule those hearings on a weekly basis,” Petersen said.
“We are also waiting for the governor to nominate two more individuals to replace the two she withdrew last week. The DINO committee is working as I intended it to, and as a result, we are receiving better-quality candidates from the executive branch to lead these state agencies. We will continue to fairly, thoroughly, honestly, and accurately vet director nominees and only approve those who are qualified for these important positions.
“While some enjoy focusing on those who were rejected and colorful bantering between the executive and the Senate, the fact is we have confirmed the vast majority of the nominees and now have just a handful of unconfirmed nominees,” Petersen said. “The process is simple. If the governor sends us qualified, nonpartisan nominees, they will be confirmed by a bipartisan group of senators.”
A separate news release on May 2 quoted conservative Republican state Sen. Jake Hoffman, chairman of the director nominations committee, reacting to “a temper tantrum displayed by Hobbs during a press conference today.”
Hobbs’ “irresponsible picks”
The release said Hoffman was “doubling down on his promise to hold Gov. Katie Hobbs accountable for her irresponsible picks of unqualified individuals to lead Arizona’s critical state agencies.”
Hoffman said, “Since the court slapped down Katie’s illegal circumvention of the confirmation process last August, the members of the Senate Committee on Director Nominations have worked consistently, diligently, and methodically to hold confirmation hearings and make recommendations to the full Senate.
“Katie’s remarks about again engaging in the same unlawful ploy to evade the Senate confirmation process reflects only a childish temper tantrum. The Senate will determine its response to any future potential moves by Katie if they ever materialize,” Hoffman said.
“It’s clear from her unhinged statements to the press today that she is once again making rash, emotional decisions and flying by the seat of her pants without any due diligence or thought behind her actions,” he said. “The confirmation process has produced better-quality nominees in every case where a rejection has occurred, and that is a big win for every Arizonan.”
Democrat Hobbs narrowly slipped into office in the 2022 general election after Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, an establishment Republican, openly expressed his horror that the Donald Trump-supporting Republican Kari Lake won the August 2022 GOP primary’s nomination for governor.
In that November’s general election, inexplicable voting problems suddenly occurred.