There has been weeping and gnashing of teeth around Australia’s chanceries ever since the Vatican announced the creation of twenty-one new cardinals. Poor old Great South Land of the Holy Ghost missed on securing a single new red hat. (In all fairness, the Holy Ghost probably left these fair shores a few years ago, after being coopted by Plenary members wanting to forge ahead with their Brave New Church.)

It seems that as progressive as our bishops may be, as willing as many of them are to stoop to the heterodox levels of this papacy and openly embrace Bergoglio’s synodal dream, nothing can persuade him to take notice of Australia and bestow a Cardinal upon us.

But it is not for want of trying.

First in line is of course, Archbishop Mark Coleridge. He makes no secret of his support for the union of sodomites, for the unholy jab and for every Modernists’ current pet project, Synodality. Coleridge even preempted the Synod on Synodality with his Plenary Council – our own attempt to reform the Church in a Masonic mould. Coleridge’s love of indigenous spirituality and his Gnostic ramblings made him seem like a good bet in the Red Hat stakes.

But Archbishop Timothy Costelloe gave him a run for his money, choosing as his new office a former Freemason lodge, and opening his cathedra for the purpose of jabbing unsuspecting passers-by with experimental gene serum. Now that he’s in charge of the Bishops Conference, he is in a position to do serious damage to the Australian church. Maybe that’s why Rome didn’t want his time spent on petty Cardinal duties.

However, Bishop Vincent Long looked as though he would be perfectly suited as a Bergoglio Cardinal – he has so much in common with McCarrick and McElroy, along with a love for James Martin and all things Jesuit. Remember, Long promised to keep children safe from predatory behavior while exposing them to predatory teachers using his anti-Catholic school curriculum – that sounds like something that would really appeal to Rome these days.

It is an open secret that Archbishop Peter Comensoli considered himself in the running for a Cardinalate, and his track record certainly looked promising. He even managed to arrange a photo op with Bishop Bob – although there are some who think Bergoglio wouldn’t have been impressed by that.

Bishop Bob with our own Archbishop Comensoli.

Of course, there once was a time when orthodoxy and a stint at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral was a guaranteed pathway to the red hat, but these days of relativism, nothing is certain. Perhaps prelates who were once reliably solid in their theology have something to learn from daring to make their move to the Other Side. Abandoning the unborn babies by wholeheartedly endorsing the medical treatment created through the use of their dead body parts does not impress God, nor it would seem, has it impressed the Pope.

But then, maybe His Holiness had a very good reason for deciding not to appoint any new Cardinals from Australia: since he’s planning on racking up a fair number of carbon miles in the near future, maybe he simply decided that the Australian Church could do a little ‘offsetting’ and languish without any decent leadership for a few more years.