Michael O'Brien: Writing News Before It Happens

Sometimes prophetic.  Excerpts:

...The mutineers maintain, anonymously, that they are doing this for the good of the Church itself. It is a recurring justification in history. They say that from the scandal they want to produce a regeneration of Christianity. But many of their "secular" supporters are interested in a collapse of the Church. Not that it be regenerated, but humiliated.

Conflicts within institutions can be managed. But betrayal much less so.
This is the signal, instead, of an absence of management, which has allowed the growth within the Roman curia of the hidden rebellion of some of its "civil servants," and has not been able to do anything to neutralize it.

The Vatican secretariat of state, which from the time of Paul VI forward has also been the main engine of the central government of the Church, is inevitably also the main culprit of this disorientation.

Benedict XVI is so aware of this that, in order to bring order back to the Sacred Palaces, he has not called upon his prime minister, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, but for the consultation of a college of adepts among those farthest from him: to begin with, cardinals Ruini, Ouellet, Tomko, Pell, Tauran.

For a change of management in the Vatican curia, the moves are already underway.

This sort of scenario was explored in a fair amount of depth in Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, a book which I think approaches the truly literary.  I love the Children of the Last Days cycle of novels.  I think he's made a substantial contribution to the Church.

An aside: I disagree with O'Brien's assessment of the Harry Potter series.  I don't discount the possibility that it may be an encouragement for some people to witchcraft and the occult.  The Lord of the Rings has done as much for some people, even though the whole series is shot through with a Catholic worldview.  And Harry Potter is shot through with the worldview of Mere Christianity, of historic English Protestantism and the culture of England so very thoroughly, much like The Dark Is Rising, that it's oftentimes beautiful.  The theme of self-sacrificing love, the sort of love at the heart of the Trinity, the sort of love to which we are called as the fulfillment and transcendence of our human nature, is the main message, the main story of the books.  Friendship, family, loyalty, and love, the value of persons, human nature and human relationships--these are things worth our time and attention.  These are the heart of Harry Potter.  They are the real substance of the series, and they are things the world desperately needs.