Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to welcome a brand-new Remnant columnist. Patrick Archbold is co-founder of Creative Minority Report and a Catholic writer on the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. When not writing, Patrick is director of information technology at a large international logistics company. Patrick, his wife Terri, and their five children reside in Long Island, N.Y. Welcome aboard, Patrick! MJM

There is an amusing investing term called a ‘dead cat bounce.’ It follows from the idea that "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height." A dead cat bounce refers to a temporary recovery from a prolonged decline followed by a continuation of the downtrend.   The dead cat bounce is a sucker’s bet.   Suckers, thinking that the worst is over and that things have reached bottom, start buying up stock. In reality, the temporary rally is caused by investors shorting the stock purchasing the worthless stock to cover long-term bets against the company creating short-term buying pressure.

In short, the suckers buy up worthless stock thinking the worst is over and the stock is on the uptrend despite the fact that all the fundamental measures should tell them otherwise.

I am a sucker who got fooled by the dead cat bounce.

This from www.theatlantic.com: "The new pope's choices stir high hopes among liberal Catholics and intense uncertainty among conservatives. Deep divisions may lie ahead.

"Now we have a Pope Francesco in the flesh, and elements of Murphy’s vision have come to pass, or so it seems: the attention-grabbing breaks with papal protocol, the interventions in global politics, the reopening of moral issues that his predecessors had deemed settled, and the blend of public humility and skillful exploitation—including the cashiering of opponents—of the papal office and its powers.

The Church is not yet in the grip of a revolution. The limits, theological and practical, on papal power are still present, and the man who was Jorge Bergoglio has not done anything that explicitly puts them to the test. But his moves and choices (and the media coverage thereof) have generated a revolutionary atmosphere around Catholicism. For the moment, at least, there is a sense that a new springtime has arrived for the Church’s progressives. And among some conservative Catholics, there is a feeling of uncertainty absent since the often-chaotic aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s and ’70s.

"... the conservatives’ very theology makes it impossible for them to effectively resist a liberalizing pope, and anyway they have no other place to go."   FULL ARTICLE HERE

REMNANT COMMENT: First of all, what do you think: Springtime, or Winter going forward under Pope Francis? And secondly, if things go from bad to worse will the neo-Catholics finally take a stand? 

Today at the Catholic Herald we read: “LCWR leaders met Pope Francis today as the Vatican announced the conclusion of the process. The Vatican has ended a seven-year investigation into the US Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR).LCWR leaders met Pope Francis today as the Vatican announced the conclusion of the process, which included oversight for three years by a committee of three bishops.

Editor’s Note: Remnant columnist, Elizabeth Yore, is an international child protection attorney who has investigated several cases of clergy sex abuse of children. She served as Special Counsel and Child Advocate to Oprah Winfrey. She is the former General Counsel of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and former General Counsel at National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She is quite obviously a well-qualified expert in the field of child abuse prevention, which is why her testimony in this case is so disturbingly apropos. MJM

They still don’t get it.

With great fanfare and media fawning, Pope Francis appointed Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley to head the new Vatican Child Protection Commission to protect children from clergy sex abuse. O’Malley said the new commission would advise the pope about the protection of children and the pastoral care of victims of abuse.

Sham “Schism” Exposed

"The neo-Catholic establishment really must cease its spiteful calumnies of the Society’s adherents, whose heroic perseverance in the traditions of the Faith will certainly be vindicated by history, as their neo-Catholic hecklers undoubtedly suspect."

I have long argued—here, for example—that the “lack of full communion” attributed to the Society of Saint Pius X, even though its clergy and laity are obviously Catholics under no sentence of excommunication, is nothing but an ad hoc contrivance designed to perpetuate the unjust persecution of this group of the faithful by creating a rather silly special category of “double secret probation” in the Church applicable only to them. I have also argued that the mere issuance of a technical decree regularizing the Society’s canonical status is all that is necessary to eliminate the illusory “lack of full communion.”

According to a story at CNN.com this morning, “Islam, the world's fastest-growing faith, will leap from 1.6 billion (in 2010) to 2.76 billion by 2050, according to the Pew study. At that time, Muslims will make up nearly one-third of the world's total projected population of about 9 billion people.

“Christianity is expected to grow, too, but not at Islam's explosive rate. The Pew study predicts Christians will increase from 2.17 billion to 2.92 billion, composing more than 31% of the world's population.

“This means that by 2050, more than 6 out of 10 people on Earth will be Christian or Muslim.” READ FULL REPORT HERE

REMNANT COMMENT: Interesting! Lowly Islam—disorganized, warring tribes, without even a claimant to the position of visible head— giving its ancient nemesis, Christianity, a serious run for its money.

Isn’t it something how faith really can move mountains, even the false variety. But poor old beleaguered Christianity doesn’t stand a chance this time around. Thanks to the debilitating and faith-destroying Spirit of Vatican II, the Crescent looms high over the Cross.

What this report does not touch on, by the way, is the almighty power of raw secularism, which at the moment seems to be dominating the world and its “great monothesitic religions”. How did we end up with homosexual ‘marriage’, for example, in a world inhabited by practitioners of religions that oppose it in peril of their souls?

If you want something to fear in the future you needn’t look to religion but rather to that Ape of God, to irreligion, to the supreme deity worshipped by the practitioners of unholy militant Secularism (read: atheism). Now that’s the stuff of global nightmares!