"Let Us Tell the World...."

For the world's oldest continuous office, it was "the most fabulous crowd" Peter ever saw.

Five years ago next month – two decades after a record 5 million thronged the Quirino Grandstand in Manila's Luneta Park for Mass with John Paul II – Cardinal Chito Tagle and Pope Francis combined to outdo their respective predecessors by at least seven figures, drawing some 6 to 7 million souls (in a driving rain) to yet another closing Eucharist in the heart of global Catholicism's third largest outpost.

As the historic moment for a global Catholicism wrapped up, the call first used at the 1995 edition of a Pope's "Biggest Day Ever" returned to the space, to be taken up with vigor by a new generation.

It took this long, but today's news goes to prove the degree to which Francis never forgot the scene. And now – as the Mission Czar of a missionary pontificate – the figure dubbed long ago as "The Golden Child" has been given worldwide carte blanche to "tell the world of His love" not from the "peripheries," but from the very "center" of the church.


As as a late call from a senior Vatican op put this all-important move: "What [Francis] wants is clear – his successor."

If that concept is news to you, start paying attention.

Either way, the major question now presents itself: does he get the apartment over the Ancora bookshop?

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All that said, if there was ever a day for this scribe to be shocked awake from Rome for the first time since B16's resignation, this would've been it – and, indeed, this was it.

As if the week just past wasn't already full enough, these days, one can't even take peace on an Advent Sunday for granted.

Of course, rising to the moment – in this case, literally – is what the moment demanded. Yet the amusing thing is how much of Whispers' more "established" peers were either too stunned or clueless to do the same... and we haven't even reached the more expected critical pieces of these weeks.

Ergo, much as this scribe is hoping to keep at the work, as ever, given the costs that come with it, that can only happen by means of your support:

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