ABC reports it today with a frankness that borders on the pedagogical: half a million euros and guaranteed access to the Pope. No uncomfortable intermediaries, no indefinite waits, no letters lost in some Curia office. Transfer, confirmation, and, with a bit of luck, a smile and a photograph.
From here, it’s advisable to start ordering priorities. Because while this premium channel for meeting the Pontiff is effectively structured, there are those who have been knocking on the door for years without getting a response. The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, for example, has long insisted on the need for a meeting to address issues that, according to their own understanding, directly affect the salvation of souls: episcopal consecrations, canonical status, definitive regularization.
Perhaps the problem wasn’t theological. Perhaps it was accounting.
Perhaps someone should suggest to them, with the charity that characterizes these times, that they review their strategy. Fewer letters, fewer formal requests, fewer appeals to Tradition and more financial engineering. Because now we know—thanks, we insist, to ABC, nothing suspicious of animosity—that there is a clear, objective, and verifiable threshold to access the Successor of Peter.
Half a million euros.
It’s not a symbolic figure. It’s an access key. A discernment criterion, if you will. One imagines the scene: the superiors of the Fraternity, after years of waiting, finally decide to gather the funds. Perhaps an internal campaign, perhaps some providential benefactor. The amount is reached. The protocol is activated. And then, finally, the long-awaited audience.
Once inside, with the time rationed, they could raise that minor issue they’ve been dragging for decades: the regularity of their consecrations, full communion, the canonical structure. Secondary matters, of course, compared to what’s truly urgent, which is having surpassed the economic entry threshold.
Everything would fit. The synodal Church, open and dialogical, would thus find an effective method to prioritize interlocutors. Not according to the gravity of the issues, nor pastoral urgency, nor doctrinal truth. According to the ability to finance the event in question.
It will be said that it’s a caricature. It is. But like every caricature, it exaggerates real features. And the most visible one today has a price. Half a million euros.