Conventional wisdom about upcoming events in the Catholic Church say that there’s a bad moon on the rise.

The MSM tribute to Pope John Paul II has been a grudging “many people thought he was a good guy” sort of thing. I’d expect them to do due diligence to the pope — whose appeal I think most of them can’t comprehend — and then move on to whoever the next pope is (most specifically, is he going to be someone who isn’t quite so incomprehensible to them). And then they’ll start to get uncomfortable with the whole High Church thing and ask to be excused from the table.

That’s fine. Church dealings aren’t really their cup of tea. But stories from conservative news are starting to look like this:

At the end of his pontificate, John Paul leaves behind an American church uplifted by his piety, yet struggling with several of the same problems that preceded him: a dramatically shrinking U.S. priesthood, disagreement over the proper role for lay leaders, and a growing conservative-liberal divide over sexuality, women’s ordination and celibacy for clergy.

So everyone is expecting that the next weeks and months will turn into a power struggle and tough talk to the new pope about how he needs to make sure the church gets with the times.

Except I’m not sure it’ll happen. Because I think it’s possible that Pope John Paul II managed to live long enough for the worst of that foul wind to blow itself out. There was a time when liberals could get themselves and others convinced that making big concessions in church tradition would (a) bring many more people into the church and (b) improve the life of the church overall. But those times are gone, because it’s been tried over and over. And — like many other liberal “life-enhancing” ideas, IMHO — they’ve turned out to not live up to the promises. Who doesn’t know of churches putting ads in the paper about how inclusive, compassionate and up-to-date they are? There’s nothing new about that spin. And so we can all just go ahead and tell them that it doesn’t work, because people turned out to be smarter than they thought. They figured out that when a church pretends to be a 4-H club it fails as both.

And even those who don’t like their church upbringing have noticed that once a church is gone, you can’t get it back. If the liberals decide that they’ve had their foot on the neck of the Old Church for long enough and decide to let it get up and caper about so that they can relive nostalgic days again, they find to their total surprise that it’s not possible. A church that has been utterly subjugated to the world’s culture can’t function as a church, even if their taskmasters wish it. And this subtlety hasn’t escaped many people who may seem nominal, but who do regard churches as important things to have around. I also don’t think that Catholics have missed what the liberalizing effort did (and is doing) to the Anglican/Episcopal Church.

So it may be that the expected fight doesn’t come with great gusto. I can’t believe there won’t at least be lip service paid to the type of liberal talking points we could all recite in our sleep now — Bible quotes taken out of context (let’s give that story of the woman taken in adultery another airing, but make sure to cut before the part where Jesus told her to sin no more), fluffy, politically-correct rhetoric, weepy anecdotes about this or that “hurting heart”, yada yada yada. And those sound-bytes will get loving attention from the media, because The True Church has spoken at last, and (praise be!) they speak fluent Liberalese! But the part I’m interested in is what happens after that. Because if that fire doesn’t catch, the Catholic Church probably won’t significantly change.

And if that happens, some liberals will lose their minds again. It’ll be Nov. 2 all over again, because how absolutely unbelievable it is that people are all stupid and don’t just give up and make that left turn into oblivion. And yes, it’s my guilty confession that I think that would be really funny. Again.

By the way, none of this is to say that there couldn’t be good ways that the Catholic Church could change. I don’t know enough about it to know if giving more of a role to the laity would have to equate liberalization. If not, it might be a good thing. And I think that it would be a very good thing if the Catholic Church could adopt a way to have married priests, but I don’t think they could make a change like that without opening a Pandora’s box of concessions.

On the whole, I’m guessing that the next pope will be less full of surprises than we’ve been led to believe.