So the world has a new Pope, Joseph "The Rat" Ratzinger. The man was formerly a member of the Hitler Youth and a Nazi soldier, manning an anti-aircraft gun at a factory where concentration camp inmates were used as slave labour. But that's all right, because he explained that he was unable to pull the trigger because he had a bad finger.
He's not known for his compassionate views, or for his tolerance of other faiths. He described Muslim Turkey's accession to the EU as "an enormous mistake". He regards other Christian churches as "deficient", says that the Anglican church is not entitled to call its leaders "priests", and condemns the ordination of women. Rock music is a "vehicle of antireligion", and communism is "one of the disgraces of our times".
But it's for gays that he reserves his fiercest condemnation. He says "the sexual act has lost its meaning and purpose …" (erm, how does he know what it's for? He's never done it … presumably) and that homosexuality is "a tendency towards intrinsic moral evil." In 1992 he rejected the notion of human rights for gays, stressing that their civil liberties could be "legitimately limited".
Obviously there's been quite a reaction to his appointment as Pope. After all, quite apart from having one billion slaves, sorry, adherents around the world, the Catholic Church has a seat at the United Nations. It certainly does seem something of a retrograde step to have at the head of an enormous international organisation that should be a force for good, hope, reconciliation and relief of suffering, a man people describe as "God's rottweiler" because he is one step to the right of Genghis Khan.
But it's really rather hard to see what the protesters expected. After all, the Catholic Church has never exactly been in the forefront of liberated thinking, has it? We are talking here about the organisation that opposed every advance you can think of in scientific thinking, that spawned the Spanish Inquisition to torture people into believing what it wanted them to believe, that burned heretics at the stake, that condemned young unmarried Irish mothers to years of imprisonment in mental hospitals, that refused to speak out against Hitler, that year after year ignored the fact that its priests were buggering children ….
So come on, chaps, be fair. You didn't really expect, did you, that all of a sudden the Church of Rome was going to heave itself out of centuries of venal filth and become an overnight beacon of freedom and love? That it could shrug off nearly two thousand years of politics, power-seeking, bribery and corruption to lead the world's poor towards a cuddly sunshine of peace and prosperity?
If you did, you're … sadly mistaken. The one thing men don't voluntarily surrender is power. And that's what we're talking about here - power. The power of the local priest over the middle-aged women and wan, inadequate young men who make up his flock (and who knows, with a bit of luck one of those middle-aged women might have a pretty son or daughter …). The power of the older priest over the younger. The power of the Bishop over his clergy. The power of the Pope over the whole damn, festering heap of ignorance.
To read more about this great human being, go to The Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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