Uncle Benny

[poliphilo]

The Foreign Office can grovel all it likes to the Pope, but that leaked memo-  which jokily suggested he might use his visit to Britain to launch an new range of condoms and bless a gay marriage-  accurately sums up what we think of him and his office.  And when I say "we" I suspect that includes a lot of British catholics too.  It's not that we hate him; we don't; it's more that we regard him with a kind of amused distaste.  He's our shuffling, exasperating, slightly unwholesome Uncle Benny. The FO has issued a grovelling apology, but you can't take back a thing like that. Hatred would be easier to deal with- hatred can be turned around-  but no-one ever recovers from the perception that they're funny.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Newsweek's Christopher Hitchens just wrote a scathing piece, "Bring the Pope to Justice" that argues that if we cannot "detain or supoena the pope for questioning in the child rape scandal," then "the only alternative fomulation [is to] declare the pope to be above and beyond all local and international laws and immune...."

He says "The holy father seems to have been lenient with criminals while reserving his severity for those who complained about them."

Kentucky has a suit before the courts seeking the testimony of the pope himself...Hitchens says "the Church is invoking 'sovereign immunity' since the pope is an alleged head of state. He adds: "The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy---the last survivor of the political architecture of the Axis powers." ...

He concludes that "this is a question of crime--organized crime, BTW--and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting--and rotting from the head."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Stirring stuff!

Hitchens and Dawkins have a plan to arrest the Pope on his visit to Britain. Won't it be fun if they try!

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine it happening, and imagine instead that Hitchens and Dawkins would be arrested themselves for disrupting or irreverance or something!

I was checking out at the grocery store this morning and saw a national newspaper headline that said Young People losing interest in churches--read the first paragrapsh quickly and I think read that the number was 72% who thought the churches had nothing relevant to say to them--most were, however, "religious" in their minds, but rarely prayed or attended organized institutions.

The Catholic Church is surely dying--and rightly so. It is a dinosaur.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I doubt if anyone hostile will get anywhere near the Pope on his visit. He'll be well guarded- and the British tax payer will be picking up the tab.

The abuse scandal means the Vatican has forfeited its moral authority. We could forgive it its reactionary views for as long as we believed its leaders were living by the rules they preached. Now that we know they weren't, we really don't want to hear from it again.