spinoff

I got drunk tonight. I don’t mean the ‘Wahay, you’re all my mates’ drunk, I mean the ‘You bastards, go on, I’ll take you all on’ drunk. Really, steaming, pissed-beyond-my-eyeballs drunk. And why?

Because the College of Cardinals has elected Cardinal-bloody-Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, as if he shared anything with St Benedict or Benedict XV of blessed memory. Here’s the Catholic Church, spiritual mentor on one sixth of the population of the world, faced with a choice between a liberal South American, a sort of conservative Nigerian, and a downright doctrinal – well, there must be a better word than Nazi, but I’m damned if I know what it is – and we (they) have chosen the doctrinal bigot, the secretary of state of the Vatican, the chief proponent of death-through-lack-of-condoms, the hatemeister in chief, Cardinal-bloody-Ratzinger.

There were three votes. Out goes the Nigerian (Nostradamus predicts that a black Pope predicts the coming Apocalypse); out goes the Latin American (too populist, too in favour of the rights of the people, too concerned with devolving power to the bishops) and in comes, well, the worst of all worlds. In comes Benedict XVI, the most conservative Cardinal in the Vatican Council, centre of power in the later years of the late lamented Paulus II Johannes, the most conservative, marginalizing and divisive member of the entire College of Cardinals.

What were they thinking of? Not the vast numbers of gay Catholics (100 million of them); not the AIDS sufferers (20 million in Nigeria alone); not the sick, the ill, the poor; and certainly not the liberals. What on earth did they think they were doing? In the five minutes following the announcement of Benedict XVI’s appointment, I received 21 text messages from Catholic friends across the world. What are we going to do? Convert to Islam? Buy a house in Avignon and set up a rival Papacy? Renounce our vows and become part of the regular world? What do we do when our Pope simply does not represent us, does not form part of our world?

For those of us for whom being Catholic is the same as being human, is as natural to us as breathing, what can we do? To rebel against the Pope is as alien to us as to rebel against our lungs, to fight against the beating of our
heart, but how on earth can we have, can we tolerate, a pope like Cardinal Ratzinger? The Pope is created by the action of the Holy Spirit working through the Cardinal Electors, and therefore we cannot question his appointment. Well, yes, but… How are we meant to take this man as the direct line descendant of St. Peter? Is it, perhaps, possible, that just this once the Holy Spirit missed?

The man who can now issue papal bulls, the man who is infallible, who is the head of the Holy Mother Church, is a vicious right winger who has consistently acted according to a doctrine that simply no longer reflects the reality of the world, and which causes enormous pain and suffering to the disadvantaged, the lonely, the sick and the different – all those whom, in fact, Christ loved and loves. What is he doing at the head of the only true church? And what are we, who are members of Christ’s only church, formed in Christ’s image and in remembrance of Him, going to do about it?

I’ve got to take some aspirin…

Yours etc,

Spinoff.