Abortion still condemned by head of church that enabled rapist pedophiles

Yes, I suppose if you abort them now, it makes it hard to sodomize them later.

Joseph Ratzinger, known to millions of Catholics around the world as "the Pope," has immediately touched off what melodramatic journalists love to call "a firestorm of controversy" over his condemnation of politicians upholding reproductive rights. He has said in effect that Catholic politicians who do not take a stand against abortion have basically excommunicated themselves and should not receive communion, a mad creepy ritual in which believers drink wine and eat little crackers and imagine themselves to be eating Jesus's flesh and sipping his blood. Again, the moral confusion of the Vatican is enough to make your head reel. What possible system can condemn abortion but sweep pedophilia under the rug and hold entire services for people to perform pretend-cannibalism? (Yes yes, I know they don't see it that way, but that doesn't lessen the bizarreness quotient.) And they call us "moral relativists."

Ratzinger's remarks were occasioned by his first visit to Latin America, an area populated by almost half the world's Catholics, and yet one which is undergoing a sea change where women's rights are concerned. In Mexico, they've just legalized abortion. The Vatican is losing followers to Protestantism, particularly this fad called "liberation theology". (Would that they were losing more to rationalism, but hey, you know, baby steps.) Liberation theology in particular drives Ratzo crazy. Part of what he is trying to do in his Latin tour is jerk a few million leashes and scare all the backsliders back into line.

Amusingly, the response from other prominent Catholics is to scramble to "clarify" Ratzinger's remarks. This is funny, as I always thought it was part of the Catholic rulebook that their "Pope" is supposed to be God's mouthpiece and thus infallible. But Papal infallibility doesn't exactly seem to be in vogue in a part of the world where hardline adherence to the most intractible and medieval Catholic doctrines about sexuality could prompt even more mass walkouts then the Church has already suffered there.

This pope's apparent candor can get him in trouble, said John L. Allen Jr., a reporter with the National Catholic Reporter. "Benedict doesn't seem to distinguish when he is speaking as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and when he is speaking as the head of the Roman Catholic Church."

Oh, there's a difference? I thought that once Ratzinger got Popified, he wasn't a mere cardinal any longer. But what does a heathen like me know about it? I must confess I have little interest in the carryings-on of a gang of medievalists who like to dress up in funny robes, give themselves pompous titles, and declaim as if they had any authority over anyone or any expertise to speak on any subject other than their storybook. I might as well take an interest in what a bunch of LARPers tra-la-la-ing about the woods in tights and chain mail and frilly blouses pretending to be Robin Hood and His Band of Merry Men have to say about abortion or human rights or geopolitics, for all that's worth.

Another humorous comment from Ratzo: God, unlike what most Christians have been led to believe, is not in fact omnipotent.

"In all parts of the world, there are those who don't want to hear," Benedict said on the plane. "Naturally, even our Lord did not manage to make everyone hear."

Naturally? Naturally. So there you have it, from his Infallible Mouthpieceness Himself: there's something God cannot do. Ta-ta, omnipotence.

It would appear that, while most of Central and South America remain devoutly Catholic, there is growing courage amongst those who would stand against the policies and practices of an oppressive Church, that, ever since the pedophilia scandal of a few years ago, has as far as I'm concerned lost any moral authority it ever had to lecture anybody on anything. As Mexican legislator Leticia Quezada, herself one of Ratzo's self-excommunicating Catholics, and one of the sponsors of Mexico's new abortion law, has said, "I voted to address a crisis of public health…. I will continue to be a believer. The church has no right to interfere in my conscience." Go, girl! It's high time — centuries overdue, in fact — for the Vatican and its gang of thugs to be handed their walking papers by the human race. Let's sweep the bums out, turn the Sistine Chapel into an art museum, and move forward with education and humanitarian aid efforts for delevoping countries that aren't based on scaring them into submission to men in robes and their invisible magic capo in the sky.