Excommunication

Recovering from last Thursday's throat surgery, Pope John Paul II today has regained speech capability. According to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "the Holy Father is fully alert mentally and also able to say the essential things with his voice" (CNN) . What do you think the "essential things" are? Condemnations of gays? Damning of abortions? Disparagement of the stem-cell research that aims to cure the same Parkinsons Disease which afflicts him?

Yes, naturally he has a legacy of hyper-conservatism (women of the cloth? HA!), but he's old, and maybe the next guy will be a bit more progressive, right? Wrong. This is the Catholic Church we're talking about here. Near two-thousand long years of narrow-mindedness. If anything ever changes, it does so at least 50-75 years too late. JP II has stacked the cardinals' ranks with his conservative supporters, insuring that the next pope will be more of the same. It's a lovely system, no? What if B*sh had a life-long term and when he died, the new president was elected by his cabinet members from among their number. Oh. Sorry. I didn't mean to make you break out in a sweat like that. Some of you may need to change your pants. It's OK, don't be embarrassed. Just realize that this is the system the Catholics use. Let's just be happy that popes don't command the military power they once did, and that holy crusades are kept to a minimum nowadays. Why are you laughing now?

My point is; Let's all hope to God (yes, I realize) that the Catholic Church can shed its doctrine of divine intolerance and learn to embrace humankind.

In my torturous journey through Catholic private school, they taught us that "catholic" meant "universal" so the rhetorical cliché "Is the pope Catholic?" has always made me chuckle cynically.

But then, most things do.