The Catholic Church is in trouble. We who have witnessed the unconscionable pedophile sickness infesting the Vatican and its Catholic Church throughout the western world like the emperor of all maladies cancer, know that this is so. Its corruption sexual and otherwise is eating it alive as we witness church after church shutting its doors, emptying its pews and seeing many shunning the priesthood like a building marked “Typhus Keep Out.” I suggest the Catholic Church is on the ropes. In its esteemed wisdom it has chosen a 76 year old Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina as its new pope since for the first time in 700 years the previous Pope Benedict resigned.
I believe Pope Benedict did not give up his papacy because he merely was too age-related tired to continue. He could not continue because the reality of the allegations against him and his Church are so stunning and so disastrous that if Benedict dares travel outside of the Vatican state I have read he allegedly will face arrest. It does not take imagination to think what those charges are since Pope Benedict’s butler spilled the beans. Allegedly, only two men will know what the Vatican intrigue has been and that is the resigned Pope Benedict and Francis, the new Pope. Traditionally, the Church’s crimes have surrounded money, power or sex. In this case it may be all three. We do not yet know. We may never know the truth behind the flurry of Vatican activity to elect this new pope quickly.
I am fond of the fact that the new pope is a Jesuit placing a value on intellect. I like his formerly being a chemist, a man of science. I support his stand on the poor. BUT his utterly false statement about gays saying they are induced by Satan in an attempt to subvert God's law, opposing even gay adoption, heterosexual contraception, married priests, women in positions Church power and more is the ridiculous apex of the Medieval hypocrisy of a church saturated with homosexual male priests some of whom molest children by the hundreds and maybe thousands.
Not only has he made grievous statements against consenting adult homosexuals who dare ask the right to marry like everyone else but he tried in vain to overpower Argentina’s president Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner who won marriage equality for everyone in her nation. Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) and his Church were singularly and calculatedly active in their laser-like focused quest to win the argument against the Argentinean president’s effort to make gay marriage law. In Argentina, this very Catholic nation, Cardinal Bergoglio and his Church lost!
I would never think the Church would be pro choice on the issue of abortion but I might think a Jesuit and a man of science would at least soften his position on the reality of the sexual diversity of homo sapiens (man) while making it crystal clear that pedophile priests will never now be let off the hook for their crimes against humanity.
His ascension to the papacy does NOT obviate the fact that this unisex institution has many adult NON-abusive homosexuals within it and as reflected in its history probably always will. Either he turns his back on his heretofore ignorant medieval hypocritical religious dogma interfering in the political realm – something which Christ himself eschewed – or he will keep the Church in the stagnated quicksand of its own making.
Yes, the Pope and his Church are on the ropes in the west. Only he has the ability to win the fight by making the Church attractive to the poor, the dispossessed, those on the margins of society and to homosexuals who are an oppressed minority variant within the sexual diversity of man. Surely he can see, as the scientist he was, the truth in this fact and bring the Church into the 21st century. I am neither anti-Catholic nor anti-papacy but I am anti ALL religious institutions inserting their right-wing extremist anti-humanist views into the political affairs of nation states.
Pope Francis can repair this rope and allow the Church to bounce back into the ring or he can use it to ultimately hang itself relegating it, ultimately, to the thumbs down legacy of western history’s verdict. How he modernizes the Church is his choice and his alone. The problems he and his Church face are immense, systemic and profound. The rope is in his hands to do with as he wishes.
