The Daily Skunk

I was drunk in a pub in St. Andrews with my good friend, AJ, a good-old-boy southerner, when we got on the topic of the recently dead Pope. Now AJ is a good Christian, meaning he’s tried more than once to convince me to give up my depraved lifestyle and return to the fold (yeah, fucking lot of chance that’s gonna happen). So when we started talking about the Pope, I naturally assumed that Alan would besiege my ears with a lot of Christian propaganda about the many wonderful things the Pope accomplished. But no, AJ’s a lot smarter than that. To my surprise, he mentioned that now that the pope (I’m fucking sick of capitalising the word “pope”) is dead, the Church can finally reform itself and try to enter the 21st Century.

“Well shit,” I thought to myself, “someone’s beaten me to the most offensive, radical, and unpopular opinion.” In light of the pope’s accomplishments, we need to remember the offensive failings of this essentially political figure. As Christopher Hitchens writes in an article in Slate, “By the time the church apologizes for saying that condoms are worse than AIDS, or admits that it was complicit at best in the mass murder in Rwanda, another few generations will have died out.” And to this list of notorious accolades, lets add either complicity with, or complete and utter incompetence in preventing/remedying the problem of, paedophilia in the priesthood. As if the situation weren’t bad enough as stands, recall that the pope granted Cardinal Law a sinecure at the Vatican. The Guardian, a British newspaper, ran an article stating, “Pope gives top position to disgraced Boston cardinal.” The article went on to explain that, “The former Archbishop of Boston, accused of covering up the activities of paedophile priests and forced to resign, was given a prestigious sinecure by the Pope yesterday.” Being cloistered in the Vatican, Law isn’t accountable to international law and is protected by the Vatican’s special status. Basically the Pope gave him diplomatic immunity for covering up the rape of children. Awesome. Fucking Awesome.

So given all this, how can you reasonably expect me to feel sorry that this violently conservative (look at his position on gay rights and abortion, among others) is finally dead? I think that any sort of reasonable Catholic who believes that the Church has erred in its decisions on the aforementioned issues should look at the passing of pope John Paul II as an opportunity for progress rather than a “tragic moment.” Ding dong, the witch is dead. Move the fuck on people.

PS: Hey, about life after death… If being gay is morally wrong, and Cardinal Law helped keep priests who performed sexual acts on young boys from being prosecuted, and the pope granted him immunity, then in the grand scheme of things, the pope is an accesory to both rape and homosexual behaviour. And while that may not hold up in any mortal court system, do you really think God and St. Peter are going to look highly on a man who is in the larger sense of the term, an accessory to paedophilic rape and homosexual behaviour? Sorry, I’ll be chillin’ in Hell (if there is one) with John II and Cardinal Law. But I won’t be there for rape at least.

PPS: Joey Rats, as the prolific social and political commentator John Stewart refers to the new pope, is also a douche-bag. They should’ve picked the African guy, not that I’d like him any more, but because I’d love to watch conservative Catholics squirm at the thought of a black pope.

PPS: Don’t tell me I’m going to hell. I know this already. I’ll be running the place.

Here’s a link to Hitchens’ article that I referenced earlier in this post. http://slate.msn.com/id/2116443/
Here’s a link to the The Guardian article. http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,12272,1226651,00.html