In the best times magnificent, in the worst times monstrous, the Roman Catholic Church with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has reached a spiritual cliff. Whether the Vatican retreats from the edge or leaps over depends a great deal on the election of the next pope. Popes often have had angels working on one shoulder and devils playing on the other.
   In 1873 Father Damien de Veuster was assigned to service the 800 members of a leper colony in Molokai, Hawaii. He became pastor, medic, and guardian to people who were outcasts because of the disease that disfigured and destroyed bodies. Father Damien fought passionately for leper colony improvements and for dignity and respect for his patients. He contracted the disease in 1884 and lived for five more years, treating his flock until he died at 49. Pope Benedict made Father Damien, the perpetrator of magnificent acts, a saint of the church in 2009.
   But the devils have been at work , too. Ireland’s Murphy Report covers the years when the Irish government assigned over 10,000 homeless, poor, mentally and physically impaired girls and females who had committed minor crimes to the Magdalen Laundries run by the Roman Catholic Church between 1922 and 1996. The church committed a holocaust on “detainees” between the ages of nine and 89, with the average age of 23. Many were sexually abused and raped with impunity by priests assigned to the workhouses. The Murphy Report is one of the worst I have read about man’s inhumanity. It chills the heart. In one instance, a supervising nun found a kitten that a girl had turned into a pet. Detainees were not allowed to keep pets.  In a monstrous act, the nun took the young girl and the kitten into the kitchens, opened the lid on a cookstove, and tossed the kitten into the flames. Ireland’s prime minister just apologized for the ninety years of monstrous rape and mental torture.

Advice For The Next Catholic Pope From An
Irreverent Jewish Mayor Of New York

   The February 18th issue of Time magazine had an obituary written by the present Jewish mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, about a previous Jewish mayor of New York, Ed Koch. Bloomberg recalled advice that Koch had given him when he ran for office: “Be yourself. Say what you believe. And don’t worry about what the people think. If you do what you believe is right, the people—even if they don’t always agree with you—will respect you. Tell the people that if they agree with you nine out of 12 times they should vote for you. But also tell them if they agree with you 12 out of 12 times, they should see a psychiatrist.” Probably terrific advice for all politicians, columnists, and popes.
   The 266th pope would be wise to see if he can get a majority of Catholics to believe a few of the 12 most important beliefs of the Vatican, but if he tries to get them to believe 12 out of the top 12, he needs to see a psychiatrist. Sex and women are the two most vexing problems of the Vatican, but the popes and cardinals, frightened to death by the religious and sexual power of women for at least 1,500 years, made their beds forever single. The Vatican also decided that married priests were leaving their hard-earned wealth and property to their wives and children, not the Vatican. How to stop that? Let’s make them be celibate so they have no inheritors. Celibacy for priests was not a “cardinal” rule until promulgated by Pope Gregory in 1079.
  Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of the Washington, D.C. diocese, tries hard to sell Catholics “truth” and dogma. He writes, “Demands are constantly made that it change its 2,000-year-old teachings on marriage, family, sexuality, morality and other matters related to the truth about human beings. They cannot be changed... Catholics are taught to respect the fundamental, inherent dignity of every person, each made in the image of God... The church teaches that it is our obligation to manifest love of neighbor, to provide charitable service to others, and to promote truth, genuine freedom and authentic humanism.”  
   I wonder if gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and women really feel that “genuine freedom” (whatever that is) and “authentic humanism” (whatever that is). These are persons  made in the image of God. Wuerl said it was a dogmatic truth. According to “truths” in the Bible, God checks out everybody while they are still in the womb. If already made in the image of God, why are they treated like second-class citizens who must go through some kind of rehab? Why is the U.S. losing 50 priests and 175 nuns a month? Why are women banned from the priesthood? Was Mary Magdalene an “apostle” of Jesus Christ, or not? The Vatican decided that as long as there were no women in the traveling apostles, women could never become priests. What a lame, monstrous, misogynist excuse!

Will The Next Pope Resemble Captain Ahab
Searching For The Great White Whale?

   Christianity is only 2,000 years old, and the Vatican claims it’s been there since the start. If true, the Vatican has done a terrible job in marketing Jesus Christ. Over 30,000 different Christian denominations have developed since then. Evidently they didn’t like what the Vatican was doing. There are now over 200 different churches in the U.S. that have Roman Catholic somewhere in their name and claim some kind of relationship to the original. An example is the St. Odilia American National Catholic Church, which has parishes in Connecticut, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and now Fargo, North Dakota. Most of the leaders in St. Odilia are former priests and nuns.
  A transgender man from Minnesota was recently ordained as a priest in the North American Old Catholic Church, and will start a new congregation called the House of Transfiguration in Minneapolis. There are an estimated 10,000 members of the church in 23 states, and over 100 transgender clergy have been ordained. When the First Vatican Council in 1870 approved the idea of papal infallibility (The pope is never wrong when he speaks about doctrine!) some church members bailed out of that particular bit of theological nonsense and started the Old Catholic Church, which later became the North American Catholic Church.
   The Roman Catholic Church claims 74.4 million members in the U.S., but I understand that to get your name removed from a Catholic Church’s roll one must write a letter. I imagine that doesn’t happen very often. Correct me if I’m wrong. In fact, the second largest “religious” group in the U.S. is fallen-away Catholics! Evangelical churches are third at 26.3 percent. The Sacramento Catholic diocese has over a million registered, but less than 140,000 attend mass regularly. Only 16 percent of Boston Catholics attend church. Of course, that’s where Cardinal Bernard Law committed his monstrous sin of hiding sexual abuse by his priests...

The Random Mathematics Of Sex And Abortion

  What sexual intercourse has to do with love between husband and wife I will leave up to the reader. Sex has been a major problem of the Vatican for over a thousand years—but it asked for the solution with monstrous results. With over seven billion people, a majority with raging hormones, let’s reduce sex to mathematics. In order to maintain a sustaining population, each eligible fertile heterosexual couple should produce two children. A female has a child-bearing period of about 30 years—let’s assume a conservative 14 to 44 age. If a couple averages two sessions of sexual intercourse per week, that means 3,120 sessions in thirty years. (If you don’t like these numbers, talk to your spouse!) But it takes only two sessions to produce your share of the population. What to do for the remaining 3,118 expressions of love when they might produce another child? You could abstain. Or you could hazard a gamble on Vatican Roulette, complete with calendar and thermometer. Or you could find a good birth control program.
   The Catholic Church claims it has been against contraceptives for 2,000 years. That means that a woman could mother about 30 children at maximum potential. Women didn’t pay any attention to the Vatican for 1,900 years, using folk remedies such as manure, poisonous herbs, and various cruel devices to abort fetuses. Actually it wasn’t until New Year’s Eve 1930 that the Vatican banned artificial means of birth control, such as the relatively new inventions of diaphragms, cervical caps, douches, various suppositories, and spermicides. Condoms have been around longer, carefully crafted by millions of sinners from sheep and cow guts. Later, latex was a real “God”send.
   Since the invention of the birth control pill in the 1960s, numerous polls have come up with the same answer. By using every means known to medical science to prevent pregnancies, 98 percent of Catholic women of child-bearing age have told the Vatican boys to go over a cliff. Catholic bishops have been on some fantasy island, listening to Vatican boy choirs singing bass, tenor, alto, and soprano parts. Most of the people in the pews appear to side with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a favorite actress of George Bernard Shaw, who once responded, “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?”

Would Female Catholic Popes Have Altered The
History Of The Roman Catholic Church?

  Cardinal Wuerl writes that the Catholic Church has made “indispensable positive contributions... to Western civilization... such as modern university and hospital systems... music, art, architecture, economics, philosophy, and legal concepts... and in providing social services to the poor.” I totally agree. It has been magnificent in these contributions.
   But if women since Mary Magdalene had played a 50 percent roll in Vatican decision-making, would the Roman Catholic Church have made so many monstrous contributions to the list of man’s inhumanity? Men possess loads of battlefield and locker-room testosterone, which often leads to terrible judgments. Women have the instincts of compromise, making a deal, of saying “Wait a minute...,” and, no doubt, have more empathy and compassion. Would women have allowed Catholic Inquisitors to burn St. Joan of Arc at the stake? Would they have approved of the monstrous dark ages of the Inquisition, where as many as 200,000 “witches” and “heretics” were hanged, drowned, beheaded, and burned at the stake? With women sharing equally in 13th-century decisions, would the Vatican have launched the Albigensian Crusade against the “heretics” of Southern France, when 20,000 people were slaughtered in one day?

The Vatican Eventually Apologized To Galileo
400 Years Later, But Not To Bruno

   When St. Francis of Assisi died following a dedicated life of poverty, would the Vatican women have allowed the pope in 1323 to declare that “anyone who claimed that Jesus and his disciples lived in absolute poverty was guilty of heresy”? To extinguish Francis’s life of poverty and thought, the Vatican put followers of St. Francis to death. Would Vatican women have ever agreed to burn Galileo’s young partner Giordano Bruno at the stake on February 17, 1600, for refusing to recant Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolved around the sun instead of vice versa? Galileo survived the inquest but was watched for the rest of his life. Pope John Paul II, who wore a bloody cicatrice at times, finally apologized to Galileo 400 years later for the church’s treatment. He didn’t say a word about Bruno.
  In the Middle Ages, would women in powerful church positions have allowed the Vatican boys club to assert that Jesus’ foreskin, saved by some anonymous scavenger, was safely ensconced in relic containers on altars of 18 churches in medieval Italy? The high-pitched female laughter would have been heard in St. Peter’s Square. Or would this be another miracle like the five loaves and two fish that fed 5,000? A little snippet turned into 18 “skins”...
   I wonder how many “saints” would have been approved by a gender-balanced Vatican. The number sanctioned by the Vatican is somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000. Among the unusual: St. Goncalo from Portugal, reputed to cure hemorrhoids if you expose your bare behind to his statue in Murtosa, Portugal; St. Bartholomew, who was skinned alive by the Inquisition, later becoming the protector of tanners; St. John, who died after being tossed into boiling oil, now the patron saint of candlemakers.
   As Vatican head of state, Benedict is immune to prosecution for criminal acts. But as a resigned pope he is not, even if he lives in the Vatican. Benedict has asked the Italian government to grant him immunity from prosecution. Stay tuned. He is still responsible for attempting to hide the sexual abuses of hundreds of priests, although Pope John Paul II sent a clear message to bishops to hide these transgressions of the body and soul by shipping Boston cardinal Bernard Law to a safe house in a Vatican-supplied apartment. He later assigned Law to a Rome basilica where he could continue to say mass. The election of Benedict’s successor is very important. A puff of white smoke might determine whether the Roman Catholic Church is on hospice or has a chance to recover.