Hail the Pope!

All hail the new Pope! A humble picker in the vineyard of the Lord etc. he seemed so self-effacing and sweet with that weird Bavarian porcelain skin and the creepy smile it was all just a wonderful chance for him to get the nod, hell he didn’t even want it. It’s not like he spent the last 20 years scaring the shit out of every priest who stepped out line, and I’m sure he spent the 2 weeks before the conclave buffing his figurine collection rather than clamping down on anyone with half an independent mind who was about to cheat him of the prize. One look in that guys eyes and you tell he is probably not one to play Vatican corridor power games with.

Now there’s been some talk about the guy being a Nazi because he was young and in the Hitler Youth. Which I think is a little unfair. Although, it seems his family certainly didn’t fall on the right side of the fence. From the Independent:

Yet, in Traunstein, some of the town's older residents feel that questions about the Pope's early years remain unanswered. Herta Kaiser, an 83-year-old pensioner recalled that several people in the town hid Jews from the Nazis and helped them to escape to neutral Switzerland. "Traunstein was not all Nazi, it was also a Catholic stronghold," she said.

There is no evidence that the Ratzinger family felt inclined to help the town's few remaining Jews, or the smattering of anti-Nazi resistance fighters who dared to oppose the regime.

Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau concentration camp for being a conscientious objector, recalled: "It was possible to resist and those people set an example for others." She added: "The Ratzingers were young and made different choices."

In 1937, another Traunstein family hid a local anti-Nazi resistance fighter, named Hans Braxenthaler. He had been tortured in Dachau for his opposition to the regime. Frieda Meyer, 82, one of the Ratzinger family's neighbours at the time, said: "When Braxenthaler was betrayed and the Nazis came for him, he shot himself rather than give himself up."


However, though Ratzinger was hardly a Nazi, he chose to be mentored by one:


Ratzinger's election will also raise questions about the dubious role played by the Catholic Church during the Nazi era. The extent to which leading Catholics felt obliged to reach compromises with the regime is outlined by the stance taken by Ratzinger's mentor, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, one of the Pope's most important early influences.

Documented evidence shows that the cardinal visited Hitler's mountain retreat during the 1930s and was entertained to lunch by the Führer in person. During their meeting, Von Faulhaber is on record as telling Hitler that the Church saw him as an "authority chosen by God, to whom we owe respect".


Doe this matter? Yes, it fucking does. This is the spiritual leader of 1.1 billion people. The competition was tough. Did you check out the CVs of the other Cardinals? These guys are serious people. They all speak about 8 languages + Latin, have incredible records of social justice and communitarian christian activities. Many are expert theologians and they’re all conservative and spiritually acceptable because… well, the last Pope made it that way. So why would they choose the guy with Hitler Youth on his CV? I mean, it just doesn’t look good. And if there’s one thing that the church of the sitine Chapel, St Peter’s dome and a billion gaudy Virigins should know something about, well – it’s appearances. Why pick the guy who, when the vast bulk of the Church faces 3rd World issues of AIDS, subsistence, poverty and oppression is obsessed by ‘relativism’? (A 1990s canard, if you ask me. I think that in the present climate with the limits of globalism and Western market capitalism becoming more and more apparent, there’s in fact a great openness to spiritual and moral quality in Western life. The Catholic Church was perfectly poised to mine that, and could do so with a savvy, aware Pope at its helm. But that’s not this guy. And one more thing: relativism ain’t so bad. Not compared to oppositional state which this Pope presumably desires, ie: Absolutism. But more on his recidivist tendencies below).

In any case, for a man who likes to wang on about spiritual purity so much, he certainly likes to stick his fat greasy thumb into temporal affairs. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote, concerning his involvement in the recent American election:

About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."

In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.

That’s not all. The Pope is also linked to Neil Bush. George Bush’s brother – the ‘bad’ brother. Neil Bush is quite something. It seems that there’s no dirty deal or shady geopolitical power play that he’s not linked to in some bizarre and unexpected way. In fact, he’s kind of like the Forrest Gump of global shady finance and we’ll no doubt be taking a look at him some future time. Meanwhile, here we find him in a boardroom with Cardinal Ratzinger, the Aga Khan and the Chief Rabbi. No, that isn’t the opening to a joke. I’m sorry folks, but as long as this shit goes on we’re the fucking jokes:


The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official. The foundation, based at the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Geneva, is listed by Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports as a management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research.

Neil Bush, the president's controversial younger brother, six years ago joined the cardinal who this week became Pope Benedict XVI as a founding board member.

….

The federal Office of Thrift Supervision sanctioned Bush for having "multiple conflicts of interest" in his role as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, a Colorado thrift whose failure cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. Bush paid $50,000 in a settlement. Gary Vachicouras, a theologian and foundation official in Geneva, would not explain in a telephone interview yesterday why Bush, who has no clear public connection to religious causes, was on the first board.

…

The charter members of the board were all well-known international religious figures, except for Bush and his close friend and business partner, Jamal Daniel, whose family has extensive holdings in the United States and Switzerland, public records show.

Besides then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, founding board members included former chief rabbi of France Rene-Samuel Sirat; Jordan's Prince Hassan, a Muslim dedicated to religious dialogue; the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, another prominent Muslim; Olivier Fatio, director of the Institute of the History of the Reformation; and foundation president Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Damaskinos.




Fantastic. A new Pope who preaches a creed of spiritual purity that bares no relation to what most – good, hardworking, God fearing – Catholics endure everyday and yet, he he’s able to rack down the Holiness enough levels to figure out gloabal crony capitalism and the demographic shifts in the US Electoral college. What a guy. Some may say, a spiritual realist. Others: a fucking hypocrite. A stinking fucking hypocrite who now lays claim of infallible superiority over 1.1 billion people. Now, what’s going to happen here? Will the 1.1 billion, eat crow and take this shit? Or will they figure this man’s out of touch and leave him and his bankrupt church behind? Did I say bankrupt? Yes I did. Why’s that? Well, the Vatican had to pay over $5 billion in legal costs in America alone due to the tsunami of sex abuse scandals that’s engulfing them. Why? Not only because the code of celibacy has now rendered almost 50% of the priesthood homosexual, some of them predatory homosexuals, but because Cardinal Ratzinger made it his job not to deal with the rising, systemic crisis that threatens the very moral and financial fabric of the institution he claims to uphold. He refused to broach the issue, he refused to speak to victims, he refused to investigate. And so, he is bankrupting the Church for billions upon billions of dollars.

And while I’m at it, please allow me to point out how much it mystifies me that a man who has never had sex, should have an infallible right to dictate the sexual behaviour of 1.1 billion people. I mean, what the fuck does he know about the issue? It’s insane. Bonkers. It’s like making David Beckham chairman of the Bank of England. It’s like having a ten year old fly a passenger plane. It’s ridiculous. Maybe, if he loosened up a bit, then he wouldn’t want to repeal the enlightenment – Blumenthal again:


The new pope's burning passion is to resurrect medieval authority. He equates the Western liberal tradition, that is, the Enlightenment, with Nazism, and denigrates it as "moral relativism." He suppresses all dissent, discussion and debate within the church and concentrates power within the Vatican bureaucracy. His abhorrence of change runs past 1968 (an abhorrence he shares with George W. Bush) to the revolutions of 1848, the "springtime of nations," and 1789, the French Revolution. But, even more momentously, the alignment of the pope's Kulturkampf with the U.S. president's culture war has also set up a conflict with the American Revolution.


And to hammer the point home, here’s the Pope’s view on Galileo. A 400 year old controversy, that pretty much got settled by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, but still raging on in one one man’s tiara-ed head:


Calling Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger, a "medievalist" is not just an empty insult. This guy literally believes the Earth is the center of the universe, or perhaps something even crazier. Check out what he said about Galileo in a speech in Parma, Italy, on March 15, 1990: "At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just."

He also said this at that time, which I consider to be more expository of Ratz' antipathy toward rational thought: "But Galileo did not limit himself to attacking Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy. Leaving the terrain of science, he went further and entered the realm of theology as well. To harmonize them with the Copernican theory, he proposed to modify the traditional interpretation of various texts of Scripture that mentioned the movements of the sun and earth."



So: Pope Benedict: Recidivist. Taught by a Hitler-loving Cardinal. Refuser of the Enlightenment. Denier of the most widespread and financially ruinous sex scandal of all time. A man who stands for spiritual purity – but shares a boardroom table with a convicted fraudster. A man who will not back down an inch on abortion – but will interfere in a sovereign country’s politics to allow the man who started a war his own church opposed to hang on to power. A man who will not confront the sexual and moral dilemmas his flock confront every second of the day – but will confront… Galileo.

You know, I’m no Catholic. But I think the Vatican has the reach and the placement to be a powerful and important player in who we are as humans, where we’re going. All the issues that confront us - issues like poverty, global warming, globalism, terrorism and war – are ones that the Catholic Church is uniquely placed to deliver moral leadership on. And, indeed, from the sound of some of the cardinals in the conclave, they would have been intellectually well-equipped to do so.

But instead, this monkey gets elected. Well, that’s nothing new, politics, hypocracy and bad decision making in the Vatican: it’s just the 16th century all over again. And they wonder why there was a Reformation.