April 06, 2005

• Current thought, obviously. Currant thought is far too fruity.
• I think you're raisin important issues here DIMMN.
• I just learned that a serial papist moved into my neighbourhood. There ought to be a law!
• If not a law, a cardinal rule.
• I didn't even know that Cliff Clavin was Catholic.
• I'm a bigger fan of Cardinal Glick myself. Remember, Jesus didn't come here to give us the willies.
• Put me down for Cardinal Sin of the Phillipines. I hope he doesn't win the conclave, just to make sure that Cardinal Sin will be part of the Church for a good long time to come. Why be a Catholic if you can't have Cardinal Sin? Cardinal Sin is the best. Where's the Cardinal Sin fan club, eh? If a man of the cloth can take stupid ribbing about his name for 30 years, he must be allright. Let's hear it for Cardinal Sin!
• Wait a sec -- I just looked up Ratzinger's bio on the Vatican site. It says he "was called into the auxiliary anti-aircraft service in the last months of World War II". Uh oh...
• Uh oh... Yes... or, rather, ja. According to the Wikipedia article, Ratzinger "went into basic training for the Wehrmacht infantry in November of 1944," and in 1945 was "interned in a POW camp as a German soldier." I scribbled about Ratzinger in another thread prior to the Pope's return to dust. He's probably the scariest, more regressive guy under serious consideration for the Papacy. When even your own fan club refers to you as the "Grand Inquisitor for Mother Rome," you might have gone a little over the deep end.
• Ratzinger authored a 2002 paper titled Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons which contains such classy statements as:

  Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such [homosexual] unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. If it is true that all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians... the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity.

• Wow, he sounds like a shoe-in for the job.
• Even my sister (who has had two private audiences with the late pope) thinks this guy is too reactionairy. But she still is against condoms, same sex marriage and all other social issues that the Catholic church has a rather conservative stand on.
• You can't really hold the Wehrmacht thing against him - he was 17, it was the middle of the second world war, and every side was drafting every man of fighting age. It doesn't necessarily make him a card carrying Nazi. That he's screamingly, unbendingly, orthodox, with a massive power base, and the intellectual firepower to use it, doesn't make him a Nazi either. Just deeply scary for those of us without his same faith. Anyone who is celebrated for silencing dissent is very troublesome to imagine a position of such influence.
• Unfortunately, some people don't seem to realise that you could have been in any of the German armed forces and not been a Nazi party member. There were even non-party members in parts of the SS. Indeed, there would have been people fighting in the army who actually fought the Nazis on the streets before they came to power.
• Grand Inquisitor for Mother Rome Man, how cool would it be to have that on your business card?
• Even my sister (who has had two private audiences with the late pope) thinks this guy is too reactionary. Bitchin'! How exactly does one get to chew the fat with the pope? Is it like some sort of mafioso deal where any Catholic can meet with him, but if he doesn't like what you've got to say he excommunicates you?
• He gets the title because he heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is what they rebadged the (Universal) Inquisition as. (Actually they changed it from that in 1908, and then to the CDF from 1965.)
• According to this morning's paper, Ratzinger (in his role as Dean of the College of Cardinals) is celebrating the Mass and giving the eulogy at the Pope's funeral.
• Is his first name Rizzo?
• So...what does he think about priests touching altar boys? I mean, is he a hypocrite? Hey, if 2/3 of the cardinals want the church to be ultra conservative and reactionary, then so be it. No one's forcing the people to go along- if they don't like his rules, they can just not follow them (like any catholic without 7+ kids does already). But if they want to elect a cardinal that is so vocally anti-homosexual, but doesn't say a word when a priest is fucking around with kids, I have a serious problem with that.