On Papal Retirement

I learn today that Pope Joey Ratzinger is retiring from his position as Pope at the end of the month. After my initial reaction, which was ‘he can do that?’ To answer that question, yes, he can; it’s a position from which the pope can, in fact, retire. It was last done in 1415, which I think is a good sign of how well that position proffers benefits. The remaining six centuries of popes all died with their extremely well-furnished golden slippers on.

The motivation for this decision was the source of my most immediate curiosity. After all, when you see a politician step down with a really close date, it’s usually worth examining their life and their political surroundings to watch for the inevitable explosion. In 2012’s roundup of crazy, the American political system, we had a handful of politicians hurriedly stepping down shortly before embarassing primaries, or revelations of widescale voter fraud. Was this why the pope is stepping down, to brace for some dreadful revelation and to deflect eventual punishment and harm, to say ‘oh, it’s all in the past, he doesn’t represent our Church,’ etcetera?

Well, sorry to say it, for anyone holding their breath about some truly explosive broadside hitting the side of the Catholic church in the coming weeks. You see, Ratzinger is the former Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, which you might know better as the Inquisition. In this role, he handled paperwork and cases of child abuse, and by the way, it’s child rape, and released new guidelines for how the people inside the church should handle these cases. That is to say, with the Catholic Church as a vast syndicate that includes in its repertoire of charitable behaviour, the protection and recirculation of child rapists, he released a document about how best to handle the aforementioned child rape cases that didn’t include taking them to the fucking police. In his eight years of reign, Cardinal Law of Boston has been promoted to work at the Holy See, where he can conspicuously not be interrogated by the Boston Police about his role in the coverup of many years of child rape, and then again, to Cardinal Mahoney, a man who ten years ago was being held out as a moderate voice who could help reform the church’s public relations image. As it so happens, Mr Mahoney was stripped of his local positions by his Archbishop when in January it came out that he worked tirelessly to defend and protect the poor helpless CHILD RAPISTS of his clerical brotherhood, but the Vatican still thinks that Mr Mahoney deserves vocational positions and special papal votes. Because who better to vote on the selection of the authority of this syndicate of child rapists and their Les Collaborateurs than a man who spent thirty years concealing the repeated and protracted abuse of the poorest and most vulnerable in one of the most desperately dangerous cities in America?

Then why, with all this history of dreadful and terrible things under the reign of a man who puts the Sin in Sinecure, why do I think that nothing’s going to come out in the coming weeks? Because there is this cavalcade of things that would destroy any kind of politician or moral human being who had anything about themselves that they could consider shame. No, I’m afraid that the most reasonable explanation for the exit of Mr Ratzinger from the shiniest padded seat in the world sat upon the most bloodstained of halls, the last helpless echoes of stolen lives, lost souls, and destroyed hope, is exactly the reason we were told: He’s too unhealthy to handle the important travelling, gold-table sitting, and hand-lifting duties his position demands.

Chances are, given the low level of physical challenge that represents, what it really means is that the evil old asshole is going senile, and is now having to deal with the personal heartbreak of watching his mental faculties slip away from him. Oh, the time has not been kind to Mr Ratzinger, time has not been kind; watching his hand tremble as he reaches for a pen, sighing, clenching the fist and waiting for the tremor to pass. The moment of hesitation, the word not there when he reaches for it, stammering, hesitating; the agony, the embarassment and the shame as the memories of his happy mornings spent goose-stepping with his fellow Hitler Youth slipping from his mind, a little less real, a little less whole, all vanishing like sugar in the rain.

On the other hand, the man lives like a billionaire, has unprecedented international influence despite no qualification to manage it, and has massively enabled long-term protracted child rape and the abuse of human dignity, so fuck him.