April 03, 2005
the next pope will be a wingnut
The pope-to-pope media blanketing is disturbingly uncritical to the point where you'd soon forget that Pope John Paul II for 28 years headed the same organization that finds itself in caption boxes of sex abuse lawsuits too numerous to list. US Archdioceses are considering bankruptcy because the Vatican, in its infinite pipeline-from-God wisdom, deliberately ignored the ten thousand or so signs that those archdioceses were operating a dating service for NAMBLA members.
But that's all been said and by people a whole lot angrier than me. As for what's next, we can only look to PaddyPower.com and place our bets on the next pope [update: PaddyPower.com, the online Irish bookmaker, has pulled its Vatican odds. Googlecache here. My guess is that their market was prone to manipulation by bettors with access to better information than the book, so they froze it]. And be frightened. For all this pope did and was, the next pope will apparently make liberals wax nostolgiac for JPII in the same way US liberals came to realize that Ronald Reagan wasn't so bad when held next to a true wingnut like George W. Bush.
Because JPII held on for so long, nearly all the cardinals elected to the cardinal college were elected by JPII - and so share his ideology. And just to make sure, JPII expanded the college by some 30+ seats (and immediately filled them with ultra-conservative ringers) only a few years back, as a statistical assurance against any surprises; like the one that led to JPI's election after he split the frontrunners, who had both managed to disgust the voting cardinals with sleazy campaign tactics. JPI, you'll recall, promised to open the Vatican Bank books to clear up rumors of scandal. A picture of perfect health prior to popedom, he lasted 33 days.
But there will be no surprises this time. The next pope will be a true wingnut.
Let's briefly look at the top candidates.
Dionigi Tettamanzi (Italy) (5 - 2)
Tettamanmzi, the top Italian choice and odds-on favorite, is not only at odds with homosexuality but even civil unions ("The attempt by society and the civil law to give equal status to families and domestic partnerships must be considered false and falsifying"). In addition to these sentiments, sees "Excommunication for procured abortion constitutes" as a "gesture of maternal love."
What's scary is that Tettamanzi is by far the most moderate and pensive of the candidates.
Francis Arinze (Nigeria) (11 - 4)
Because Catholicism has demographically drifted below the equator over the past quarter century, there is reason to think that Nigeria's Francis Arinze will find himself as the next pope. Africa has become a modern day Crusades-arena, with constant and often deadly muslim-christian friction in nearly every country. Electing Arinze would send a message that the Catholic church takes the situation in Africa quite seriously. It would also send a message to the West of an unambiguous and unyielding stance on stem cell research and abortion.
ABCNews.Com reports that Cardinal Francis Arinze compared abortion and genetic research to the 9/11 terrorist attacks,He appealed to Buddhists to work against "a culture of death, in which abortion, euthanasia and genetic experiments on human life itself have already obtained or are on the way to obtaining legal recognition."
Oscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga (Latin America) (4 - 1)
Maradiaga is the leading candidate from Latin America, which, like Nigeria, has experienced exponential growth in recent years, as opposed to Europe, where Catholicism has flat-lined somewhat. Not to be outdone in the hyperbole department by his competitors, while attempting to explain the media coverage of the sex abuse scandals in America, Maradiaga said, "Only in this fashion can I explain the ferocity [in the press] that reminds me of the times of Nero and Diocletian, and more recently, of Stalin and Hitler."
Joseph Ratzinger (Germany) (7 - 1)
We all make mistakes when we're young, but you'd think that Joseph Ratzinger's brief fling as a Hitler Youth would come up a bit more often when the media discusses his overall qualifications. Not that there's anything wrong with a little youthful indiscretion, but perhaps the tolerance Ratzinger learned in 1930s Germany has carried over:
As if that weren’t enough, the ever-busy Cardinal has used his privileged take on the Truth to set back inter-faith tolerance and religious pluralism a few decades. In 1997 Ratzinger annoyed Buddhists by calling their religion an ‘autoerotic spirituality’ that offers ‘transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations’. And Hinduism, he said, offers ‘false hope’; it guarantees ‘purification’ based on a ‘morally cruel’ concept of reincarnation resembling ‘a continuous circle of hell’. The Cardinal predicted Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church’s main enemy this century.
posted by scott pilutik at April 3, 2005 12:59 PM
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