More Questions Prompted by Pictures of the Pope's Visit to Britain

What percentage of the Catholic Church is white? What percentage is male? What percentage is over 65? What percentage is wealthy enough to dress in silken robes and jewelry? This image of the pope and his entourage should give you some glimpse of the problem with the church. The hierarchy consists (almost) exclusively of rich-old-white-guys who go around insisting everyone else do things their way. Sound like a reasonable plan to you? Any wonder why the 'morality' they preach is so exclusionary and oppressive?

Celebrating Your Appendix

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip escorted
Pope Benedict XVI to the Morning Drawing Room in
the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence
in Scotland, on Thursday. Photograph © Dan Kitwood.

I opened The New York Times this morning to find this front page image - monarchs and pope, two remnants of the dark ages. Listening to npr this morning I heard one man who planned to protest the Pope's current visit to Britain articulate the relevant matters quite succinctly; he noted that the Pope holds a series of appallingly retrograde views - you know, no woman on earth is capable of being a priest, married HIV+ men are forbidden from using condoms when having sex with their wives, homosexuals embody sin and evil, and so on. Such views are not just disrespectful, they are often deadly. The pope's job, of course, is to impose them on others. Celebrating such bigotry and ignorance is really quite astounding. And that is Catholicism, as it were, when used correctly. In other words, no one has even mentioned the church's myriad "errors" or "mistakes" - say, the scores (easily more) of child molesters the Church has enabled and continues to harbor. In this latter crime the pope and the church are fully complicit, and not just after the fact.

This picture prompted me to consider the appendix - a vestigial appendage (1) with no apparent function, that (2) I could live without, but that (3) also can, without warning, prove lethal. That is a pretty good analogy.