No offense, but as an atheist, here's my take on the news; an old wizard came to America yesterday. He'll take a short tour of the northeast, do some wizard stuff with other wizards, then he'll go back to his big wizard-city in Rome. Needless to say, I don't see the visit by the pope the same way a lot of people do.Like John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI is pretty much a mixed bag. I guess when you try to apply the religion of bronze age nomadic shepherds to the 21st century, the results are predictably iffy. While the former Cardinal Ratzinger is somewhat more conservative that his predecessor, Benedict's pretty much a 50/50. Sure, he's as homophobic as any previous pope; anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and anti-embryonic stem cell research to boot. He's also committed to expanding the use of exorcism in the world, a development that has mental health experts more than a little alarmed.
But he's also committed to world peace, fighting poverty, and leading on climate change -- under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican will become the world's first carbon neutral state. I guess, when you're dealing with old wizards, you get your good and you get your bad. So yay for the good and boo for the bad. Can you start to see the roots of my ambivalence here?
Another person who thinks the pope is a mixed bag is President Bush. With the possible exception of the expanded exorcism thing, what Bush sees as the good and the bad of Benedict is exactly the opposite of what I do. The anti-war, anti-poverty, environmentalist pope is a problem, while the anti-abortion, anti-stem cell, and anti-gay pope is an ally. But Bush, with approval ratings in the tank and his party's '08 candidate getting a big bear hug from an anti-Catholic demagogue, needs the ally pope more than the problematic pope.
So Bush is pushing the idea that he's more Catholic than John F. Kennedy -- literally. A puff piece put out by the Religion News Service shows us just how high the administration is shoveling it. The headline; "NEWS ANALYSIS: Is George Bush leading America's first truly Catholic presidency?"
Seriously...
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