The Nature of Things

So, for the first time in over seven hundred years, a pope of the Catholic Church is voluntarily giving up his crown, red shoes, and scepter . Truly, we do live in amazing times. As a total outsider, a non-Catholic with only a passing knowledge of how the Catholic Church works, I have to say that I think this may be the best decision the man has made as pope. His time in office has been marked by one scandal after another, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that any of the scandals are Benedict's fault, my observation is that his instinct has always been to obfuscate and cover up rather than to get at the root of the corruption and clean things up. This attitude has most obviously permeated the church in its reaction to the sexual abuse of children by priests. The institution's primary concern has always been for the welfare of the priests rather than the welfare of children. Of course, this is an institution which continues to deny that women are equal to men and to ...

Maureen Dowd can be a real screech, particularly when writing about the Clintons. For some reason, she seems to truly despise both Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008, she was merciless and, in my opinion, downright misogynistic and completely unbalanced in her coverage of the the Clinton campaign. Now, admittedly, I might be somewhat prejudiced because I was a supporter of Hillary Clinton's campaign. I thought she was the best qualified candidate for the job, and she was a woman, and I dearly wanted to see a woman become president in my lifetime. As far as Maureen was concerned though, if her name was Clinton, that disqualified her from consideration. She is totally unhinged on the subject. I finally just stopped reading any of her columns that mentioned either of the Clintons because I knew what her opinion would be. It was preformed and cast in concrete. It was not going to change. These days, though, Maureen has become a scree...

Is there any institution in today's world that is more insular and self-absorbed and truly tone deaf to the world around them than the Catholic Church ? If there is, I don't think I want to know about it. We have the spectacle of the pope's own preacher addressing the world at Easter time and comparing the "sufferings" of pedophile priests and those who have protected and sheltered them from the consequences of their sins to the sufferings of Jews during the Holocaust. He has now apologized for that statement, but I suspect the apology only came because of the storm of outrage that it provoked. I really doubt that he has changed his opinion. Others in the Catholic hierarchy have compared the priests' "sufferings" to the suffering of Jesus at his scourging and crucifixion. As I said, totally tone deaf and with no apparent remorse for the children who have been scarred for life, both physically and mentally, not to mention spiritually by their act...