Yesterday the CTV national news reported that the Pope is really stepping down because of a Vatican sex scandal similar to what this site reported Vatican denounces reports that Pope quit over gay sex scandal

Why do you think he stepped down or retired? is he old and frail ?

or is there a sexual scandal in the vatican?

I think he had to return to the dark side, after all there's another star wars film to be made

Perhaps a more apt question would be "When is there ever not a sex scandal in the Vatican?". Honestly, though, I don't see how it makes a difference. The pope isn't accused of blackmailing anyone, or of having sex with any of his "parishoners", and there's no suggestion that the pope is gay himself. So, if this supposed revelation did have anything to do with his resignation, then it must have been because he didn't feel he was able to do whatever it is popes are meant to do when something "terrible" happens - in other words, he's no longer up to the job, which is exactly what he said was his reason in the first place.

I'm thinking that this Pope maybe finally realized that he was never going to be dynamic and relevant like John Paul sometimes was, in a time when the Catholic church is fairly dynamic and in danger of losing relevance thanks to folks like the current Pope deciding to fight losing cultural battles all the time without ever stepping up and winning a few moral victories. You know, because sometimes it seems like Elton John's got more important things to say to people than the current old dodger and that shouldn't happen with any influential ruler of a sovereign nation.

I still think I'd make a hell of a Pope. I'm pretty much through with the sexy sexing these days. I can make young people feel like crap. I don't have trouble telling anyone they're wrong and I'm right. I don't have any history with Nazis or other genocidal organizations. I like hats, and I'm fairly young. I could be in the Popemobile right past the time it flies even. I've already had experience with telling people that what I'm saying is tantamount to the word of god...

I'd be the Pope everyone could have a beer with, the Pope who could talk about sports and order tacos in Spanish. I'd take Catholicism and explain that sex was okay, just don't go fucking nuts with it - and hey, we need to spend more money on science and space exploration and the arts instead of making religion just about people's party pants. Sure, I'm an atheist, but given the amount of bullshit that seems to continuously being thrown out there by folks who claim to be extremely devout I'll take my chances for actually putting forth a religious agenda that's closer to what that Jesus guy seems to have said against any of the guys they're likely to elect any day of the week. And hey, no crisis of faith for me: As an outsider I wouldn't worry so much about nitpicking the Bible or whether some deity was actually talking to me or not. The important bit would be trying to get all of the Catholics in the world to be better people, however I could... Maybe that would spread to the other religious folks too, and before long maybe the world would be less a few million assholes. It can't be much worse than some of the other historical Popes.

Well, shit. Find me some gay cardinals I can blackmail into voting for you.

C'mon guys, this needs to happen.

We need a pope who was born in the 1950's or later, may of smoked pot and attended a rock festival or rock concert at one point in there life and who is not homophobic or isn't attracted to little boys and girl's, and from this side of the world for a change and never served in any wars or supported nazi's or fascism or Sharia law

Last edited by C_Guy : 24th Feb 2013 at 8:45 PM.

I don't care about anyone's pot use except as much as it does or doesn't make them a piece of shit. Some people are fine with pot, some people are annoying with it ("It's the best thing ever! Everyone should do this, like meeee!"), and a few people manage to turn it into a troubling drug habit I guess. Just be cool, which is one of those things that should be in the Bible. Jesus supposedly walked around feeding people and shooting the shit with strangers, with the only people he ever got really hostile with being folks cheating other people out of their money by using their god against them. That seems a stronger, easier message to swallow than burning witches or peeking through keyholes to make sure no one's doing the buttsex. There might have been good hygiene reasons against buttsex in the Bronze Age, like not eating old meat or angering steppe nomads, but going after people who prey on the poor, being nice to other people, and getting people medicine seems fairly straightforward even now. Unless you still want to eat the question meat in the back of the fridge - if you need god to tell you don't do that, then that's okay.

Just a clarification about your post... you believe that it would be good to have a pope who is a pedophile? Or, was there a NOT which was supposed to be attached to that?

@Mootilda



We all make mistakes. I can definitely see the source of confusion however...

There have been numerous reports that the International Tribunal Into Crimes of Church and State have been building a case against the Pope. The most widely reported story is that exactly one week before he announced his resignation, a member of an unnamed country's government, with intimate knowledge of the case against him, leaked information about a possible arrest warrant to the Vatican. Because the Pope is legally the head of state of the Vatican City, he would be under the Tribunal's jurisdiction. However, as a private citizen (resigned), the Vatican can refuse his extradition. Additionally, there have been reports that the Pope has met privately with the Italian President to request immunity from prosecution, in case he ever needs to be moved to a hospital in Rome, and thus outside of the sovereign borders of the Vatican.

Either way you cut it... it's kind of hard to take the Catholic Church's claim of Papal infallibility serious anymore. At least the next one won't be a Nazi. Hopefully.

I love that someone feels they need to pose that question. These men all probably eat caviar for breakfast, they DO swan around in frocks all day, and probably all have matching sets of solid gold double-ended dildos.

I mean, is anyone shocked or surprised to hear the Vatican is a den of hypocrisy and criminality? They pretty much always have been, it's not a modern development.

opp's my bad, I was multi - tasking earlier on and had the TV on while posting, I fixed it to isn't

Well, one of Scotland's cardinals just resigned amid another growing sex scandal (same story as usual), which only fuels the fiery speculation that Miss Ratzinger is retiring because his infallible papal body cannot take the next approaching shitstorm of mass abuse.

I hate that anyone believes in or listens to the Church or the Pope. When Benedickkkt was elected, I had friends being bombared by phone calls to the effect of, "ZOMG, we have a new Pope! Pay your respects!"

It's not the same story as usual, this one is accused of abusing adults.


Does anyone get the feeling that the MTS population doesn't take popes very seriously?

Well, as I've said, I'm an atheist. There's a limit to how seriously I take any sort of religion. But Catholicism is more like regular politics in my head than a lot of other religion, owing to its long history of stepping into that arena and telling heads of states who to behead and all that; and they do have their own country, which is not (surprisingly) Mississippi or Arkansas.

But since it's political, I tend to look at it in a political way, which is why I (perhaps mockingly, but hell give me a chance and I'm game even if the clothes are ridiculous) brought up the whole spiel which was my way of "this is what Catholicism needs to do to stay relevant." Because even though I don't have a personal need for religion, I recognize that there are people who do (if not for the reasons that they often tend to proclaim) and since they do I think the function of a religion to try to provide leadership for moral and ethical behavior is an important one for those people. Or to put it the other way, I'd rather that people were good and moral people without religion because personally I see having someone hovering over your shoulder with the threat of eternal punishment as your reason to not be a dick makes it a little less endearing than if you got to that place on your own; but ultimately I don't care how people decide to not be dicks at some point, the important part is that people not be assholes to each other.

But the Catholic church, which was a pretty good thing in some ways hundreds of years ago when the legal system was complete shit and amounted to "don't piss off the guy who lives in the castle" has pretty much lost its way in my opinion, getting sidelined with shit that's a fair shake irrelevant even in their own religious texts. You know, because there's an awful lot in there about treating the poor fairly and attending to them, and not an awful lot about who's sleeping with who and nothing about gun control or lowering taxes as a way to salvation. Since the Pope is supposedly the leader of all Catholics, having a guy step up for all of those millions of people and tell them flat out "Look, stfu and listen. We've been doing it wrong," seems like that could be a very good thing for everyone with very little drawback or public cost. It would be the cop on the corner maybe for all sorts of shitty behavior, just by one dude deciding to step up and be a good leader.

I think stuff like that's kind of awesome and scary, since it's also a reflection of how terrifying things can get with one bad leader. So...um, so what if it's about religion or popes or whatever. It's about people who look outside themselves for moral leadership, and since that's the case I wish... maybe even the sort of wish that amounts to a prayer for an atheist that those folks would get that leadership and he'd be amazing. It's not like a country... I think moral leadership for Presidents and stuff like that is overrated. There's just too much gray area in the things that are "good for the country" versus "will probably result in innocent lives being taken" sometimes. It's why real theocracies, the sort that aren't a few city blocks wide, are terrible government.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/25/world....html?hpt=hp_t3

Archbishop of Scotland is resigning too. This whole "I'm too old to be Pope anymore" excuse is starting to sound like pure and utter bullshit. Something really seedy is going to come out in the coming weeks and months, and I have a feeling it's going to be pretty damn huge.

Nah, I think the whole organization has so many problems all the time right now that it's easy enough for it to all be coincidence or the external fallout out of internal politicking - which all part of the problem really. As a complete outside, it looks like Bishops and such are falling into a really academic level of petty squabbling which is fine if you're an actual academic because the politics are vicious because the stakes are small and all that, but like I said, whether I totally agree with it or not, people look to the church for leadership. That's ultimately the most important part of the church, beyond even the religious message on some levels, since a church without leadership is a church that no one listens to. As far as I'm concerned, the "big thing" could just as easily be that the Catholic church, on some organizational level, might be waking the fuck up and realizing that old farts and rapists aren't getting the first job of presenting your message to the public done: People will only listen to you if they trust what you have to say.

That would be hard enough if it was just some lazy atheist like myself in the funny hat, telling people a lot of stuff they want to hear; but once you get to some guy older than your grandparents telling you not to touch your junk or else Jesus will... care I guess or some accused rapists trying to tell people how to get into paradise? Look, I understand that paradise is a big deal in church and it's supposed to be great, but push comes to shove I'm still going to go with "Heaven can be great all it wants, but it's not helping me when my kids are being raped by the alleged servants of the Big Guy on Earth." It's an image problem on so many levels that if it was a major retailer or something the solution would be "Fire everyone except the most trusted folks in management. Start again." I'm not even sure Catholics have a good way to fire folks, so maybe organizationally laying everyone and encouraging them to go take a hike is as good as it gets unless you've got someone like me in charge saying, "Fuck it, I'm the Pope. Excommunicate all of those guys, let god sort it out." Or what would be a more polite and holy sounding alternative, because appearances matter and that's the whole point.

I dunno... the timing of all of this seems way too convenient for it all to be simply coincidence, and the Pope is the common denominator in all of it. Not even six months ago the Pope's butler was thrown under the bus by the Catholic church for leaking documents that catalogue enormous corruption in the church. Sentenced to 18 months in prison by the Italian government. Then all of a sudden in February the Pope announces he is retiring, and all of a sudden huge scandals come to light? Yeah... As Hamlet would say, "Something is rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark". Benedict XVI was an extremely conservative Pontiff and used his position often in a "bully pulpit" manner. It's a HUGE U-turn for him to then randomly say that he's going to be the first Pope in 600 years to resign. If it was really just "too old and tired", I seriously doubt that he would do so much damage to the institution of the Papacy. More like "I'm too old and tired to keep up with how ridiculously corrupt this place is".

Feb 2005: Pope is rushed to hospital
April 2005: Former Nazi Youth member elected as new pope
January 2006: Man jailed in Turkey for trying to assassinate the pope
May 2006: China starts appointing its own bishops, the Pope starts excommunicating them all
Sep 2006: Pope pisses off entire Muslim world
Oct 2006: Child abuse scandal in Ireland
June 2007: Someone else tries to kill the pope
Oct 2007: Prelate suspended for being gay, but he was just pretending
April 2008: Child abuse scandal in US
July 2008: Child abuse scandal in Australia
Dec 2008: Pope gets sexuality and gender identity confused, claims that genderqueers are destroying humanity
Feb 2009: Bishop claims Holocaust didn't happen
March 2009: Pope tells African Catholics that God wants them to deliberately contract HIV and have babies they can't feed
Dec 2009: Even more child abuse in Ireland
March 2010: Two Vatican officials found to have arranged cottaging sessions in the Vatican
March 2010: Child abuse scandals in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil; pope personally implicated
March 2010: Pope personally implicated in more sex abuse scandals, this time in the US
April 2010: Pope's aide claims that anger over child abuse is basically just anti-Catholic prejudice comparable to anti-semitism before the Holocaust
April 2010: Child abuse scandal in Malta
June 2010: Child abuse scandal in Belgium
Sep 2010: Vatican bank accused of money laundering
Nov 2010: Pope admits that using condoms to avoid spreading HIV might be moral, and then the Vatican quickly backpedals
July 2011: Vatican cuts diplomatic ties with Ireland over accusations that a handful of bishops might perhaps have not been entirely diligent when it comes to that whole not doing about anything about child abuse thing
May 2012: Pope's butler accused of leaking confidential documents
Oct 2012: Aforementioned butler jailed
Feb 2013: Pope resigns
Feb 2013: Allegation that gay priests are being blackmailed (as opposed to lampooned, sacked, excommunicated, and condemned to burn in hell, all of which are much more run of the mill)

Of course, I've exaggerated most of these titles for effect. But my point is that no matter when, if the pope had decided to resign at any point in his tenure so far, it would have been entirely possible to cry "He's only resigning because of [insert latest scandal here]!"

I don't believe that's a fair assessment of what the Pope said. Perhaps a rephrasing? The rest may be overstated a bit, but seem basically correct.

Yes, you're quite right - that wasn't the intended message of the speech, and wasn't unintentionally included in it either. But the speech did, rightly, create a lot of outrage, and it was correctly pointed out that the result of this policy of the Catholic church would be the various hyperbolised evils I mentioned. I don't mean to lampoon the pope too much - but I went for polemic descriptions, in order to illustrate the plausibility of any of these events as triggers for a resignation.

...

That's my handle on things too. One more crisis to break the church's back? I can't imagine it unless there's something so radical and outrageous that it dwarfs all other scandals. Just looking at the major ones right now... There's several of them and not any single one of them is actually anything new unless you've stuck your head under a rock for the last fifty thousand years and not paid attention to what sort of animals these "humans" are...

The Vatican Bank is rotten... which is pretty much the same issue with all of the banks of Europe apparently since the post 9-11 "terrorist money laundering" powers started rolling out a series of new oversight and auditing powers in the US - which were quickly either adapted elsewhere or used by the US to hand over new information about what variously bad behaving financial institutions have been doing, a lot of it that have nothing to do with terrorism. The bank scandals in Britain, in Switzerland, and yes, the Vatican Bank, are all pretty much more or less the same issue, that banks all over Europe (and I guess the US possibly, but I haven't heard a lot of about that and I'm disinclined to speculate since it's been fairly clear that American bad behavior in banking is mostly of a different sort, more out in the open and just flipping the rules over and pounding away at them until everyone feels dirty for having noticed) But the Vatican Bank has been at the heart of scandal before and while it's troubling from a specifically Catholic and generally financial sort of view, it's really not anything that transforms the dialog.

Then there's the sex scandals, which again aren't anything new exactly - they've been filtering out slowly for decades and it's clear that the church hasn't exactly been unaware of them during any of that time. I'm not sure how much more impact one more sex scandal has, given the huge numbers of molested children that haven't done more than rock the boat. I suppose if there was something specific about the Pope it could escalate things, but even the Archbishop of Scotland doing the hot man-sex thing with consenting adults is something I'm not sure works for me as a smoking gun. Again, unless the hot man-sex thing is... I dunno, the equivalent to shaking hands in the back rooms of the Vatican... that all of the higher ups in the church somehow managed to come around to tricking out the Vatican like a dock worker's gay bar, with Benedict doing the Streisand on stage or something. Lesser catastrophes of hypocrisy are still yet more nails in the coffin that is the moral authority of the church, but they're not exactly "building up" to anything. There are gay Catholics in position of power, everyone but pants-on-head Catholic Guy has to have known that simply by looking at the statistics. Some fraction of these Catholic folks are also not nice people too, which should have been a no-brainer as well. And the scandal that is "Well, they molested some kids... but that shouldn't stop them from doing God's work, right?" thing, well it's already been played out. How do you escalate that to the next level, until you get to "black Vatican helicopters inserting special forces child rapists into Manhattan?" The church has bad problems, but they're already bad enough without imagining they somehow get worse.

Then there's the tittery "Pope's Butler" leaks. A very powerful person manages his appointments according to the amount of money that people can provide him? You don't say...No one likes bribes-as-access gateways, but honestly I don't really know what organization doesn't end up doing it to some extent once you get to this level. Essentially at some point you've got to turn away people anyways because there aren't enough hours in the day to deal with everyone, so having the people you meet up with be the people who can do the most for you ends up being about as practical and arbitrarily egalitarian as a lot of organizations ever get without specific rules otherwise. Given that you presumably don't "step up" over the authority of the Pope within the Catholic church, I'm not sure what the scandal actually is except the appearance of scandal. The Pope presumably has the right as I understand it to arbitrarily meet with whoever he decides to for any reason, which was the interesting bit about John Paul when he decided to meet with the guy who tried to assassinate him. I'm not sure that happened because JP got a check in the mail to do so, but ultimately I'm not sure it's unreasonable to say "so what" if that was the case.

The Catholic Church is ripe with scandal and justly earned outrage and ill-will towards it, but you're suggesting that they're somehow going to top all of the shitty things real soon with "Thassa the last freakin' thing!" I don't buy it. Every single thing is sufficiently screwed up to be a clear indication that change within the organization is required, and I just outlined a couple of the highlights. Maybe I'll be proved wrong - that the Vatican Bank funded 9-11, or gay pool parties with the assembled Bishops, or maybe "Bribe? We're Catholics, we've got plenty of money... the Pope says he'll meet with you if you give up that ass..." all happened and the world will have proof that sometimes some people are just not like the rest of us. Because hey, that happens sometimes. But an escalation, a scandal to beat all current scandals seems a little Bigfoot's Baby to me. It's already terrible in there. I think it's perfectly logical and reasonable to have this guy come in thinking "What a great honor..." and a few years have a crisis of conscience when he wakes up one morning and goes "this is a fucking mess, and I've got no way to fix it but somebody has to." Or even someone making that decision for him essentially, in the time honored tradition of "do us a favor and resign in dignity, so we can get the guy in place who can do the job that needs to be done."

I really don't think the problems with the Catholic church are insurmountable. The Bank business is irrelevant to church authority. If someone has a problem with how we do appointments? I'd tell them to go screw themselves, it was our decision. And the sex scandals/child abuse bits... Just do what you should have done in the first place: shrug off the gay priests (Maybe with the Catholic equivalent of Don't Ask Don't Tell: "As long as our priests are engaged in consensual activities that don't disrespect our institution..." or something like that) and help the relevant authorities put the rest under the prison. Then don't dwell on it any longer and move forward with Kinder Gentler Catholicism whether some of your priests like it or not. You can move back to "Aren't you ashamed you touched yourself" Catholicism after a bit if you want to, but the most important thing is to shed the worst of the scandals, wave away the least, and move forward for now in a way that signals "Things are changing over here." You do that in other organizations firstly by doing the same sort of thing the Catholics appear to be doing right now, getting rid of the management structures that might be perceived as part of the problem.

If there's any real scandal in the church? Maybe it's that this whole stepping down Pope thing is the religious equivalent of a shareholder revolt, sans the 30 Years War. And since we do have that as an example of how not to do things, maybe the stepping down thing was even more reasonable? I've got no problem with giving Benedict the benefit of the doubt right now and maybe suggesting he's stepping down because it's the right thing to do for the church, because at this point a scandal to trump all current scandals seems like it would require Vatican Death Squads or the Catholic Church running drone attacks supporting Syrian loyalists or something.

I think we can stop stressing the "Nazi Youth" thing. Any German kid of his age was prone to being lumped into that, especially given the Catholic church's initial support for Hitler, it doesn't actually mean he held any Nazi beliefs into the mature periods of his life. "Nazi Youth" is quite remote from "member of the Gestapo".

Oh, yes - again, I didn't mean to suggest that it's a legitimate reason for him not to be suitable as pope, just that it's something that could easily have led to the kind of media frenzy which could be claimed as a reason for a resignation.

I walked to the market today to buy a litre of barley only to find that it now costs a day’s wage.