Good News From the Vatican

So the Pope is resigning.  When I first saw that headline, I was hopeful that the resignation was due to some sort of breaking scandal.  Perhaps, I thought, a photograph of the Pope with Jimmy Savile, possibly with a group of choirboys, had surfaced.  After all, with Pope Benedict having been a long-serving Cardinal before his elevation to the Papacy, and with Savile's brown-nosing around the Vatican, (he was he recipient of a Papal knighthood), there has to be a good chance that they met.  Ideally, I was hoping that a picture of Pope Benedict smoking one of 'Uncle' Jimmy's cigars had been uncovered.  At the very least, I hoped that maybe the Papal porn stash had been discovered by a cleaning lady - if they were lucky it would just have been nun porn.  But no, apparently it all comes down to the fact that he thinks that he's too old for the job.  Not too Nazi, you notice, just too old.

But too old for what, exactly?  I can't say that being Pope looks like the most taxing of jobs - just spend half the day talking to yourself, then going and telling everyone that it was actually God's voice you heard.  It's just a coincidence that he speaks with a German accent.  Now, if I wanted to be controversial, I could speculate that he's now too old to chase those choir and altar boys.  They're just too quick for him and besides, all that activity and sexual expectation isn't good for his heart.  But I wouldn't do a thing like that.  In reality, I'd hope that his decision to resign was founded upon the realisation of how utterly irrelevant his inflexible, doctrinaire, world view is to the modern world.  His stances on the ordination of women and homosexuality belong in medieval times.  Whilst not religious myself, I found his denunciation of non-believers like myself, made during his visit to the UK, utterly offensive, particularly his claim that atheists were somehow facilitators of the Nazi regime in Germany.  A regime, incidentally, which he happily served as a member of the Hitler Youth, manning an anti-aircraft gun and shooting down British and American bomber crews.  I can only hope that the Catholic Church chooses a replacement who doesn't spout this same kind of hateful bile and remembers that Christianity is supposed to be a faith built on love.