A Pop at the Pope

Written for Don't Panic

Parents across Great Britain (especially those with young boys) can breath a sigh of relief this week. The leader of a well know, world wide paedophile ring has slipped out of the country. Ha! What a mockery the Catholic Church makes of itself, and common law. It still cannot get used to being held accountable for its actions. In times gone by if some one (like king Henry IV of Germany) opposed the Vatican’s expansionist megalomania, a simple excommunication would bring them to heal. Now, in spite of damning evidence of conspiracy to cover up crimes against vulnerable children for the ‘good of the Universal Church’, committed by the current pope in his time as ‘Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, it seems as if not all that much has changed. Parliament intervened to block the campaign to get a warrant for the pope’s arrest, just as George Bush did on another occasion in America, in 2005.

Apparently the main emphasis of the pope’s state visit, aside from the odd Beatification and drinking blood with some Glaswegians, was to highlight the ‘marginalisation of religion, particularly Christianity’. Erm, excuse me mister Benedict, sir, please don’t spank me, but which other institutions enjoy the same impunity as the Catholic church, and £10million of public funding for state visits?

Not my chess club. Nor even the RSPCA, and they do some great things for dolphins. How about the 390,127 people who listed themselves as Jedi on the 2001 census form? Unlikely. Not even the Scientologists, oh how they dream of the day…

So stop winging about the march of ‘aggressive secularism’ and comparing atheists to Nazi’s (even though you know very well what being a Nazi is all about, having been a member of the Hitler Youth). It’s irrelevant, it may be that many great acts of kindness and altruism are carried out by religious organizations, but many atrocities are too, boring argument… blah blah blah. Stalin was an atheist don’t you know? Remember Mother Theresa? Whatever. Red herring. What really matters is people are less inclined to believe peddlers of anachronistic fairy stories in 21st century Britain, and less tolerant of the privileged and molly-coddled position afforded them.

I understand that the church finds itself powerless to halt the ebbing decline of congregations in the UK, and that all pyramid schemes require the base to be larger than the pinnacle, and that the pope himself must be feeling the squeeze. The trouble is that this fashionable back lash against what is being painted as Richard Dawkins and his evil band of fundamentalist atheists seems more than a little out of touch with reality. But then that is essential tenet of religion after all.