Pope Benedict XVI is resigning, the first pope to step down in over half a millenium.
These days, when a very high-ranking official anywhere steps down for reasons of health (or to "spend more time with my family"), one has to wonder if that's just a cover for something else.
Assuming that the Pope's reasons are on the level, then it's a good thing. It can't help any organization when the boss becomes ill/incompetent and won't leave until they carry him (or her) out in a box, tradition be damned. If the Pope had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he could have been occupying the job and being less effective than nothing.
If I had to make an uninformed guess, I'll bet that the Cardinals will do what they did the last time: Choose an elderly one of their own who won't have the energy to push through real changes or is guaranteed not to be in the job for very long.
Not Playing Around With The Playful Signs
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5 comments:
The usual thing that happens when the Pope gets too old to carry out his duties is that the Cardinals run the Church until the Pope shuffles off this mortal coil. When you have a 2,000 year old bureaucracy, the guy at the top pretty much just yells orders at the guy who yells orders at the guy who yells orders at the helm, anyhow, rather than having any direct input to the helm. And to make it even more fun, you have several hundred helms, all of which have to operate in concert in order to change direction of the ship.
My guess is that the whole priest kiddie-f**king thing has taken him into a moral quandary for which he has no answers and he's making it someone else's problem. Good 'nuff. Hopefully he has some time to reflect on his own contribution to that problem as he sits in his cell in the monastery that he's retiring to.
This burns me up. Now that the pedo claims are beginning to stick, the Head of the Church "retires", let it be someone elses problem.
This, is a crock of shit. OK I wouldn't expect the old nazi to do time, not that it would bother me if he rotted in a cold, dark and damp cell.(I have a problem with anything nazi, and he went along with them back then) However it would be nice to see some responsibility from the Church and maybe admit they were 'bad', or something?
I don't know what would be right, but this is SO wrong.
w3ski
I think the standard practice is to let a scandal like this simmer for a couple hundred years before they magnanimously deign to admit wrongdoing.
350 years, give or take. Based on what they did to Galileo. But they still haven't apologized for frying Friar Bruno. 400 years after they burned him at the stake, the Church called it "a sad affair", but said they were right to have done it.
Ratzy can retire safely because he & JPII stacked the College of Cardinals full of reactionary antichrists like themselves. Expect the next Pope to double down on the pedopriest shuffle now that they can send them to Africa.
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