So long loser…
The worst Pope ever? Hard to say, there were some really horrible Popes back in the old days. The worst Pope of the modern era? Certainly. Digby breaks it down…
He did not just fail; his papacy has been a rolling disaster for the Church in the West.
He lost Ireland, for Pete’s sake, if you’ll pardon the expression. His version of Catholicism entered the public square and has been overwhelmingly refuted, rejected, and spurned by not just those outside the Western church but by so many within it. And in his inability to rise to the occasion of unthinkable evil in the child-rape conspiracy – to clean house by removing every cardinal and every bishop and every priest implicated in any way with it – he has presided over the global destruction of the church’s moral authority. By his refusal to face the fact of huge hypocrisy in the church over homosexuality – indeed to double down on the stigmatization of gay people, reversing previous gradual movement toward acceptance – he has consigned the church to what might well become an institutional tragedy.
I think that the thing that I will remember from this Pope is his tendency to blame the media for so much of the Church’s failure. At one time they were trying to pedal the idea that the child rape epidemic was due to the moral looseness of the 60s. As though we couldn’t tell that this has been going on and had been covered up in the Church well before that. And we were supposed to overlook the fact that this excuse completely undermines any reason for the Church, really. Sometime last week I was listening to the BBC and they were running an hour on reaction to the Pope’s resignation. One of the Vatican talking heads made the case that Vatican II was never meant to be a liberalization of the Church. TV made up that story and it stuck. So all of these Folk Masses were the result of bad info from the TV, I guess. Leaving Catholics (and ex-Catholics) all over wondering when priests started taking instruction from the TV set?
I only wish he was gone. He did most of his damage before he ever became Pope, and will likely do more afterwards. I think he found he is more powerful owning a Pope than being one.
D’oh
His overconfidence was his weakness.