Fire for effect

So it seems the Pope has just arrived in Berlin.

As this video shows, German artillery was unsuccessful in halting the advance of His Holiness from the beachhead he'd immediately established upon exiting Vatican One.

Benedict then moved decisively forward, and it appears that the German political leadership was quickly driven into submission without the slightest struggle.

Welcome to the occupation. 

Suffer the little children

A brief addendum to Ophelia's exasperated comment over at Butterflies and Wheels on the Catholic Church's habitual proclivity to conflate sinfulness and homosexuality - which, as was to be expected, is being wielded as the killer argument in the current debate around sexual abuse committed by representatives/employees of the Catholic Church.

Here's a snippet from a statement to the press by Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German episcopal conference, in which he craftily uses his public apology to the victims as a vehicle to expound the Vatican's views. "Twisted and impervious" indeed, as Ophelia notes. What makes the whole performance even more daunting is the sanctimonious delivery. The guttural lilt, the self-righteous rhoticity - this is what all Catholic priests in Germany sound like.

As Zollitsch asserts smilingly at the end of the video, sexual abuse is not a systemic problem in the Catholic Church, but rather an accumulation of instances of individual deviance. Read (I guess, considering Ophelia's comment) homosexuality.

Which makes you wonder what the heck it is about the Catholic Church that apparently makes it so attractive to deviants all over the world.

A message from the past (or: Richard Dawkins slandered by German bishop)

There's so much wrong in the attack that Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Bishop of Cologne, launched against godless Dawkins in his All Saint's Day sermon that even the attempt to unravel this jumble of flawed, stupid prejudice seems futile:

"Ähnlich wie einst die Nationalsozialisten im einzelnen Menschen primär nur den Träger des Erbgutes seiner Rasse sahen, definiert auch der Vorreiter der neuen Gottlosen, der Engländer Richard Dawkins, den Menschen als 'Verpackung der allein wichtigen Gene', deren Erhaltung der vorrangige Zweck unseres Daseins sei ...."

("Like the Nazis, who saw the individual primarily as a carrier of his race's genes, the pioneer of the new atheists, the Briton Richard Dawkins defines human beings as 'containers for genes', whose preservation he considers to be the ultimate rationale for our existence.")

Sigh. Sometimes life is like hitting your head against a concrete wall, repeatedly. And I've been having a headbanging hell of a time lately, even without this benighted nonsense.

The cheek, the gobsmacking, exasperating cheek

After a week of heated and hysterical debate, which culminated in the pope's somewhat silly command that Holocaust-denier Richard Williamson spontaneously distance himself from his "beliefs" in order to be reintegrated into the fold, the man at the centre of it all has finally deigned to comment.

Before distancing himself from his notorious ideas about the Holocaust, Williamson stated in an interview with Der Spiegel, he will first "examine" the historical evidence. Only if that historical evidence yields the appropriate insight will he rethink his attitude. This will take time, however - a prediction we can safely take to mean that Williamson has no inclination whatsoever to rethink his views of the Holocaust.

The real kick in the gob of reason and sanity, of course, is his obscene suggestion that the historical evidence needs to be examined. By him.

As always when confronted with the conspiracy theorist's claim to the right to form her/his own opinion about firmly established facts, I feel a blinding, palpitating wave of exasperation wash over me. Right now I wish I did believe in a wrathful god, because if I did I would pray for him to strike Mr. Williamson with particular vehemence (and would probably feel better for it), but since I don't, all I can do is hit my own head against the wall and wail.