Be still, my heart

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI will be known as "emeritus pope" in his retirement and will continue to wear a white cassock, the Vatican announced Tuesday, again fueling concerns about potential conflicts arising from having both a reigning and a retired pope. 

Looks like the popey guy is determined to be a continuing nuisance. Over at the Vatican, they're all saying "Drat!" If you cup a hand to your ear and listen closely, you can probably hear them. Go ahead and try it. Do you hear them? Now they're saying "Dang!"

In the two weeks since Benedict's resignation announcement, Vatican officials had suggested that Benedict would likely resume wearing the traditional black garb of a cleric and would use the title "emeritus bishop of Rome" so as to not create confusion with the future pope. 

Not create confusion?! This is Ratzinger you're talking about. Confusion is his middle name. This is all his doing, by the way. The story notes that "Benedict himself made the decision in consultation with others, settling on 'Your Holiness Benedict XVI' and either emeritus pope or emeritus Roman pontiff."

Emeritis Roman mastiff might be more appropriate. But the good news is that Ratzi's not letting go. He is the once and future popey guy. Oh, the juicy times that lie ahead! Be still, my heart.

The gay pope and fashion

Hat tip to Annie for this one. A somewhat crazed woman wrote a paean to the sartorial style of the departing pope. It has paragraphs like this:

My own fashion sense is nearly nonexistent, but that only makes me more appreciative of Benedict's. Some highlights: Benedict saying Mass in 2008 at Washington's Nationals Park stadium in a billowing scarlet satin chasuble (a priest's outermost liturgical garment) trimmed with crimson velvet and delicate gold piping. Benedict greeting worshipers in Rome, his chasuble this time woven of emerald-green watered silk with a pattern of golden stars. Benedict on Oct. 21 canonizing Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, while attired in a fanon, a gold-and-white striped shoulder covering, dating to the 8th century, that only popes may wear.

Oh yeah? Well, I'm gonna get me one o' them fanons today at Amazon. As to why I say the writer is somewhat crazed, see the paragraph below. She seems quite comfortable using Bill Donohue-style "logic" to make her point.

It is especially fitting for our time that the pope has chosen his own liturgical apparel as an aesthetic medium. In the world of what passes for sophisticated culture these days, beauty and art have become nearly unmoored from each other. Art is supposed to be transgressive, while beauty is judged merely ornamental. Paint a Madonna, and you've got calendar kitsch. Paint a Madonna, and add some elephant dung and pictures of female genitalia cut out from porn magazines, and you've got a work to be exhibited in an exclusive gallery. Only in the decorative and useful arts — jewelry, fabrics, home furnishings, clothing, the design of cars, machines, and even humble objects — are beauty and fine craftsmanship still the criteria by which we judge value.

She knows lots more words than Donohue but the crazy is there. Only this woman, Giuliani and Donohue truly went bonkers over the poop madonna. Everyone else thought it was fun. And she didn't have to bring up Andrew Sullivan to suggest that this pope is gay. This pope is gay. Get over it.

What could have been

Apparently, before the Roman Catholic church made the ghastly mistake of appointing Ratzinger as pope, they were moving in a different direction.

ROME (Reuters) — The former archbishop of Milan and papal candidate Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said the Roman Catholic Church was “200 years out of date” in his final interview before his death, published Saturday. 

“Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up; our rituals and our cassocks are pompous,” Cardinal Martini said in the interview published in Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.

“The church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the pope and the bishops,” he said in the interview. “The pedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation.” 

Amazing, isn't it? He was even open to gay relationships -- didn't think they were odd, at all. What a difference from this blind pope. But of course, the cardinals chose hatred over love, and went with Ratzi. It's the Christian way.