sex stays in the closet

Ratzinger had been a member of the Hitler Youth for two years when in 1943 his class was drafted into the Flak and assigned to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, to guard a BMW aircraft engine plant. In February of that same year, members of the White Rose Society were executed by guillotine for issuing leaflets and painting anti-Nazi slogans throughout Munich. The persecution of a nonviolent resistance movement couldn’t have escaped the seminary student’s attention. He received and complied with two more draft notices before finally “deserting” only “days or weeks” before the German surrender when scrambling to do so was widespread. I don’t mean to say the church is anti-semitic. Perhaps maintaining the status quo of a popular pope by naming a close confidant took precedence over any controversy the appointment would generate.

In that respect, he’s a natural choice for a genocidal organisation that intends to withhold its blessings and favours from the most oppressed should they dare to commit the grave sin of being sexual human beings. Hypocritical Catholics will continue to sin, shuffle into confessional boxes with steamy stories of their escapades and hidden desires, and dutifully recite 5 Hail Mary and 10 Our Father pentinences whilst their confessors relieve pent-up frustration preying on the defenceless.

Volo comparare nonnulla tegumembra.

Updated @1615 04/20/05: Patrick Doherty believes the pope needs to wage a war on consumerism. In fact, a consumer war is being waged but not in the sense Doherty means.

In Latin America, Catholics are being outdone by evangelical churches started by American missionaries and promising televisions and other shiny stuff through prayer, if you do it in their churches. Another reason the Catholic Church is floundering is the priest shortage. People with problems like a human touch, as do the men leaving the church or looking elsewhere for a position.

Updated @1800 04/20/05: Richard Silverstein raises some valid concerns about Ratzinger’s views, as does mobius about religious intolerance:

While on the most recent Dorot seminar in Tzefat, the week preceding Purim, I davened (prayed) in the hesder yeshiva on Shabbat. Hesder is a program (albeit an endangered one) that allows Israeli men entering the army to spend half their military service learning in yeshiva. In between Kabbalat Shabbat and maariv (the prayers welcoming the Sabbath and the final evening prayer service) one of the students gave a shiur (sermon) that more or less went like this:

“Jews? We start out here [spiritually],” he says, extending his arm in front of him. “And if we work our whole lives,” he begins raising his arm into the air, “we go up, and up and up. Goyim? They start out here,” he says, lowering his hand to the floor. “And if they work their whole lives, they can only get as high as where we start out.”