Pope Benedict in Wonderland

If you sit and watch a ceremony in the Vatican with Pope Benedict XVI sitting high on a platform surrounded by his red-robed battalions of eminent clowns, you have to consider how this group looks more and more like characters out of Alice in Wonderland. In the past month they and their American league of Red-Hat bumblers have issued one stupid proclamation after another.

Perhaps their stupidest pronouncement to date is that they have appointed an American bishop to rein-in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.” They said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes.

The verdict on the nuns’ group was issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is now led by an American, Cardinal William Levada, formerly the archbishop of San Francisco. He appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to lead the process of reforming the sisters’ conference, with assistance from Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki and Bishop Leonard Blair, who was in charge of the investigation of the group. They have been given up to five years to revise the group’s statutes, approve of every speaker at the group’s public programs, and replace a handbook the group used to facilitate dialogue on matters that the Vatican said should be settled doctrine.

It should be obvious that the nuns are not going to sit tight for the ministrations of the three blind mice. The Vatican is wasting its time. What is the Vatican going to do when the nuns tell the three bishops to go take a hike? Is it going to excommunicate all of the nuns? The nuns should appoint someone to reform the bishops and the Vatican. The bishops are a bunch of dunderheads. The nuns should all resign from the Church and see how it does without them.

The Vatican also recently denounced a book by a distinguished theologian, Sr. Margaret Farley of Yale Divinity School, entitled, “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.” Needless to say, the Vatican’s criticism has resulted in the book becoming a New York Times best seller.

The American Conference of dim-witted bishops has also criticized the Obama Administration for requiring health insurance companies to cover birth control. The bumbling bishops do this because they are brain-dead to the fact that over 90% of Catholics use birth control despite the Church’s bizarre ban on such practices.

As someone who grew-up in a devout Catholic family, it took me many years to recognize the utter absurdity if the Church’s teachings, practices, pageantry, and hypocrisy. While the Church has been anathematizing groups that show sympathy and understanding for the downtrodden, it has been protecting and defending the abominations of a disgusting group of child-molesters.