Benny Boy XVI Calls It Quits

[Nickdfresh]

I actually think the Vatican Scandel in Rome is actually a bit of an improvement since it involves consenting, but blackmailing gay-manwhore, adults. At least no children were abused, for once...

[Va Beach VH Fan]

Dayum... Of course, Sullivan himself is gay, so I guess he would know...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/27/andrew-sullivan-pope-is-gay_n_2776603.html

Andrew Sullivan, Gay Catholic Blogger, Speculates Pope Is Gay
The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 02/27/2013 7:01 pm EST | Updated: 02/27/2013 11:57 pm EST

A prominent Catholic and gay blogger has renewed speculation that the outgoing Pope Benedict may be secretly gay.

Following the announcement that Benedict will not go into hidden retirement but will instead continue living in the Vatican with trusted secretary Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, The Dish's Andrew Sullivan penned a post titled, "Two Popes, One Secretary," in which he speculates that "something truly weird going on."

The 56-year-old Gaenswein, dubbed "Gorgeous Georg" by the Italian media, was recently featured on the cover of Italian Vogue, according to the New York Daily News. Vogue, which did not interview the archbishop for the article, titled its piece: "Father Georg - It's not a sin to be beautiful."

"So Benedict’s handsome male companion will continue to live with him, while working for the other Pope during the day," Sullivan writes. "Are we supposed to think that’s, well, a normal arrangement?"

Clearly, Sullivan does not.

In a past column, Sullivan concluded that it "seems pretty obvious" that "the current Pope is a gay man," albeit one who has not "explored his sexuality, or has violated his own strictures on the matter." Detailing the close relationship between His Holiness and the papal right-hand man, Sullivan's column cites Colm Tóibín's tabloid-esque review of Angelo Quattrocchi's book The Pope Is Not Gay.

From the review:
When asked if he felt nervous in the presence of the Holy Father, Gänswein replied that he sometimes did and added: ‘But it is also true that the fact of meeting each other and being together on a daily basis creates a sense of “familiarity”, which makes you feel less nervous. But obviously I know who the Holy Father is and so I know how to behave appropriately. There are always some situations, however, when the heart beats a little stronger than usual.’
Gaenswein's proposed living arrangement is just more proof for Sullivan that the pope is closeted. "This man – clearly in some kind of love with Ratzinger (and vice-versa) will now be working for the new Pope as secretary in the day and spending the nights with the Pope Emeritus," Sullivan wrote this week. "This is not the Vatican. It’s Melrose Place."

Sullivan's column is more grist for the Vatican's gay rumor wheel, coming on the heels of a bombshell article in Italian paper La Repubblica, which claimed the pope's resignation was influenced by a damning internal document that reportedly cited powerful lobbying influences in the Vatican, including a gay lobby.

La Repubblica detailed other points from the alleged dossier, including the claim that a gay underground network organized sexual meetings of members at venues across Rome and Vatican City.

[Nickdfresh]

Will the next Pope be Fabulous IV?

[Hardrock69]

A great op-ed piece in the NY Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/opinion/if-the-pope-can-quit-catholics-can-too.html

Give Up Your Pew for Lent
By PAUL ELIE
Published: February 28, 2013

AT 8 p.m. last night in Vatican City, Benedict XVI resigned the papacy. Now American Catholics should consider resigning too.

The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has caught the mood of the church, especially in North America.

Resignation: that’s what American Catholics are feeling about our faith. We are resigned to the fact that so much in the Roman Catholic Church is broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon.

So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en masse, if only for a time.

We are in the third week of Lent, a six-week season of reflection and personal sacrifice when Christians prepare for Easter by taking stock of their religious lives. In recent centuries Roman Catholics have observed Lent by giving up a habit or pleasure, whether red meat, chocolate, soap operas or Facebook, to simplify their lives and regain their independence from worldly attractions — their religious freedom, if you like.

Two years ago, Stephen Colbert gave up Catholicism itself. As the comedian told it, he swore off Catholicism on Ash Wednesday and made it as far as Good Friday, when he went on a “Catholic bender.” His riff inverted the old saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Mr. Colbert beat the pope to the punch.

In traditional parlance, Benedict’s resignation leaves the Chair of St. Peter “vacant.” So I propose that American Catholics vacate the pews this weekend.

We should seize this opportunity to ask what is true in our faith, what it costs us in obfuscation and moral compromise, and what its telos, or end purpose, really is. And we should explore other religious traditions, which we understand poorly.

For the Catholic Church, it has been “all bad news, all the time” since Benedict took office in 2005: a papal insult to Muslims; a papal embrace of a Holocaust denier; molesting by priests and cover-ups by their superiors. When the Scottish cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned on Monday amid reports of “inappropriate” conduct toward priests in the 1980s, the routine was wearingly familiar. It’s enough to make any Catholic yearn to leave the whole mess for someone else to clean up.

Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is a theologian. He would not have stepped down if he did not think he was setting a sound precedent: a resignation prompted by physical, not institutional, weakness. That he felt free to resign suggests that he thinks the church is doing fine. But countless ordinary Catholics know otherwise.

That is why this Sunday, I won’t be at the Oratory Church of St. Boniface in Downtown Brooklyn, even though I love it there — a welcoming, open-minded, authentically religious place.

Instead, I’ll be at the Brooklyn Meeting of the Quakers, who have long invited volunteers from our church to serve food to the poor.

Or I’ll be at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, an Episcopal congregation that hosted the Occupy movement’s relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy.

Or I’ll go to the Zen Mountain Monastery at Mount Tremper, in the Catskills.

Or I’ll be in Washington, with colleagues who attend Shabbat services at Georgetown, the first American Catholic university and the first (four decades ago) to engage a full-time rabbi.

Or I’ll knock on the door of the Masjid Ibadul-Rahman, a mosque on my block, or the Zion Shiloh Baptist Church, across the street, or L’Église Baptiste d’Expression Française, on the corner.

I hope and expect to return to the Oratory church the following Sunday. But I can’t be sure. To some degree, it’s out of my hands, a response to a calling.

A temporary resignation would be a fitting Lenten observance. It would help believers to purify and deepen our faith in the light of our neighbors’ — “to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness,” as the American writer Flannery O’Connor put it. It would let us begin to figure out what in Catholicism we can take and what we can and ought to leave. It might even get the attention of the cardinals who will meet behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel and elect a pope in circumstances that one hopes would augur a time of change.

And it might dispel the resignation we feel. Most ordinary believers have given up hope that the church will change its ways. But Benedict’s resignation reminds us of a truth we have known all along: change in the church can happen, even dramatically. If so hidebound an institution as the papacy can be changed, what can’t be?

Any religion that believes in an invisible, intelligent, wrathful or benevolent SkyDaddy needs to resign.

The top clerics in Islam, the top Rabbis in Judaism, and the Cardinals in the Vatican all need to step up to the plate and announce to the world that their respective religions are nothing more than scams perpetrated upon the human race for thousands of years.

Give it up people.

If you cannot find meaning in your lives without having to OBEY what other people tell you, then you will just have to fucking deal with it.

[FORD]

**Popeapalooza 2013 update: White smoke alert**

New Pope announcement imminent...... stay tuned

[mh5150]

Azzoff just tweeted
"No new pope despite @whitesmoke

[Sensible Shoes]

I refuse to turn on CNN and honor this stuff with my watching.

[envy_me]

How hard is it??? Just put all names in a hat and pick one...

Vatican is so embaressing. Those people outside waiting are so embaressing.

[ZahZoo]

It takes a two/thirds majority vote. There's 118 cardinals voting... that means about 78 have to vote for one guy to win it.

[envy_me]

It takes a two/thirds majority vote. There's 118 cardinals voting... that means about 78 have to vote for one guy to win it.

My method is more efficient. And it would achieve the same result :D

[FORD]

It takes a two/thirds majority vote. There's 118 cardinals voting... that means about 78 have to vote for one guy to win it.

And then some right wing cardinal threatens a filibuster and it all goes to shit......

[envy_me]

And then some right wing cardinal threatens a filibuster and it all goes to shit......

Right wing cardinal

[FORD]

Well, OK... that's a relevant term. Odds are that if they're cardinals, they're probably already right wingers.

There are some liberal priests and nuns out there.... but they probably aren't the ones who get chosen to move up in the hierarchy.

[DLR Bridge]

I think the humor in the remark was the idea of a poor little red bird who can't help but fly in a circle.

[envy_me]

Well, OK... that's a relevant term. Odds are that if they're cardinals, they're probably already right wingers.

There are some liberal priests and nuns out there.... but they probably aren't the ones who get chosen to move up in the hierarchy.

I know. It's so sad. You have to be a theif to get anywhere in the catholic (and most others) church.

It's just embaressing to see all those people waiting outside. How they act... Haven't we gotten further as humans?? God, it's sad.