Nobody Expects...

Good God. I said I was expecting a conservative Pope. I wasn't expecting bloody Ratzinger. How on earth did he get past the moderate cardinals?

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI is a former Hitler Youth member (which one should probably forgive him personally, as the Nazis didn't exactly make dissent easy, but it's a strange message for the Catholic church to be sending out) and the former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which in less euphemistic times used to be called the Holy Inquisition (actually, come to think of it that isn't any less euphemistic, is it? It's just acquired certain... negative connotations). In the latter capacity he has come down hard on left-wingers such as liberation theologians.

He pretty much wrote John Paul II's doctrinaire policies on the ordination of women to the priesthood (he's against), the use of condoms to prevent infection in areas of high HIV incidence (he's against) and the like (you name it, he's against, pretty much). He's been kind enough to call homosexuality "an intrinsic moral evil", and all faiths other than Catholicism "deficient".

Some comfort may be found in the fact that he's 78 years old, and therefore the oldest Pope to have been elected since 1730.

If I go on about this for too long, I shall get seriously cross. Thank God I'm not a Catholic, is all I can say.