Her Lips Are Moving

OKAY, so by now everybody's had his little fun with that Noonan column. So all I want to add is that, being dedicated to a sportive enjoyment of Bronze Age superstition on a daily basis, I watched every fifteen-to-twenty-minute segment the CBS morning program opened with while it had Charlie and Nora in Rome, and they kissed more rings in a week than Vince Lombardi did in a lifetime. I also watched the locals, of course, and stopped any time I saw a shot of that chimney, or a progression of men in lace, and I never caught a moment when the coverage didn't take this stuff at least as serious as it takes itself. And that is Damned Serious, indeed.

If Nooners doesn't like the fact that the teleprompter readers might've mentioned “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” a couple times, in between bouts of mass Stendahl syndrome caused by the pageantry of it all, she ought to take it up with her fellow American Catholics, whose concerns those are. Because as far as I'm concerned "news" coverage of the RCC ought fairly to scream a reminder every thirty seconds that these same child rapists, professional erotophobes, and cosmogonical sexists are, when they aren't out playing dress up, tapping vast sources of untaxed cash in an attempt to keep women who don't share their faith from controlling their own reproductive systems. Care to comment, Peg? There was so much fluffing of Timothy Cardinal Dolan (he of the private masses for The Media), to name the most egregious example, that if the thing had gone on through the weekend I think his vow of chastity would'a been compromised. I saw two interviews with the man where the toughest question was whether the mic was at the right height for him.

Look, Peg: your Church already had a nineteen-hundred year history of avarice, torture, enslavement, genocide, class warfare, theft, usury, deception, gluttony, and aerodynamically unsafe wimple design. The Catholic Church had, let's be charitable for no reason other than it puts the mock to the euphemism and call it a questionable relationship with European fascism in the living memory of, among others, your Pope Emeritus. And which was, in the postwar world, given a pass Werner von Braun must've envied. The new guy, was a mere child, and should be asked only to justify his own relationship to the sometimes unpleasant realities of Argentinian politics and assassination. And who will, no doubt, be as forthcoming as his recent predecessors have been.

I'm sorry, but if "church observers" on "th' teevee" brought any of that up I missed it. The Church managed, without a bit of outside assistance, to add to that history an organized ring of boy buggery and fucking topped that with a systematic program of avoiding the problem, as well as the laws of men. That didn't happen once, or twice. It happened often enough to invoke RICO statutes. It is so shocking, and so extensive, that swoon apologists such as yourself are required to admit it existed.

But the rest of us are supposed to apologize to you for noticing.