I... hmm. What I meant to say is... I, uh... oh, bother. Why do I subject myself to this? I mean, clicking on links that I know will eventually make me despair for all of humanity, much less my own sanity?
There's a rabidly neo-con blog out there (which I won't link to, thankyouverymuch) that aims to make Ann Coulter look like Mary Poppins. And so one of their posts takes Pope Benedict to task for decrying the bloodshed that's broken out in Lebanon. In between rants about how the U.S. should empty our nuclear arsenal to turn all Islamic countries into glowing glass plains and how Catholics were never Christian anyway, one of the arguements offered as "proof" the Vatican is ungodly an un-Christian is the Albigensian Crusade, a particularly nasty 20-year period where the Catholic Church essentially contracted the King of France to exterminate a popular sect viewed as apostate. The slaughter was horrific, even by the standards of the day.
Follow the logic? The papacy is bad, because it won't condone the slaughter of those who don't believe the same as we do. And the papacy has been bad a long, long time, because it used to condone the slaughter of those who don't believe the same as we do. I've been critical of Cardinal Ratzinger here before, scathingly so at times, but I have to admit that he's displayed a remarkably even-handed approach thus far in his reign as Pope Benedict. I'm not entirely happy with it, mind you, but not distressed, either.
At the same time, there are professed Catholics posting at this site, claiming they refuse to listen to the Pope, because he's just a liberal lap-dog that doesn't understand scripture, while at the same time condemning so-called "cafeteria Catholics" because that group doesn't obediently follow the Vatican's more conservative social directives.
Head... splitting! Must not... explode!
Now Playing: Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3
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