Pope Dope

That shy and retiring Miss Dowd has piped up over at the NYT re: the Catholic Church's treatment of nuns and other folks beneath the notice of Our Holy Fathead.  I spent a substantial portion of my life in the Catholic school system, from grade 2 all the way through Catholic University (actually, to call it by its proper name, The National Pontifical Coeducational Catholic University of America, which was a lot of fun to spell out at football games).  In the 1970s and '80s, CUA was an incredibly liberal hotbed of ideas — gay priests & nuns; myriad students, male and female,  from Iran and other parts of the Middle East; Marxist anthropologists and potheads and liberal theologians.  

All that has changed: CU is now as hidebound and ethically moribund as the rest of the mainstream Catholic world.  AIDS cut a swathe through a generation of gay seminarians, and we saw how that whole Marxist thing played out  post-Reagan/Bush.  Now the Church spends its time and money stomping on gay rights and paying off women impregnated by priests, though the Franciscans draw the line at ensuring good medical care for the priest's children when they need cancer treatment.  I have a few friends who became priests, and they seem like decent guys, but I knew many nuns who were brilliant, dedicated women working for what was once quaintly called social justice.  Some of them left the Church, and I've lost track with almost all of them.  

But I thought of them while reading Dowd's piece.  Accusing the Catholic Church of being and amoral is like accusing Maine of being cold in the winter.  Here in my adopted state the Church has taken in over a quarter-million dollars in second collections at Sunday Mass.  To help the homeless, or pay for fuel assistance for those in need? 

Why, no.  It's to fight gay marriage downeast — which, I can tell you, is a far lesser threat to folks in Maine than poverty and unemployment.  Too bad all those aging nuns can't storm the gates of the Vatican or, failing that, quietly organize a distaff takeover of the Church.  It might take women a long time to clean up the mess left by men in power, but hey, we're used to it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opinion/25dowd.html?_r=1&em=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1256556302-5QjKiMyq31NX/Egop5Cg6g

To counteract the sour taste left by communion wine, Gary Leib's jazzy one-minute animated tribute to the isle of Manhattan.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/10/25/opinion/1247465199861/concrete-jumble-midtown-twist.html?hp