HABEMUS POP MARCH 18, 2013
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Vatican officials breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when Pope Francis (“Just call me ‘Frank’”) surfaced in Buenos Aires nearly a month after disappearing during the first week of his papacy. The pope said he had spent the month hitch-hiking from Rome to his modest apartment in the Argentine capital in order to “pick up a few things” from his old life as a humble cardinal to his even humbler new life as the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics. He said he planned to take a bus back to Rome, and couldn’t say for sure when he’d arrive. “You never can tell with these buses, can you?” the pontiff said. “But don’t worry about me,” he went on. “I’ll just do whatever poor people do when they are unexpectedly summoned halfway around the world to the throne of St. Peter.”
The pope added that he intended to replace that throne with a simple folding chair. “Why should the pope sit in a better chair than its poorest worshipper?” he said, adding that he intended to purchase a new chair as one of his first papal acts. “I’ve got my eye on a nice blue one from Ikea,” he added. “Eight Euros! How do they do it?” Vatican observers said the choice of the color blue was significant. “It will nicely set off the red robes,” said one cardinal, who asked not to be identified because cardinals were warned specifically, on pain of interdiction, not to talk to the press. Interdiction? Maybe it was interaction. Absolution? Introduction? Transubstantiation? At any rate he’ll go to hell if God finds out he spilled the beans. “And I have a feeling God already knows it,” said the cardinal with a sigh.
No one should conclude from this primitive effort to keep journalists from finding out what was going on in the cardinals’ secret conclave that Pope Francis starts his papacy with a negative attitude toward the media. That will only develop over time and further contact, as it does in all men and women who find themselves in positions of power, according to Professor Joseph Ratzinger (“Hey, a fella’s got to eat”) of the Center for Study of the Papacy and the Press of George Mason University (slogan: “Pandering to academic fashion since 1976. If you’ve got the money, honey, we’ve got the graduate center”).
Meanwhile, other observers say that the Pope has decided to abandon red robes completely because they send the wrong message, suggesting that the Pope is a Republican. The new pope would like to avoid this association. “Some of the things those people believe!” the pope is said to have lamented to the cardinal seated next to him at dinner the night before his elevation. “I mean, guns in Church? Sheesh! Give me a break.”
The pope has commissioned Old Navy to design a new line of Popeware that is inexpensive but stylish, in keeping with Francis’s “Pope of the People” branding strategy. Gone are “those funny hats,” said a member of the fashion community who has seen advanced sketches of the new line. “Taken together, the new pieces say, ‘I may be Pope, but I’m also a guy. And I know how to have a good time. On the other hand, I am the pope, and don’t you forget it.’”
Of course the Republican Party and the Vatican do not disagree about everything. They are in accord, for example, in opposing gay marriage. A source high in the Vatican said that this was unlikely to change, at least on the Church’s side of things. “We, unlike the Republicans, do not have children of our leaders coming out of the closet and forcing us to rethink the issue. That’s because we don’t have children, for the most part. In fact, we have successfully avoided rethinking many issues that are important to our members for many centuries. And not having children is one reason why.”
10 comments
Actually, purple is the right choice. I might add that Jerry Seinfeld and Lewis Black can poke fun at rabbis because Seinfeld and Black are, you know, Jewish. I haven't read his recent book, but I have watched Garry Wills deliver a talk about it, and it was painful to watch, and not just because of his spinal condition - a once faithful Roman Catholic having to take on the clerics. The hierarchy was created to impose discipline, for without it there would be no single Christology much less a Church. Of course, maybe the path not chosen by the Church was the path to salvation - darn those clerics! Anyway, the Reformation was the beginning of the end, and the end has accelerated in America and elsewhere, as membership in Protestant denominations dwindles and is being replaced with what I refer to as the "Church of I", with no hierarchy, without even a need for an intercessionist, the relationship with God being personal. Where there was once a single Christian God, today there are millions. Perhaps that will increase the odds of actually finding the path to salvation. I hope so. And I don't believe it will make any difference what color vestments Francis chooses, even purple.
- rayward
March 18, 2013 at 10:58am
3,18,13,2:04:30 pm, est/// Sorry pal there is no path to salvation because there is no salvation. Negative capability, that's the ticket.
- basman
March 18, 2013 at 1:59pm
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
3,18,2013, 2:00 pm, est///The humor was labored but it all came together effectively well in the end. Piquant ridiculing of anachronistic absurdity, which, perversely, is unfortunately as significant as it anachronistic and absurd.
- basman
March 18, 2013 at 1:54pm
P.S. This Pope gives new meaning to humble-bragging.
- basman
March 18, 2013 at 1:55pm
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
Lame Mike. You can do better, and I expect you will. Go Francis!!
- Robert Powell
March 18, 2013 at 4:15pm
I agree with Robert Powell. Very lame piece. But, unlike Robert Powell, I'm not sure if Mike can do better. Good satire depends on using the actual personality of those ridiculed. And the new Pope would not talk like Mike has him doing in any context. He might say something very seriously that, upon reflection, turns out to be absurd. That would be satire.
- magboy47.
March 18, 2013 at 4:32pm
3,18,13,6:25, pm, est// Magboy, while I think this piece has limits, it's not as bad as you say. First you are being too prescriptive on what can constitute satire. Second you're missing the point, which is the complete inversion of the faux humility of this man who knows exactly what he's doing and that he is at the seat of immense power. By absurdly stretching his pretenses to humility to absurdity, a traditional mode of satire, Kinsley explodes those very pretenses.//// Third, if the humor inclines to the sophomoric, a point I'd grant, I'd argue, as I said, it all comes together at the end in what is a bitter and powerful indictment:...That’s because we don’t have children, for the most part. In fact, we have successfully avoided rethinking many issues that are important to our members for many centuries. And not having children is one reason why...////// When you put that against the church's reactionary positions on women, homosexuality, contraception, celibacy, sex itself, other things, let alone its corruption, let alone its accommodating of its deviant priests, let alone the perverse reification at its very foundation, that indictment only grows in its power. ///And there is no redemption, BTW, in Francis "humbling" himself to wash the feet of the poor, a grotesque gesture, ultimately sentimental in the worst sense of that word, in light of the sheer backwardness of the church, which he embodies and advocates for.
- basman
March 18, 2013 at 6:42pm
That comment is addressed to Bob too.
- basman
March 18, 2013 at 6:48pm
What is this fixation Mr.Kinley has for/henewpope? When did he becimev a Catholic?
- arnon1
March 18, 2013 at 10:46pm
Funny I can post but I can not see what I posted.
- arnon1
March 18, 2013 at 10:48pm