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On Pope Francis

 Like many others, I was irritated by Bergoglio's ignorant comments about transgender people, and about surrogacy, this week. (Bergoglio is now known as "Pope Francis." In his thirties, he lived in Argentina, where he supported a right-wing Peronist group, and in fact acted as spiritual advisor to the group. Colm Toibin writes: "When Jesuit priests visited poor areas, Bergoglio encouraged them to to talk about religion rather than social conditions, and to have nothing to do with unions or cooperatives...He exercised his authority with an iron fist, as if he was the soul interpreter of Ignatius Loyola.")


I think there is mainly one sensible response to the Catholic Church, which is to laugh at it. Christopher Durang, a gay playwright and a recovering Catholic, just died. He knew how to make use of his childhood memories. He invented a crazy nun (for whom he felt obvious compassion), and he wrote an insane monologue, in which the nun fields questions from admirers:


Are you ever sorry you became a nun? I am never sorry I became a nun. 


It used to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays, and now it isn't. Does that mean that people who ate meat on Fridays back when it was a sin are in hell? Or what? People who ate meat on Fridays back when it was a mortal sin are indeed in hell if they did not confess the sin before they died. If they confessed it, they are not in hell, unless they did not confess some other mortal sin they committed. People who would eat meat on Fridays back in the 50s tended to be the sort who would commit other mortal sins, so on a guess, I bet many of them are in hell for other sins, even if they did confess the eating of meat. 


What exactly went on in Sodom? Who asked me this question? I'm going to talk about Sodom a bit. To answer your question, Sodom is where they committed acts of homosexuality and bestiality in the Old Testament, and God, infuriated by this, destroyed them all in one fell swoop. Modern day Sodoms are New York City, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Los Angeles... well, basically anywhere where the population is over 50,000. The only reason that God has not destroyed these modern day Sodoms is that Catholic nuns and priests live in these cities, and God does not wish to destroy them....



I'm grateful for Durang's work, and sorry that he has died. At least we readers will always have "Sister Mary Ignatius."

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