"I'm resigning due to old age," said no Pope in history ever.

 
I don’t want to say anything overtly mean about the Pope, because for one, I believe that he is a highly intelligent individual who has lived his entire life in a constant struggle to do what he feels is the morally right thing, and two, he has a pet lion. But let's be clear: there is no way Benedict XVI is resigning due to old age.

Yes, he’s old, but even at 85 he is still quite a few years from being the oldest Pope in history, and theoretically modern medicine has advanced to where our Pope is more healthy than, say, Clement X, who was born in 1590 yet still managed to be Pope into an older age than Benedict XVI. Resigning due to old age is simply not something Popes do, especially right before the busy season of Lent and Easter but also especially ever at all in the history of all Popes ever.

There are only three clear cases of Papal resignation in history, the most interesting being  Pope Benedict IX, who was elected when he was only 11 or so years old and who later decided to literally sell the papacy for some jewelry. Another of these rare Papal resigners, Celestine V, was only in office for a few months and hated it, and even after he resigned Celestine V was still then kept prisoner by the Catholic Church and probably killed. The most recent of these three cases of papal resignation happened six centuries ago- at least 77 years before Christopher Columbus first set foot upon anything resembling the Americas- and only happened because the Catholic Church was being divided between three different concurrent Popes and things were really getting quite dire.  So considering we are witnessing something that hasn’t happened since before the discovery of the printing press and only occurred because it to do otherwise could have led to the complete dissolution of the Church, mmmmaaayyybbbee we should look a little more into it than just what we’ve been told.

SUPPOSITIONS AND PROGNOSTICATIONS

If you are an employer or apartment manager and somebody known to keep secrets gives you two weeks notice and a weak reason, you might have reason to be suspicious. And yet, Benedict's resignation is coming without warning and is effective the same month he announced it. This quick leave suggests urgency to me, and I would be much quicker to suppress my suspicion were it not that this century has been a peak one for scandals in the Catholic Church. While we don’t know yet why exactly the Pope resigned, we can try to read between the lines of his resignation and attempt at a hypothesis. Perhaps, like William Burroughs claiming he could see the future through cutting up and rearranging newspaper articles, we can predict what revelations about this Pope may come out in the coming months by widening our perception of how we currently see him. 

If you read the papal resignation letter, it is one of extreme contrition. There seems to be tinges of remorse and penitence in the wording of the document, with Benedict admiting that he is resigning after “repeatedly examined my conscience before God,” and later stating that “I ask pardon for all my defects.” Yes, he is a humble man, but he is still the Pope, and like any former political leader I believe we should be suspect whenever they request something to stay out of the limelight, even if that something is themselves. The Pope no longer wants to be in the public eye, and instead requests to be allowed to walk off the national stage for “a life dedicated to prayer.” This is, I suspect, the celibate's equivalent to "wanting to spend more time with his family" and just as indicative.

His resignation could have something having to do with the leaks about widespread Vatican economic corruption and fraud, but to my knowledge Benedict was actually fighting for full transparency both in the Vatican bank and the internal investigation.  But leaks about economic corruption could lead to leaks about other vices, and even if the fraud leaks do not openly indict the Pope he may be tied to some other form of corruption. After the sex abuse scandal and the banking scandals of 1978, the secrecy and corruption of the Church is something of public record now.  And while it is true that the Pope did a huge amount of work to prevent further child abuse within the Church, he also did a huge amount to cover up the scandals and very little to punish the abusers. In effect, Benedict’s job title has been, for many years, the world’s preeminent protector of child molesters, requesting Catholics to report possible sexual abuse to the Church rather than to local authorities.

To be honest, I'm having a hard time thinking of the Pope doing anything I would consider more unethical than the things he has already done publicly, short of perhaps strangling somebody in broad daylight. He already lifted the excommunication of holocaust-deniers and strengthened the suppression of nuns and other women in the Church.  He has already stated that condoms literally aggravate the spread of AIDS in Africa- though, interestingly, he later clarified his statements to argue that condoms might be acceptable in the case of gay prostitutes. Let us not forget that we are talking about a moral compass for nearly a billion people who sees child molestation as a relative evil ("In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children") but who stated that stem cell research and somatic cell cloning were a sign that mankind "is becoming a more dangerous threat than weapons of mass destruction." We are talking about a Catholic who has called for the censure of left-wing priests in Latin America and the Indian subcontinent, calling liberation theology a “singular heresy” rooted in nothing more than “cultural imperialism.” We are talking about a political leader who said, “Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman." We are talking about a human being in the modern world condoned the trial and conviction of Galileo and who publicly equated secularism to Nazism.*

I suspect that the only thing that would have caused shame to the Pope is something others may not consider to be unethical but that the Church considers anathemic. I'm about 97.86% certain that he decided to out himself or was outed by the church before he became, so to speak, outed. To get more to the point, I hypothesize- and again, just a hypothesis- that the Pope's resignation has something to do with Georg Ganswein, personal secretary and possible lover to the Pope.

 

WAIT, POSSIBLE LOVER?

Well, that’s the rumor I'm willing to go with, at least. Before you get your mind filled with freaky “Hop on Pope” imagery, I’m not stating that this relationship was ever genitally consummated via what Benedict calls "the intrinsic evil of homosexual activity.” But the Pope and Georg are extremely close, known to take long walks and afternoon naps together. And this Georg is a very curious figure, one who would have been certain to take over much of the leadership in the Vatican if il Papa continued to reign in a state of mental decline. He is also one who has been gaining attention in the media spotlight, especially after being the cover model for the Italian version of Vanity Fair last month. We know for a fact, from the leaked documents, that senior Vatican officials are upset with the media attention paid to him. We also know for a fact that he is a very handsome gentleman who hangs out with an older man who wears ruby slippers.What we don't know for a fact yet is what this all means. But keep your eyes to either Chinese news (as the PRC would be the most likely country to have both the capacity and the audacity to smear the Papacy) or wikileaks- I am about 98% certain that it will come out somehow that this Pope is gay.

Is an outspoken homophobe being secretly gay unheard of? Only if you haven’t heard of Philip Hinkle and craigslist, George Rekers and rentboy.com, Larry Craig and taking a “wide stance” in the men’s room, or of Ted Haggard and every single thing he’s ever said or done. Only if you aren’t aware that violet capes with fur lining and rose-colored muumuus are the type of things even Popes don’t normally wear. Only if you are somehow unaware that the pope, while he owns less lions than them, is as clearly gay as Siegfried and Roy once were.

Benedict is probably not the only gay pope in history, either. Pope Julius III shared a bedroom and bed with another man, and if you really care there are rumors that “eating too much melon” was actually just a metaphor for the true cause of death of Pope Paul II. But he is the only Pope to be in office in an age of Youtube and Wikileaks, the only Pope to be called  "simply the most repressed, imploded gay in the world," and the only Pope with a “best friend” on the cover of a fashion magazine with the heading “it’s not a sin to be beautiful.” 

Less than two years ago, the Vatican was enmeshed in a gay prostitution scandal that reached as least as far as a Gentleman of His Holiness, one of the Pope’s personal attendants. Suspecting that the Pope himself was asking for these prostitutes would be asking a lot out of an 85-year-old man who, one would suspect, probably doesn’t have the world’s greatest sex drive, but we do know from Youtube that he likes to watch. 

Is there anything wrong with having a gay Pope? Not at all, or at least, nothing more wrong than having a straight Pope or any person of any sexual preference who can claim to be infallible yet who demeans women and children and gay people and people of other beliefs. But perhaps, with Ratzinger no longer the Pope, we can now expect a better, more open future for the Catholic Church, right? One free of a Nazi-trained apologist for child rapists?

Um, probably not. The safe bets for the new Pope land on a Canadian gentleman named Marc Ouelett, a biblical literalist and conservative enemy of the effects of the Second Vatican Council. You know, the one that allowed people who don’t know Latin to actually understand the teachings of the Catholic Church and encouraged people to read the Bible. So this Pope may be going away to spend the rest of his years hiding in a monastery, but fear not- the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church isn't going anywhere!

 CODA: NOW LET'S TURN TO THE CRAZY!!

Or maybe it is? Let us not forget the 3^rd secret of Fatima, one of three revelations the Church believes were given by an apparition of the Virgin to three young Portuguese girls in 1917.  While the first two are matters of public knowledge, the third was not revealed by the girls to the Church until they were ordered to in 1943, and even then the revelation was sealed and not to be opened until 1960, and even then the Church did not release this secret until the year 2000. According to the official release of this vision, it is of the Pope and other bishops being killed underneath a cross on a hilltop. Some argue that this is referring to the death of Pope John Paul I, others claim it refers to the assassination attempt of John Paul II. There are also those who suspected that this is not the full prophecy. Before its release, a theologian by the name of Joseph Ratzinger stated that the third revelation must stay secret because it spoke of "dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore (the life) of the world." But then, after its release, the same cardinal wrote that, in the third secret, “No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled,” and that “the purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite.” Why would Ratzinger have this about face?  And why would the Church put off revealing this for so long, if they even revealed the whole thing? Well, there is a theory that the prophecy as it was released has been edited, and that there is a lost page that states that the Papacy will "lose the faith and become the throne of the Antichrist." So there's that.
And hey, what about the Prophecy of the Popes, a 16^thCentury list of 112 Popes past and future that the Vatican officially claims is a forgery and inauthentic? In this document, in which each Pope has been mentioned and linked to a specific prophecy, the last Pope is the one to come after Benedict XVI. This final Pope, called Peter the Roman, will sit upon the Papal throne “in the extreme persecution of the Catholic Church” at the end of days, when “the dreadful judge will judge his people, the city of seven hills will be destroyed.” Since Peter is the last Pope, that city of seven hills probably refers to Rome, though it could also be San Francisco or Seattle or Jerusalem or any number of other cities with a fair amount of hills.

It is also worth mentioning that less than two years ago, the church’s top exorcist claimed that the devil is at home in the Holy See and that the Vatican was filled with "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon". So what does this all mean?

Probably nothing. Neither of those prophecies is anything unique, and an exorcist isn’t exactly the most trustworthy source given that his job relies upon the existence of demons and his skill set is one that has been since replaced by more effective sciences about 1,000 years ago. People have been predicting the end of the Catholic Church since the beginning of the Catholic Church, and while the Vatican will one day go the way of the Temple of Ra-Atum at Heliopolis or the Pyramids of the Nine Gods in Tikal, that day isn’t in our near future. Every year there is a new reason to hope for the end times, and every year people face some sort of great disappointment that they get to continue living on this planet.  

As a general rule, I don't believe in any prophecies until they happen. It's very easy to find connections between an event and a prediction after they happen, but even easier to find a list of prophecies that were believed and proven wrong. We can only predict the future insofar as we prognosticate that it will be unpredictable, that it will be stranger than what we imagined, and that it will contain both more of the old than we thought possible and more of the new every day than we can comprehend. I only hope, given the constant presence of ignorance and abuse of power within the Vatican, that the future of the aging Catholic Church will continue to cultivate the newness that it showed today in the the first ever resignation of a Pope due to old age.

*(“We can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society.”) 

  HEY, HERE'S A BUNCH OF LINKS!!

"Pope could be the victim of assassination plot within a year," says senior Vatican cardinal exactly one year ago, strangely: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2099276/The-Pope-victim-assassination-plot-year-claims-senior-Vatican-cardinal.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#axzz2KdFXwcD5

"Of course in my youth there were women who I would happily see and there were others I was even happier to see," says Pope's assistant, totally straightly: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2263301/The-Popes-righthand-man-Archbishop-Georg-Ganswein-models-Italys-Vanity-Fair.html#axzz2KdFXwcD5 

Condoms are OK if you're doing it with a gay prostitute, says Pope, even straighterly: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40289256/ns/world_news-europe/#.URmbL2fVpBk 

"His gayness is almost wince-inducing," says gay Catholic blogger about the Pope, intelligently and with compassion: http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/08/the-pope-is-not-gay/183564/

"The U.S. State Department has put the Vatican on a list of countries of concern for money laundering or other financial crimes," says US Public News outlet, somehow ironically:  http://www.npr.org/2012/03/29/149614995/vatican-leaks-raise-questions-over-finances

"The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting," says British news outlet, charmingly: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/04/vatican-gay-sex-scandal

"When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia," says exorcist in the 21st Century, somehow still making a living: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/11/vatican_exorcist/