Seeing as my wife is asleep I forsee that certain lenten observances will indeed be kept.
I dedicate this post, such as it is, to her whose love makes me who I am.
In my capacity as a spiritual searcher I must disclaim that I am not quite a cradle Catholic - I was
baptised in a small West Coast town when I was four, but since then, like Charlie Reid
I have wondered over half the world, but remained an ignorant man.
As a Spiritual Searcher, or just a sensible man, I must say that I can see the benefit to the World of a Roman
Catholic Pope who beats selflessly in his viens the antidote to the contemporary zietgiest while at the same
time floating effortlessly along on its good tide.
Forged in the fire of Nazism and Communism John Paul the Great was such a man, and as the World is in a
state of almost daily transformation we need a man to fill his shoes.
I said in my previous post that Benedict was a good man, not a great man. A Catholic friend of mine was
slightly taken aback tonight when I compared the resigning Pope to the American screen icon Forest Gump.
Tom Hanks has executed roles as eclectic as this and Dan Brown's proffesor Langdon. Semioticly Gump
was a conservative who for the love of a woman heroically stuck to the rules all his life when others around
him were losing their lives, virginity, innocence and worse.
As JPII's right hand man Ratzinger did an excellent job of making everyone tow the line, through liberation
theology, the excesses of the eighties and whatever. This was his personal journey, identical with the
subjective calling of the God he loved and with his short papacy dotted all the 'i's and crossed all the t's of his
fellow Central European pontiff.
Faithful to the end Benedict told us honestly and selflessly that he could not go on. Again we thank him.
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