I hear there's a new pope

As a good friend wrote me: "This new pope is ponterrific! He is old, white and European. He has everything it takes to be a world leader. And at 78 we can start a new pope watch next week."

As for me, I thought it might be a bad sign that they chose such a conservative guy to be the new pope, but I may have underestimated the problem. Here's some commentary from around the web.

From Andrew Sullivan:

"THE FUNDAMENTALIST TRIUMPH: And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so ... to prayer. What else do we now have?"

And, from the slate.com:

"Today, the election of Ratzinger—a German and a conservative—is a clear answer to two questions asked as John Paul II slowly succumbed to Parkinson's disease. First, would the next pope's election prove comparable in geopolitical boldness to the choice of John Paul II? The news of John Paul II's election echoed with electrifying clarity from Lithuania to Croatia. The election of a Latin American, African, or even a Middle Eastern or Asian cardinal today could have equally electrified regions that are even more important to the church's future. But the cardinals chose instead to elect another European.

"The second question was whether the church would liberalize its stance on sexual morality and whether, in particular, it would soon take the step of allowing artificial contraceptives—as it came close to doing in the mid-1960s, before /Humanae Vitae/. That 1968 encyclical reaffirmed ultraconservative sexual morality and reversed a trend toward collegiality in church government. Today, condoms have helped to slow the spread of AIDS in Brazil and elsewhere. But in Africa, where the AIDS crisis is worst, the church is identified more than ever with the most adamant opposition to the condom. Meanwhile, church governance remains more tightly centralized than ever. The election of Joseph Ratzinger announces that in both these regards—sexual morality and church governance—the status quo will remain unchanged."

But, on a brighter note, this may hasten the apocalypse:

"If the list of Popes from the Prophecy of St. Malachy is legitimate, the current Pope would be the next to last one, cryptically called “Gloria Olivae,” the Glory of the Olives. The Benedictine Order has traditionally claimed that the next to last Pope would be a Benedictine—and there was once a Benedictine order known as the Olivetans, taking their name from the Mount of Olives, where Jesus prophesied of the end of the world. Pope “Gloria Olivae” supposedly will lead the Catholic Church as the final tribulation and persecution of Catholics begins at the hands of the Antichrist."