Do you remember agonizing over those poor little babies in Limbo? Bye-bye Limbo! For more reasons than can be explained readily, the Church is nuts. I wish it wasn't so.

I've got a great-uncle who's doing time in hell for eating a bologna sandwich on a Friday.

The words are harsh, of course, but they nevertheless serve a very useful purpose: We can catch an occasional glimpse into what is really going on inside a normally closed organization, without the benefit of handlers filtering the words. I think the NYT article gets at the heart of it: "...[his] career before becoming pope was more concerned with theology than public policy".

The chimp occasionally goes off script and throws us one like this as well, of course.

If the Pope wants to look you in the eye and say, "Abortion is immoral, contraception is immoral, divorce is immoral, assisted suicide is immoral," I can understand that. When he goes with "Only unmarried, celibate men should be priests," I kind of shake my head. But when he pulls "We didn't forcibly destroy native cultures," that's where I tell him, "Sorry, Pops, you're full of sh*t."

"The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” Hmm.. killing, raping, pilaging, and persecution all in the name of jesus? That was not allienation? I think Bush has a new theme for Iraq..no allienation there either, thanks pope.