Oh, what's he said now?

I guess in some ways you have to feel sorry for the Pope. He’s committed his whole life to Catholicism, and he’s managed to rise to the highest possible job in the church, and now he’s discovering that he doesn’t actually do anything much but sit there and occasionally address a crowd of people who mostly won’t understand a word of it. He’s a figurehead, and (as he amply demonstrates) imaginary dead people can do that job. He’s head of an organisation that hasn’t materially changed since its inception, and probably by now everything interesting and relevant on the subject has been said by a previous Pope, so now he’s reduced to chatting nonsense. This is his spokesperson (or ‘Metatron’) talking:

In the age of the cell phone and the internet it is probably more difficult than before to protect silence and to nourish the interior dimension of life. It is difficult but necessary. There is an interior and spiritual dimension of life that must be guarded and nourished. If it is not, it can become barren to the point of drying up and, indeed, dying. Today, this is a very grave threat, and it is the most irreparable misfortune. Nations once rich in faith and vocations are losing their own identity under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture.

It’s just nonsense. It sounds like something Sarah Palin might say. It seems to mean (if anything) that having the opportunity to communicate efficiently is a bad thing because it means you spend less time sitting about on your own coming up with bullshit ideas about how you’d like the universe to work. But mostly it looks like vague twaddle designed to sound impressive without saying anything, with a couple of modern references thrown in at the start to make it seem relevant and new, even though you could replace ‘the cell phone and the internet’ with ‘quill and parchment’ or even ‘the wheel and fire’ and it wouldn’t make any less sense.

But tragically, this really is the most useful thing he has to do with his life. There are a lot of problems with the Catholic Church that by rights the Pope should be fixing, obviously, but you can’t expect him to actually do it because the entire system is designed so that nobody who will spot them would ever want or be allowed to become Pope.

I wonder if he realises how utterly pointless he is. Probably not. I expect he’d do something useful if he did.