They’re remembering the death of pope John Paul this week, and in couple more it’ll be the ascendancy of pope Ratzinger.  So since my weekly cartoon is late again (I did another sleep clinic at Hopkins which really mucked up my weekend…), I’ll try and bribe you with a re-run:

And that’s pretty much been the way it’s been with Ratzinger: 

Calling same-sex unions "pseudo-matrimony" the pope said: "The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man."

Although was his first public comment on same-sex marriage since becoming Pope, Benedict had long history of attacking same-sex unions. 

As Cardinal Ratzinger he was the Vatican’s most outspoken opponent of gay marriage.

He was the author of the a 2003 Vatican directive to priests around the world calling for a proactive stand to stop governments from legalizing same-sex marriage and for a repeal of those those already on the books that give rights, including adoption, to gay couples. (story)

In just a year Ratzinger took John-Paul’s various assaults on the humanity of homosexual people, removed the paternalistic veneer from them, and turned it all into a relentless machine.  And now worldwide, violence toward homosexuals is on the rise.  Imagine that.  You’d think the Catholic church would know better then to go down this path again…

We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such.  These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. 

-James Carroll, "Constantine’s Sword"

…but hate takes away all reason.  In another year people will be marveling at how Ratzinger managed to make the climate for gays and lesbians even worse then he already had.  And that hostile climate will in turn, kill more innocent people.