Hell? Yes!

Whoa! Ratzinger the Rottweiler is back! That saintly politician had suddenly lost his bark and his bite shortly after John Paul II went to his reward. Now it was “Nice doggie. Nice “papabile” doggie.”. Don’t want to scare off those Liberation Theologians and fellow traveling Jesuits before the Vatican chimney burns white smoke for me. Now His Snarl is back where it belongs--in Pope Benedict the XVI.

First evidence? He reigned (er, rained) on the European Union’s 50th Birthday Party in Berlin this weekend.Those plummeting birth rates, especially disgusting since traditionally fertile Catholic Spain, Poland, and Italy are leading the EU’s demographic demise. He prophesied that the formerly Christian nations were risking disappearance by controlling their birth rates.

Oh yes, Birth Control. Back when the Church was attempting to be rational about such a severe moral assignment, they invented what we married young Catholics called Russian Roulette B.C. No condoms for the man, no diaphragms for the woman. Give her a thermometer! Let her keep track of her uterine temperature and “only do it” when the mercury was right!

And clerical celibacy? No way. With his left lobe he’s trying to inveigle the schismatic Eastern Orthodox Catholics back into the Roman Fold, where the clergy have been fruitfully married for centuries, and with his right lobe he’s encouraged his Episcopate to drag their legal feet on revealing all in the clerical pederasty scandal, going so far as to award the major American foot dragger, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, a prestigious sinecure in Rome instead of sequestration in a monastery for his scandalous behavior. (Heh, what’s sauce for the pagan geese is sauce for the wandering Catholic ganders.)

And the same weekend, Benny Sixteen chose one of the poorest and most rundown churches in Rome to raise HELL. I mean he couldn’t understand, he told that flock of the faithful—mired as they were in their own little hell of a slum—why nobody talked of hell anymore. Listen, Rottweiller, I’ll explain it. Because most Europeans are no longer so dumb as to worship a God who put people in a burning hell for eternity for their human sins.

Any adult who has so much as burned his little finger on a hot stove would find such patriarchal punishment outrageously amoral. So how do Catholic theologians double talk their way out of such medieval mutterings. They say, as polysyllabically as possible, in pseudo-existentialist “philosophizing” that we never meant to say real fire. We mean the punishment is being separated from the love of God forever.

Hell, almost all of us haven’t suffered a bit throughout our very mortal lives from such separation. And remember the Commandment, “Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness”. In Jesuit college days we went on so-called Retreats, i.e. a withdrawal from daily confusion to tune up our spiritual lives. And we were threatened not with existential isolation from God, but fry your ass off for ever in Hell preaching. And that was only as far back as the 1950’s. Benny, Thou Shall Not Lie to Your Faithful. Go to Hell? Go to Hell!

The Rottweiler snarls now, instead of thinking: Europe is too full of educated people to go for that kind of theological piffle. He tells Liberation Theologians in Latin America to quit their Marxizing of Christianity, while he preens around in his Popemobile. Meanwhile, the indigenous people of Latin America suffer more and more daily hells under the pressures of globalization. If Ratzinger wants the EU to put Christ back in their continent, then let him put Christ back in his Church, which flaunts zillions while his people suffer unchosen Hells on Earth.

Scuttlebutt has it that the Pope is a very gentle man. Plays Mozart nights. Loves Culture. And reputedly he fled Tubingen, the most esteemed theological faculty in Europe, because the seminarians were too mouthy, sounding off in class, in general acting like 1960’s liberal teenagers. He sulked off to the inferior Regensburg for peace and quiet. He’s what my German wife calls a Hopper, a bunny so timid about the real world of violence and strife that he hides.

Well, as American politicos are wont to say, I have no dog, Rottweiler or Weimaraner, in that fight. But I recognize “thoughtful” foolishness when I hear it. (Bless the Jebbies for showing me how!) And that’s what he’s peddling when he should be talking Christian charity to a world mad over money and power. For Christ’s sake, Pope. Read your founder’s ideas, and have your Catholics follow them. Don’t simply try to re-Christianize Europe. Set a better example for the whole World.

Just for the Hell of it!