The world is paying a whole lot of attention to the Catholic Church this week, and I totally get it—the pageantry, the hats, the smoke monster jokes, the Old World charm, Tom Hanks’s wig, all the hits. It’s irresistible. Yes! Smash the abdicator’s magic ring with your silver cudgel of justice, Brother Domenico! Picking a new pope is like the world’s biggest D&D game that also happens to be a massive global child-molestation cover-up racket. Exciting! It’s like electing a glamorous Prom Queen who ran on a platform of denying life-saving prophylactics to HIV-riddled continents that she previously personally colonized and plundered! Three cheers for Tiffany. Roosevelt High thanks you for the smallpox.
So, yes, we have a new pope now. He’s from South America instead of Europe, which is mildly interesting, and he’s a Jesuit, which is mildly encouraging. However—DOWNSIDE—he’s also just another fucking pope. The Catholic Church is a multibillion-dollar international corporation, a groaning dinosaur with its claws in almost every backwards socially conservative plank out there. The individual dude who’s chosen (DUDE, mind you—you can tell a business is tres modern when they don’t even let women submit resumes) almost certainly matters in subtle ways that Catholicism wonks could parse for days. But in the grand scheme of things, come on. It only took Obama three years to repeal DADT, and that was with John McCain being an obstructionist old iguana for no reason. These pope dudes have had more than a millennium to fucking catch up on simple human rights issues, with the added bonus of being the infallible mouthpiece of God. So, no, I’m not holding my breath for some sudden, grand papal turnaround into progressive politics—or even basic social responsibility.
That’s not to say that the Catholic Church isn’t full of wonderful, caring, socially responsible human beings—of course it is (hi, Grandma Winnie!)—but the institution itself is frighteningly regressive, almost spiteful. And I have to wonder, if all of us (Catholics and lapsed Catholics and atheists and [fill-in-the-blank religious adherents] and the frantically riffing throngs of Twitter)—if we all took the level of energy and LASER FOCUS we’ve had for this week’s goofy dog-and-popey show and turned it toward the actual heinous positions and actions of the Catholic Church, what would that church look like in five years? Ten? Twenty? The current Catholic Church (like so many other massive modern bureaucracies, but, you know, one thing at a time) is a force for stagnation, and I sincerely hope that all the smart, vibrant, caring Catholics of the world are even more dismayed by it than I am.