Stop-Gap pope?

But he was a stading-in-the-gap pope.

I don't care if he was 98, God decides how long you will serve.

You know what cracks me up? How the media puts in juxtaposition some of the basic Catholic teachings as though they don't make any sense. I was reading the bio's of the "potential candidates" for the next Pope (and I'm really praying that the next Pope doesn't come from any of them!) and these two sentences refer to Cardinal Tettamanzi (emphasis added by me): "He is close to the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei and published an article in 1998 praising Opus Dei founder José Maria Escrivá de Balaguer. However, he also backed some of the antiglobalization protests at the July 2001 G-8 Summit in Genoa, giving a speech to a meeting of thousands of young Catholics in which he said that 'a single African child sick with AIDS counts more than the entire universe.' "

"However"?! Why are those two thoughts in opposition?!? That was just the worse offense, the whole report was full of similar juxtapositions that make it clear that they don't understand the actual Catholic teachings at all.

Ok, that's enough ranting here... May our Cardinals elect a man who will lead the Church well. Everything else is secondary.

brandon.

Excelellents points, all three.

Brandon, I think part of the problem is that the media wants to squeeze these people into political categories. So when somebody does one thing they interpret as "conservative" and another which they interpret as "liberal," they see a "contradiction." An apolitical ideology is worse than a foreign language to these people.

Funny that a media that praises nuance and complexity as virtues in themselves is utterly confounded by something that doesn't fit their black and white categories.