Pope Benedict XVI gave his last Sunday blessing this morning to a crowd of 100,000 gathered outside the terrace of his rent-controlled apartment at the Vatican. According to the AP, Benedict appeared "relaxed and sounded energized," almost as if he had just unburdened himself from worrying about 1.2 billion souls. "[Retiring] doesn't mean abandoning the church," the pope said. "On the contrary…I can continue to serve it with the same dedication and the same love which I have tried to do so until now," in a physical space even farther from reality (and the law) than the Vatican.
Several newspapers in Italy and Britain recently reported that the pope's resignation was directly linked to a 300-page report presented to the pontiff in December that detailed how male prostitutes were blackmailing senior Vatican prelates over their participation in romps held throughout Rome, as well as a hair salon in the Vatican.
Britain's senior Catholic official, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, who once said that gays were "captives of sexual aberrations," was also named in newspaper reports as a high-ranking official who had complaints of inappropriate behavior lodged against him for over 30 years. According to the Guardian, three priests and one former priest reported that O'Brien had inappropriate relationships with them—one of them said the relationship required "long-term psychological counseling."
A spokesman for the cardinal told the Times that “Cardinal O’Brien contests these claims and is taking legal advice." O'Brien, along with Cardinal Roger Mahony, who shielded child molesters from the legal system until 2011 as the archbishop of Los Angeles (new revelations of child abuse and the church's blind eye seem endless), are scheduled to meet with all the other cardinals for a secret conclave in the Sistine Chapel on Friday to elect the new pope.
Reached for comment, The Lord Almighty suggested that the Catholic Church was a "failed experiment," and urged church leaders to just "give up on this charade."
"You think some white smoke and doves or whatever—do you honestly believe that is going to make Me or anyone else believe that these guys will elect someone to clean up the Catholic Church's problems?" the Omniscient Prince of Peace said. "Please. Oh, and tell Benedict: if he tries to peddle some Dan Brown-esque tell-all from that monastery, I'm going to be pissed."
