Pontifex Maximus

And don't they hate him for it? Really, really, really hate him.

You see, like John Paul II, the then Cardinal Ratzinger unreservedly condemned the war in Iraq. Iran has had an arrangement in place for several years whereby the Vatican would mediate in any dispute with the United States should, as is now mercifully most unlikely, that matter ever really come to a head. Benedict XVI is, as John Paul II was, a great admirer of Pius XII, under whom the Holy See had quite warm relations with the State of Israel, which was not at that time imposing military law on the Catholics of the West Bank, nor occupying that part of the viable Palestinian State created on both sides of the Jordan at the end of the British Mandate, nor bombarding the Catholics of Lebanon.

Well, we can't have any of that, can we? So the Pope's moral authority must be destroyed by absolutely any means whatever, lest, having been right on Iraq, he prevent a war against Iran, and possibly even bring about the reunification of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan while securing the sovereignty and integrity of Lebanon. All that, and he doesn't agree that the world has too many proles and darkies in it, nor that femaleness itself is a medicable condition requiring powerful chemical or surgical intervention, nor that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the mother's body. He might even dare to ask whether it is the whole of a woman's body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?

No, no, no. From The Times of London to The New York Times, we can't be having any of that. Instead, we must all join in protest behind Peter Tatchell, who would lower the age of consent of 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused, but who is reliably signed up to female reproductive (if not total) insentience, to XX Syndrome and the drastic measures required to counter it, to ridding the world of proles and darkies, and specifically to ridding the world of Levantine proles and darkies. So, that's all right, then. Isn't it?