They elected another Pope. It’s Ratzinger - the Goebbels of the Vatican. Un-fucking-believable, even for an organization as self-destructively oblivious as this one.

Well, for Catholics and the dwindling number of Westerners who still take Catholicism seriously, it’s time to kiss the Dark Ages hello again. For the rest of us, we can only hunker down and await an onslaught of rabidly reactionary politicking from an extremely rich, tax-exempt organization that claims mandatory authority over its members, including public office-holders. The medieval wing of an organization that just barely got over Galileo has now claimed the right to declare itself “infallible” (the irony of which they never seem to get). If you thought John Paul II was bad, wait till you get a load of Pope Torquemada Jr.

The unwelcome silver lining is this: he will certainly accelerate the race to irrelevance of the Catholic church in educated, industrialized countries. Already, it is known that rates of non-compliance by Western Catholics with church dogma on birth control, abortion, and other personal-liberty issues have been very high for decades; I predict the rate of Catholic use of birth control will grow by at least 15%, and total membership in Catholic churches will drop by the same level, in 5 years in the US and most EU countries. Conceivably, adherence to conservative religion across the board will decline as the excesses of a church, and a Pope, for whom the word “excess” has no meaning become more visible. This is all to the good.

The bad side of the good side is that it is the conservative elements that are driving Catholic church growth in its region of greatest growth right now - Africa. We can only expect a consolidation of that trend, and ever-greater pressure against women’s independence, birth control, access to abortion, condom use, and other liberating measures. The result, for as long as Ratzinger and his ilk have the whip hand, will be yet more uncountable thousands of African deaths from AIDS, starvation, and childbed fever, and still more misery for African women. Things don’t look great for Latin America, the Caribbean or, hell, anywhere else, either.

For those with more choices, though, the problem is largely political. Few care what the Vatican thinks about how they should live their lives, and fewer will when the Ratzingerian Papal bull starts to pile up in coming years. The real challenge is to keep him from making his personal obsessions mandatory, and his personal phobias crimes, for the rest of us who dare to claim the right to live our own lives and make our own decisions. Beyond that . . . well, who cares? Meet the new Pope - same as the old Pope. I doubt many of us are going to get fooled again (or for the first time).