Our Pontiff Predicament

The Catholic Church has been around for a long time. There are currently about 68 million Catholics living in North America. My family, on my mother's side, is riddled with them. The church has brought us such gems of history as the crusades, witch hunting, and prepubescent boy fucking.

I narrowly escaped a Roman Catholic upbringing thanks to my mother's collegiate rebellion to Evangelical Christianity, saving me from having to go to mass once a week. Being raised Christian certainly carries its own set of thorns to continuously jab at your secret desires. But, I escaped Catholicism. For this I am eternally grateful. However, I am familiar enough with Catholicism as an observing apostate at family reunions to realize most of its bells and whistles. Its special brand of guilty nuance, as it were.

Pope Benedict XVI recently graced the continent of Africa with a papal visit. If it's one thing that an impoverished, war torn land needs, its a visit from an ex-nazi, sith lord impersonator with an imaginary friend. A papal visit to Africa makes a bit of sense considering Africa is home to about 135 million Catholics. Shell shocked and mal-educated prepares the ground perfectly for Catholic seed.

The pope, at the sprightly age of 81, seemed to take the visit a bit more seriously than a typical papal visit. Usually it's rife with all the customary niceties of talking about world peace, shaking the hands of elected leaders, waving at adoring fans, and otherwise shutting the fuck up. Instead, the Vatican took the opportunity to take a continental health policy stance about condom use and to reaffirm the Roman Catholic belief on birth control. His exact words to the Associated Press during his trip were, "You can't resolve it (HIV transmission) with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem." Monogamy within marriage, says the pope, is the only way to tackle this problem. This was his message before heads of governments, who would rather ignore the AIDS crisis, and before common laymen who are the unwilling and unknowing breeding ground for new infections.

As a volunteer for the Aids Alliance, and perhaps more importantly as a gay man, I know better. Get into a monogamous relationship with someone who is HIV positive and take the pope's advice. It may not work out to your liking. 22 million people in Africa are HIV positive, and those are just the cases that have been tested and reported to international health organizations. Approximately 800 people die every day due to AIDS related complications on the continent without lifesaving drugs that are commonplace and taken for granted in the West. It is a constant struggle between the international community and the governments of certain African nations, namely Zambia and South Africa, where the transmission rates are highest, to get safe sex education into the country. Then the pope shows up, all white and shiny and Jesusy, and fucks things up further.

In uplifting news, pretty much everyone else in the world responded to the pope by suggesting that he might be spinning on his pointy hat. If you want to be Catholic, fine. If you aspire to be pope, fine. If your imaginary friend walks with you, and talks with you, and tells you that you are his own, fine. But please leave the health advice to the health care professionals. They know more than you, they believe in "science," and they care more about actual results rather than scoring points for a fictitious deity. Shouldn't you be diligently working towards expanding the amount of human guilt on the planet, anyway?

Yes, I'm biased. I think Catholicism is for the weak of mind. Clearly. But, I also care deeply about the HIV crisis. It is something that affects my community disproportionately in this country, and that I have given my time and energy to try to make a difference. The innocent people of Africa deserve better from their leaders. Especially the leaders that should know better.

Pope Benedict XVI can suck my condom-sheathed cock. I hope he chokes on it.