If you had one neck I'd hack it through

British slugs. Insert throbbing melodic bassline here. Or possibly gently inspirational Cirque de Soleil musique - I really can't tell how the spirit is moving them.

Spoke to yet another Catholic who used to be whipped by the nuns in her school. Câlisse! I never thought I’d identify with Caligula , but now I find that if Vatican City had one cheek (and if I could dodge the hail of Swiss Guard bullets) I’d slap it. Does anyone else find the Catholic Church deeply depressing in the same sort of way France is deeply depressing ? That is, a bunch of people absolutely unwilling to respond to obvious realities by making changes to an anachronistic system that was wrong even when it was created hundreds of years ago?

The notion of mandatory celibacy for priests or teaching monks and nuns is retarded. A cloistered monk or nun, sure. Someone who chooses a contemplative lifestyle and a union with God that approaches a mystic, spiritual marriage; power to them. But to have someone in constant contact with the community, someone who plays the public roles of moral leader, social adviser, and sex ed teacher, who isn’t expected to know the emotional primacy of the family, the comforts of a supportive spouse, and the real social and physical importance of fucking? They’re supposed to guess all of this while tending to the spiritual health of the flock? Or is a bunch of other mental castrati in Seminary supposed to teach it to them? I suppose any authoritative position will be abused, but there’s a reason we haven’t heard the same quantity of horror stories out of the Orthodox and Protestant churches.

And instead of some note being taken to this, the present slap-down on gays is, one assumes, the response of choice to the public outcry regarding sexual assaults on children. It’s hard to see an equation of homosexuality and pederasty, harder to know that many people will now feel the Catholic Church is really doing something to address the rash of accounts of sexual and physical abuse, and tear-jerking to imagine anybody'd think this was enough.

Instead, it might be fun if the Catholic Church had human priests. It needn't be afraid letting them get married is going to make the Church less special. After all, when it comes to shitting on women, it’s still a superstar.