CT Blue

Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness:

Pope Francis said Friday he took personal responsibility for the ‘‘evil’’ of priests who raped and molested children, asking forgiveness from victims and saying the church must be even bolder in its efforts to protect the young. It was the first time a pope has taken personal responsibility for the sex crimes of his priests and begged forgiveness.

via Boston.com

Well, I'm afraid this only proves that those conservative Catholics are right: Francis is no Catholic. If he were, he'd know that you can't get forgiveness without a proper confession, and Francis hasn't even gone halfway on that score.

Every Catholic knows the rules, but for the benefit of you heathen that are doomed to rot in hell with the like of apostates like me, we'll review them.

I'm perhaps a little rusty on this, as it's been-lets see-about 48 years since my last confession, but I remember the drill well enough.

I'm not really sure how a Pope starts it off. For us peons it was always “Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been X days/weeks/months/years since my last confession”, which when you think about it, makes no sense, for why should someone be blessed for sinning? But let us pass over that.

So Francis should be saying something like “Bless me world, for the church has sinned, it has been 2000 years and we have never confessed before…”

Next, you have to detail your sins. All your sins, not just the ones you're acknowledging at the moment. Truth to tell, this was always a weak point for me when I went to confession. I mean, who really counts, and when you're a real little kid, who really sins? So I would throw in some “lied to my mothers” and such like attached to some arbitrary number (not too many, not too few-it had to sound plausible). I won't, by the way, get into what happened the time I slipped up and copped to “having impure thoughts”, which at the time consisted of thinking about boobies. Anyway, here's what Francis should be saying after the intro:

We have burned innocent people at the stake X times;

We have provoked Y “holy wars” resulting in the murder of Z innocent people;

We stood by and did nothing while Hitler killed the Jews 1 time, and stood by silently (when we weren't encouraging the killing) during lesser pogroms X times;

We harassed Galileo and other scientists Y times for daring to suggest that the Bible might not be scientifically accurate;

We kidnapped the children of Jews Z times;

[Your favorites here-the list is long]…and finally;

We have created a clerical system designed to attract sexual deviants to the priesthood and have actively sought to protect X deviant priests from exposure, despite our knowledge that they would continue to prey on the most powerless among our flock and have mainly been trying to protect our financial position since being found out and we actually have no real intent to do anything but engage in a PR exercise now.

Finally, and here's where the Pope really shows his ignorance, there's a little matter of the proper penance. This is the most important part, and you can't get cleansed of your sins without doing penance. For the kinds of sins Francis is (or should be) reciting, a few “Hail Marys” and a couple of “Our Fathers” just won't do. We really need to go back to the olden days, when the penances doled out to the faithful were a little more creative.

In keeping with Francis's PR moves, perhaps his penance should be that he should do as Jesus advised: “go and sell what you have, and give to the poor”.

But finally, none of it really counts unless your act of contrition is sincere. Time will tell on that score.