HABEMUS PAPAM!

While doing a quick look around the internet I discovered the pope blog - an unofficial blog covering His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

http://thepopeblog.blogspot.com/

Having listened to quite a few comments about the pope while driving to and from work, opinion seems to be quite divided about whether he is a good choice or a bad one. He seems to be very conservative. This is bad news for the more liberal side of the Catholic Church - no change on issues like contraception, divorce, women priests and so on. Some people expressed the idea that it was a backward step.

I listened quite carefully to his conflict with the liberation theologians. The Church should be more than a political tool, but I don't think it should be absent from politics. There is more to a person than just their spirit, and God is interested in the whole person. When no one else is speaking on behalf of the oppressed poor, surely the Church ought to be.

I think I have read too many conspiracy novels like "The Davinci Code" to trust my objectivity concerning the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing I did like was this line in one of his prayers - "I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools." None of us a really up to the task that God sets us, but God knows that and works with us and through us anyway.

God is bigger than the purposes of man.