Week XVI: Benediction

I couldn't resist. It's Week XVI after all. Using Roman numerals to count the weeks was a decision that I made to distinguish this latest round of entries from those that I wrote last year. A blog in two parts, if you will. I wonder if this blog will make it to the point where I have to look up the number. What's 50 in Roman numerals? I don't know offhand. D? I'll have to check. Nope, it's L. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. I hadn't thought about it when I started writing what became this week's smattering of words, but seeing as how we've recently bid farewell to that creepy, Emperor Palpatine-looking dealer of misery and defender of child molesters, and seeing as how he was a XVI himself, I'd like to spend a few of my 1,000 words to say "see you in hell" to Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI. He's the first Pope to resign the papacy in 600 years. I guess the cries of all those thousands of abuse victims that he ignored as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the Catholic organization that shielded child rapists from prosecution - must weigh pretty heavily on the conscience. You can't just walk off that type of malignant soul cancer at his age.

Of all the sickening things about Benedict XVI's lofty reign atop a mountain of suffering children, condom-burning bishops, and regressive politics, there is perhaps nothing I find more despicable than the words he and his co-conspirators uttered as they promised to shield abusive priests from justice:

"...and that I will never directly or indirectly, by gesture, word, writing or in any other way, and under any pretext, even that of a greater good or of a highly urgent and serious reason, do anything against this fidelity to secrecy, unless special permission or dispensation is expressly granted to me by the Supreme Pontiff."

I guess that reciting it in Latin makes it okay, though. Tradition. Keep the faith strong and whatnot. As long as it can be shrouded in mystery and chalked up to the will of God protecting his chosen institution on Earth, they can get away with just about anything. Police, politicians, doesn't matter. Can't get through. God's on their side.

The problem of child abuse by priests in the Catholic church is so widespread and the clergy so corrupt that there is now an international Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. The existence of that organization speaks volumes about the sickening corruption in the Catholic church - far more than I could ever express inside of 1,000 words.

Despite knowing about many cases of abuse, both as pope and prefect, Ratzinger and his (I imagine) hooded clan of soul-sucking pedophile mutants hoped to protect the reputation of the church by spiriting child-molesting priests away from the public eye and into new congregations with a stern wag of the finger and an admonishment to stop raping children, which many summarily ignored.

And here he sits upon his velvet cushion of diplomatic immunity, locked away in his waning years, left to consider how best to put a fine point on a career of sickening tragedy and crimes against humanity.

And thus, I dedicate this poem to the man himself for his years of global disservice. The Latin is a parody derived from the oath referenced above that Ratzinger and other Catholic officials took as they promised to keep ongoing sexual abuse of children by priests secret from the public. Summorum pontificum means "of the Supreme Pontiffs." And without further ado,


Benediction

Alas, incongruity wasted the day
And the putrefied paste of their moral decay
Fell like the wheat trodden under their feet
As the bones of contention were lifted away

The last skeleton in the burial ground
Scarcely heard, as the guns and the larks all around
Cursed land and sky with a holy war cry,
The laureate kings of a weaponized sound

The nourishing mother was drained of her milk
For the taste and the succor, intransigent ilk
Idolatrous waste, the venerable caste
Who ravaged her corpse behind spun gold and silk

All glory and honour to christ on the cross
Whose inversions became alabaster embossed
On faces and chains, 'round necks of the cranes
Replace them with nooses, consider the cost

And we but the pendulous, left here to choke
And to absently swing at the end of a rope
Shrug at the pain and recant our refrain
And call down a fire on the head of the pope

Behold as the fat gilded phallus of Rome
With his arms wide outstretched stands and casts the first stone,
A papal bull who leaves gore in the hole,
Then shrinks to his den with a pick and a bone

With censers they clouded the eyes of the mass
All the blind lame and sick, and denied their repast
Woe betide you, lest spirits that guide you
Some day lead you back to the spiritual path

So cinch up your cilice, lay down with the priest
And be filled with the warmth and the love of the beast
Sins need confessing, wrongs need redressing
Come closer, my son, and you'll feel the release

Crimen pessimum, confess as you lie low
Summorum pontificum, motu proprio
Nutu, verbo, aut alio modo
Ego spondeo, voveo, ac iuro

I solemnly swear that the screams I conceal
Will rot in my mouth, grind my jaw into meal
I sin with my tongue and punish the young
And dream that my visions of hell are not real



Word count: 886