“Pope To Ease Up On Jesus Talk”
Written by Robin Marie in Humor, Opinion at March 16, 2011
A cute story from The Onion: Pope To Ease Up On Jesus Talk
To temper his past hyperbole with regard to Jesus, the Supreme Pontiff said he is now at work on an encyclical in which he will call upon Catholics to relax a little and not treat every aspect of church doctrine “as if it were the end-all, be-all of the whole universe or something.”
Indulge me in a moment of analysis; why is this funny? I think part of the joke is that in an increasingly secular culture (in the long run, folks, not since the 1970s) which, for reasons of maintaining happy consumers, prefers no one to rock the boat of complacency and comfort most people try to maintain, even traditional religious establishments have to bend to survive. This is funny, of course, because it appears to negate the reason for their existence.
On the other hand, it is funny because even in this context of modernity, the Catholic Church (and perhaps religion in general) remains at its core an anarchronism, no matter how it dresses up its dogma:
“I was worried at first,” Cardinal Lorenzo Antonetti said. “Then His Holiness reassured me that whatever words he chose, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and the distribution of condoms in starving, AIDS-ravaged nations would always remain abominations. That calmed all my fears.”
