Oh Rats!

"So, Pope Benedict," my friend told me over the phone yesterday.

"That's what he picked, eh?" I replied.

"What kind of devout Catholic are you? Weren't you watching on TV?"

"Nope. As soon as they said, 'Cardinal Ratz...' I turned it off."

Let's get things straight. Just because I go to church every Sunday doesn't make me devout. What part of, "Welcome to the Birth Control Clinic. My name is Jennifer. How can I help you?" tells you I'm a good Catholic? Especially under Pope Benedict XVI (or any others, really).

My sisters and I had a strange upbringing from the hands and mouth of our mum, the über-Catholic. She had us all wearing scapulars and Miraculous Medals. We went to Catholic school all the way through. We all learned to pray the rosary and the Chaplets of Mercy (though I think I'm the only one to remember how, but I digress). We were well taught in the ways of Roman Catholic dogma, and if you strip away at most of the rules that were placed on it over the last 2000 years, what you have is a lovely tenet, a real guidebook on how to be good and just a general feeling of being loved and wanted.

And yet my parents also raised us with strong feminist and liberal ideals. Never were we to feel that we were inferior to anyone with a penis. This comes partly from our culture of very strong women and partly from my mother's devotion to The Phil Donohue Show (and she even is the splitting image of Marlo Thomas).

And liberalism? Hey, my dad used to teach us union songs and picket line chants.

I would have liked to have seen a pope who could have embraced Vatican II, perhaps even draw from its spirit and move the Church a little further. Mind you, the guy has had the job for 24 hours. Who knows what will happen? But I'm not holding my breath.

Just sometimes I find it difficult to evangelize. My daughter has been questioning me endlessly lately about the lack of a visual presence of women in Roman Catholicism. Most of the time, I give her the answer, the one that has been passed down from the Vatican, but my delivery is weak. It's sad when the first thing my baby sister noticed at my parish was that we have a female usher. She thought that was so forward-thinking. Hey, we almost got a female deacon too! Woo-woo!

But if I could hope for anything, I'd wish that the new pope truly will listen. I hope he will be open not just to his advisors but to local bishops and lay workers, to regular joe Catholics, to the young, to the old. I believe that there are many roads that people can take to find God and Catholicism isn't the only one or the best one. So I hope he reaches out to other religious leaders and sane, altruistic world leaders...and Bono!

But am I surprised that he was picked? Not in the least.

Who needs memory of Grade 10 Theology class when you have the internet?