Pope, Poop

I've spoken of the current Pope before, as recently as last night even! And I still largely hold to my comments, but I should talk about the elephant in the room, that being Kim Davis.

For those unaware, her lawyer informed the world yesterday that the Pope met with her privately for about 15 minutes or so during his US visit. The lawyer claimed that they prayed together, she was told to "stay strong" and that he gave her and her husband a rosary that he had personally blessed.

I will get to my reaction to the visit if it indeed went down exactly as described, but first I want to get some doubts out of the way.

Kim Davis' lawyer, Mat Staver, is... perhaps not the most trustworthy source possible, recently Liberty Counsel, the group he heads who represents Mrs. Davis, released a photo purporting to be of over a hundred thousand people at a mass prayer of support for her in Peru, this picture was quite thoroughly debunked. And falsifying the existence, or at least details, of a meeting with the pontiff would be right in line with their previous tactics.
Even if the meeting happened, as appears to have been confirmed by the Vatican, the details of the meeting are still uncorroborated, and will likely remain so, I don't see the church making a statement that boils down to "This woman is a liar" when her position is still in line with official church doctrine anyway.

Let us assume that everything went down exactly as described, what does it mean? Well, not much, I know we all wanted Francis to be a complete supporter of gay rights, but despite the public statements he's made, he has certainly never outright said anything in direct defiance of established doctrine that I have been able to find. Basically his position boils down to "If you don't act on it, we welcome you", he always seemed to speak of it in a context of people getting forgiveness, not as if they hadn't been committing a sin in the first place.
Now this is still pretty revolutionary, especially in an institution like the Catholic church, which doesn't like the term "hidebound" only because they don't trust this newfangled "hide" and put their faith in stone slabs instead.

I like Pope Francis, I really do, he seems to be as progressive of a person as is possible to be in the church, but it was probably unrealistic to hope he would end up being a liberal, especially on topics like homosexuality and birth control.

It's sad though, the Catholic church has long been seen as increasingly out of touch with the world, and the Emperor Palpatine looking motherfucker who was the previous Pope had done nothing to help that. There are a lot of liberal religious folks out there who the church as rejected, as well as homosexuals of course, and until the church finds a way to embrace them, it is going to become more and more isolated, and irrelevant.

Personally I wouldn't be heartbroken, I feel like most organized religion has done a lot more harm than good over it's history and the influence of religion on politics is among the more terrifying trends we've seen over the last, well, hundred plus years, I will lose no sleep over its loss of relevance.

But I am not religious, I have friends and family who are though, and I can't imagine what a support like that feels like, or what it feels like when you realize that it doesn't actually seem to want you, so I am hoping for more change rather than the continual decline of the church, it is a shame that we aren't seeing more if it right now though.