So let's see where we are so far. The new Pope loves people. He catches the bus. He talks to people going to work. He does his own washing up. He lives in a little flat.


Bless.


Now the reality. He is reactionary and authoritarian, elected by unrepresentative old men who are also reactionary and authoritarian. Not elected by the Catholics of the world, and no woman had the slightest say in his election. Yet the main tenets of his papacy, and of all previous papacies, enshrine the fact that women are second-class. They must not be priests. They must not marry priests. They must not use contraception. They must not have abortions. They must remain ignorant and they must regard poverty as a virtue. Don't tell me, please, from the US-centric point of view, that this is not accurate. Most Catholics live in Africa and Latin America where the Church has an iron grip. US citizens can, and do, fight back against this barbarism: there are 30 million lapsed Catholics in the US. It isn't so easy in the third world. Ask the tens of millions of women infected with HIV, or dying after back-street abortions, or living with disease and misery and poverty, courtesy of the Catholic church's ban on condoms and abortion, whether it's easy to demur. Nothing is going to change. His undoubted complicity in the fascist regimes of the 70s and 80s (which has got the Church's spin doctors in apoplectic panic) is almost a red herring, horrid though it is. Finding a cardinal who's squeaky-clean, sexually, financially or politically, would be harder than finding rocking-horse shit.