Reply #1: Are you Catholic, or .......

[OldLeftieLawyer]

........... are you a Roman Catholic? There's a difference.

People have their opinions, informed or not, and that's the beauty of free speech.

That said, I think you're whistling past the graveyard if you think this new Pope is going to be anything but dangerously and destructively conservative. This is the man responsible for getting Bernard Law the hell out of Boston when the notion of a criminal indictment of Law loomed. This is the man who thinks rock music is immoral, and this is the man who has been responsible for how the Vatican has operated for the last several years.

Yeah, "opposition to war." The Vatican was about as vociferous about that as it was about the molestation of children by its priests.

I think he's just another in the increasingly-lengthening strand of overdressed professional virgins and women-haters who are going to continue to undo any remnant of Vatican II and John XXIII.

(By the way, I was raised as a Roman Catholic, too, and, in fact, my author photo on the dust cover of my first published novel is my First Holy Communion picture...............)