It shouldn't surprise me the manners in which former Joseph Ratzinger, aka the Pope, chooses to run the church. He was, after all, a former Nazi youth and carried those thoughts forward into his career as a cardinal when he headed up the Doctrine of Faith which was basically a modern day inquisition. . . we remember the inquisition. He has expressed a bitter prejudice against anything that doesn't look as he feels it should. . . aka Catholic old school where the nuns were scary and carried very solid rulers. I don't just mean old school in a sense that we can remember in recent history, I am talking about the old school that burned anything that twitched and caused the plague old school.

Ratzinger's most recent decrees are the ones that that have made me crook a brow clear into my hair line. First, he has decreed that all Catholic pharmacists not dispense the day after pill and second, he has ordered every parish to have an exorcism squad. It kind of alarms me that " exorcist in chief" Father Gabriele Amorth praises the idea that there is finally a Pope who is willing to " fight the devil head on. . ." It is unclear whether he is speaking to lay people or the local church staff. . . what is clear is that Father Paolo Scarafoni holds conferences and lectures on exorcisms, scares the holy crap out of people then states the requests for exorcisms are on the rise. It is also unclear to me how long this particular activity has been going on.

If the Catholic church has been actively advocating the existence of demonic possession for a while, which I suspect it has, the scene out here in Phoenix where a grandfather was tazered for choking his granddaughter claiming to be performing an exorcism now makes more sense to me. It is still unforgivable, but the source of the fear has just come to a crystalline point of clarity and I know just how potent a compeller fear is. What is also clear to me, is that the Church's agenda involves turning the clock back to a time where religions ruled with brutality inciting fear amongst the people to gain a hand in holding power for power's sake. It's classic demagoguery and this man should not be speaking for a 21st century church much less any religion since he can't seem to follow the advice of his own prophet.

We must not fear. . . fear is the mind killer, but we must not ignore what is being stirred. A Pope cannot conjure demons, deny human rights and practice demagoguery without thinking minds wondering what this man is so afraid of.