Destiny and the Timing of the Pope's Visit
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
April 16, 2008

There is a new irony in America’s religion. We are witnessing a lofty Papal sleight of hand in dealing with the contemporary religious scene. The outrageous venal, carnal, duplicitous, mendacious, and general moral turpitude of the Evangelicals, and affiliated pseudo pious politicians, had completely shifted the focus away from their Catholic ‘brothers in sin’. The Pope and his entourage were able to make a timely step into this opening. Seeming to be, by comparison with the Evangelicals, almost immaculate devotees, they have swept the skulking apostasy of American Christianity out from under its cloud of shame and demoralization. While presidential candidates are being grilled on theological technicalities of dogma by shaken pious flocks, the gala celebrations of the Papacy are imbuing the motley flocks with a ‘mirage’ of holiness and righteousness. Oh, what a majestic display of vestmental plumage and golden, syrupy oratory ensconced within grandiloquent facades can do to transform our scandalized politicians, clergy, and even nation of discredited believers, into having an appearance of unblemished, genial holiness.

Historical developments are an aspect of structures that shape the ways of persons and personages. As the timing dictates, vast and complex clandestine tactics can begin to foment in cloistered corridors. Global social bodies such as these two contrasting sets of believers, being powerful religious identities in the clearly recognized apposition and barely veiled, surreptitious opposition that they are, structure even the political maneuvers of each other’s leaders and followers.