A Moral Teacher

The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has graciously condescended to answer a few questions from the lower orders on Italian television, and in doing so has given as eloquent a demonstration of his church's intellectual substance and moral courage as one could hope to see. Asked by a Muslim woman in the Ivory Coast about how the violence there might be ended, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak said that he had asked one of his officials to try and mediate; given the Vatican's worldwide reputation as an honest broker, we can only wonder why peace hasn't broken out all over Africa. An Italian woman asked whether her son, who has been in a vegetative coma for two years, still had a soul, and the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak trotted out the party line to prevent any meddling doctors from turning off the life support. Doubtless it was only pressing legal matters which prevented Silvio Berlusconi from speculating about the son's capabilities as a breeder.

Most interestingly of all, a Japanese child asked about the effects of the earthquake and tsunami: "I am very frightened because the house where I felt safe really shook a lot and many children my age have died. I cannot go to play in the park. I want to know: why do I have to be so afraid? Why do children have to be so sad?" The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak said first that "we do not have the answers", which is untrue. Jehovah gave his servant Job a perfectly clear and comprehensible answer to this question; boiled down, it amounts to You are all my toys and I will break you as I please. Surely a seven-year-old should be able to understand that. The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak then said that "we know that Jesus suffered as you do, an innocent", Christian compassion being apparently the idea that a sufferer should feel better when reminded of the suffering of others. Curiously, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak made no mention of the standard Christian excuse for their invisible playmate's more spectacular japes, namely the doctrine of original sin. It would appear, then, that either the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak is as incompetent a theologian as the Most Reverend and Right Honourable John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, who had "nothing to say" to make sense of last year's divine prank in Haiti; or else that the Pontiff of Paedophilia has been guilty, once again, of an offence against a child. I wonder which it could be?