Old Men in a Hurry

The Catholic church continues its long and painful journey into the modern age with a bit of instant sainthood. In the church's younger days, the process of canonisation could take decades or even centuries; now, in the church's endlessly prolongued senility, a man can be hustled into the holy company with all the unseemly haste of an elderly cardinal fumbling his final choirboy. The Vatican has announced the impending sainthood of Pope John Paul II a mere eight years after his death and two years after his beatification by his own former Grand Inquisitor, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak. The beatification was itself fast-tracked, with the normal five-year waiting period being waived because of "exceptional circumstances". Evidently the church's famous rigidity and dogmatism apply only to its less illustrious members; quite possibly the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has hopes of undergoing his own beatification without the inconvenience of dying first. Nevertheless, given the patchy record of the Wojtyla-Ratzinger cabal in defending the church against the calumnies of the Jewish-homosexual secularist press, a few devil's advocates have naturally emerged. Presumably it is for the hardness of such hearts that the Vatican has also decided to chuck Pope John XXIII into the bargain bin of sainthood.