Lourdes, Art Thou Not Worthy to Receive Me

While visiting France amid the Church of Rome's customary trappings of poverty and humility, the Pope has once more called for a healing of the church's "deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors." Apparently we are to hope that the recovery process will be aided by the absence among these afflictions of crimes and sins. His Holiness is due to meet a handful of those whom various soldiers of Christ treated as spoils of war; although at least one survivors' group has already complained that the delegates have been "carefully selected" by the church, presumably in order to avoid tainting divine justice with the merely human variety and its inconvenient lust for compensation. It may not be entirely irrelevant that the Pope's words were delivered at Lourdes, which is reputed, no doubt reliably, as a place of healing; and that his prescription was to "humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze" - that same Lord who gazed down from His heavenly throne upon each and every abuse, and decreed that each and every one of them should go ahead as He had planned since the beginning of time.